What can we learn by exploring peer feedback practices in other disciplines? That’s the central question driving this series of posts. I started close to home in my last few posts by considering workshop practices in creative writing, but the truth is that this project was inspired by the art critique.   Before stepping into the role of Interim Chair for Visual Arts and Art History last year, I sat down with each of the department’s faculty members to get to know them and their work. I learned a lot about art—how it functions as a research practice, the considerable costs involved in producing it, and the serious safety risks involved in teaching it—and I was truly impressed by the work my colleagues were doing. I’m blessed to work with such amazing people. I was also immediately intrigued by critique, since it seemed so much like my own use of peer review in the writing classroom. And so I was only too happy to spend more time learning about critique for this series of posts.   My two informants in this case were Andy Brown and Sharon Hart. Andy is the Foundations Instructor for the department. He’s super-duper smart, very easy-going, and just fun to hang around and chat with (we grab coffee on occasion for just that purpose). He’s also an awesome painter. Sharon is an Assistant Professor and the area head for Photography. She’s committed, passionate, and a wonderful photographer and a strong advocate for her area. I sat down with each of them and asked them about critique in the studio art classroom. The conversations were animated and wide-ranging—we just had so much to discuss! But to start I’ll share a little about what I learned from discussing the mechanics and logistics of critique.   For starters, as Andy informed me, there are two basic forms of critique: group and individual. Group critique is analogous to peer review. Individual critique is a one-on-one session between instructor and student and reminded me most of a student coming to my office hours to discuss a paper. In a group critique, students place their work up around the studio, a piece is selected, and the class responds to it. As with workshop in creative writing, generally the artist doesn’t speak until after the critique. Discussion proceeds apace with the goal of getting to as many pieces as possible during the class time. Sharon indicated that in the course of a semester, there will be 5-6 group critiques, which is about how often peer revision happens in my writing classes. There are many variations to this basic formula. Sharon shared that she likes to try out new methods so that she doesn’t get bored; she likes to get excited by the process too. For example, one variation she shared with me involved having students put photos on the wall “salon style” (all next to each other with no space between) and then having students vote for the six images they would want to live with for a year, marking their votes by placing a sticky note on the photo. Then the class talked about the ones with the highest votes and why.   Both of them stressed that in all ways critique is a learning process, which is to say that through critique students learn more about their individual works, studio technique, and the practices of art but which is also to say that students need to learn how to critique. As Andy observed, “A lot of critiquing is about figuring out how to look at things.” To that end, both also referenced readings they use or have used that talk about critique and how to do it. That reminded me of the worksheets I create for peer review but it also made me wonder why we don’t have more readings about peer review for our students. Students in my classes often don’t understand why they’re doing peer review, let alone how. Sharon’s approach was particularly resonant for me in this respect. She has a handout that’s collaboratively generated with her students and that goes over the goals of the critique and offered some practical guidelines. The one I’m most likely to steal for the writing classroom is “Remove the word ‘like’ from your vocabulary during critique,” going on to suggest that instead of saying “I like _____” students should instead say “I think this is successful because _____.” I can definitely see myself bringing that into the writing classroom, as well as more generally generating guidelines on peer revision based on conversations in the classroom.   As with workshops in creative writing, I walk away from this discussion of the mechanics of the art critique with a desire to do more large-scale, class-level peer reviews of student writing—more than a sample paper. I also want to find some readings about peer revision and use those to generate a discussion and a set of guidelines for the class. And I want students to reframe what they like about writing into what they find successful about writing.   In the next post, I’ll talk about the emotive charge of critique and consider its implications for the writing classroom. In the meantime, I welcome your comments. ... View more

Drew Cameron joined the Army in 2000, right out of high school, and served as a Sergeant in Iraq. In an interview, he says he realized fairly early on that what was happening in Iraq was all wrong and that “we shouldn’t be here,” but he served his tour of duty anyway. When he came home in 2006, he sought ways to express his experiences, without success, until one day, he said, he put on his uniform and then began cutting it off his body. Thus was born his Combat Paper Project. As Cameron puts it, “Language to articulate the complex associations and memories wrapped up in military service can be a mountainous task. Starting with a non-verbal activity, with the intention of exploring those places, is a phenomenally empowering act.” An artist and paper maker, Cameron took his cut up uniform and began transforming it into handmade paper, which he then painted or drew or wrote on. Slowly, he began to contact other veterans who wanted to take part in this process, who were interested in fiber art and in how “we might transform [materials] into a narrative that illustrates our collective stories.” I first met Cameron a year or so ago in Chicago, where he was exhibiting his work in connection with the world premiere of composer Jonathan Berger’s “My Lai,” which tells the story of Hugh Thompson, the helicopter pilot who tried to stop the My Lai Massacre, who was reviled and ostracized for his actions and only 30 years after the fact recognized with a Soldier’s Medal for bravery. Sung by Rinde Eckert (with lush and moving libretto by Harriet Chessman) and performed by The Kronos Quartet, “My Lai” is one of the most gripping and memorable musical works I have ever heard. It was after the haunting performance that I met Cameron, along with one of the two 18-year-old crew members who was with him during March 16, 1968 (the second young soldier died in battle three weeks later). I believe that this work will be touring the country for the 50 th anniversary of this tragedy: if you and your students can possibly see it, do so. Recently I encountered Cameron again, this time at UCLA where he was leading papermaking workshops with first-year undergraduates (and others). Students were bringing in all kinds of materials: some, of course, were veterans themselves, with uniforms and other materials from their service; others had relatives who had given them articles, like the young woman whose grandfather had given her parachute cloth. Together, they were learning to create a remix, a mashup, as they turned the cloth into pulpy fiber and then learned to make sheets of handmade paper with it. What struck me during this encounter was how Cameron spoke about the stories that these artifacts tell, and about the stories that they elicit from the people who work with them. Somehow, he says, this process of unmaking and remaking seems to release the words necessary to share experiences further, as a visual art leads to a verbal one and back again. Some of the paper makers have gone on to write blogs, articles, essays, even books. And continue to make visual art as well. I left wishing that every college in the country could have a visit from Drew Cameron and his Combat Paper Project. He has conducted them from coast to coast and is currently engaged in teaching others to carry out similar projects. The college frosh who either drop in or sign up for these workshops may never have heard of My Lai, may have thought very little about war, about the way war is inscribed on the bodies of those who are caught in its vice. But they leave with new knowledge, as well as with the experience of having made something good and strong and real out of the materials of war. You can read more about Combat Paper on PBS News hour’s “The Rundown” from April 30, 2012.  ... View more

Since students in my course are choosing their own projects, every student is on a different schedule at this point. Some are working toward the midterm. Some are working on the Genre Analysis Report. Some are working on open projects. Because they are all working at their own pace, it’s not possible to set up peer review activities for the projects. There’s no way to guess who will have a draft ready when. From this point on, then, I have asked students to work in online writing groups to share whatever they have and provide accountability for one another. To keep these groups organized, I set up a general schedule with expectations for each student to post several times in the course forums each week. In face-to-face classes, I ask students to create their own guidelines and schedules, but my experience with these online students is that they need more definite structures. Without spaced-out expectations to post and return to reply, they frequently wait too long to engage in conversations with their classmates. I set up the schedule below, but I did indicate that groups can adjust this schedule as necessary: By 11:59 PM on You should Wednesday Check the previous week’s discussion to make sure all questions have been answered. Post details in the current week’s discussion on where you are on your projects, even if you haven’t made much progress. See details below. Include any questions, challenges you need help with, or drafts that you have at that point. Friday Read and reply to the messages that have been posted. See details below. Add peer review comments on any drafts that have been posted. Make any requests for additional information (e.g., if a reply leaves you with a question), Monday Check out everything that has been posted. Add any additional replies or requests for more information.   Writing Group Wednesday Activities Here are some things you might share with one by Wednesday in your weekly discussion: Status/progress reports on what you are doing/have done since last Wednesday.  (Check Markel, Practical Strategies for Technical Communication, Chapter 12 for help with status and progress reports. Your updates can be informal.) Rough drafts of your projects. Revisions of your projects. Small chunks of your projects, if you want feedback on something very specific. Success stories. Challenges you encounter. Questions that you have about your projects.   Writing Group Friday Activities After sharing, you can reply by Friday with any of the following: Provide supportive feedback and advice, like that shown in the No One Writes Alone video. Work together to solve any challenges or answer any questions. Collaborate on projects (be sure to credit your helpers if someone provides significant input). Plan for future discussions.   Final Thoughts This week will be our first time to try out the writing groups. I'm excited about the possibilities for these groups. It's a strategy that I am looking forward to developing and using again next term. I will report on how it works. If you have any suggestions, please let me know. I can always use advice.    Credit: by Daria / epicantus, on Flickr, used under a CC-BY license ... View more

Can offensive language sabotage a whole election? It would be an understatement to say that language has played a critical role in the presidential campaign recently. Parents had to rethink letting their children watch the second presidential debate—educational value aside—because language that most parents never want their children to hear was at the heart of a controversy about whether a man who used such language is fit to be president. The candidates avoided using specific offensive words during the debate, but the conversation still had the potential to raise questions that parents would be uncomfortable discussing, and on CNN at least, a single offensive word was not bleeped out, and the audience heard it over and over and over throughout the day and night. It immediately became the basis of jokes, memes, and late-night monologues. Donald Trump dismissed the sexual language both on- and off-stage as mere “locker room banter.” Those who withdrew their support for his campaign saw it differently, calling it a verbal description of sexual assault. Anderson Cooper, one of the debate moderators, bluntly clarified what Trump had said on tape and what it meant: “You described kissing women without consent, grabbing their genitals. That is sexual assault. You bragged that you have sexually assaulted women. Do you understand that?” Two commentators on CNN later got into a heated argument when Trump spokeswoman Scottie Nell Hughes asked Republican spokeswoman Ana Navarro not to use Trump’s word because her young daughter was watching—this in spite of the fact that the tape of Trump using the word had been played repeatedly. A number of people on social media and elsewhere have pointed out that the one word that did not describe their reaction to the Trump tape was “surprise.” Trump has made a habit of using derogatory terms to describe women, immigrants, POWs, and racial and ethnic groups, and being the Republican nominee for president has not slowed him down much. His hours of “locker room banter” with Howard Stern took place over seventeen years. In response to the recently released tape, he presents himself as superior to Bill Clinton because where he only used words against women, Clinton acted. Hillary Clinton was guilty of using offensive language when she labeled half of Trump’s supporters a “basket of deplorables,” a phrase that has come back to haunt her over and over again. In the second debate, Trump attacked her for being unwilling to use the words “radical Islamic terrorists,” pointing out, “To solve a problem, you have to be able to state what the problem is or at least, say the name. She won’t say the name. . . . And before you solve it, you have to say the name.” There may have been more acrimonious presidential campaigns in the past, but there has never been one more carefully documented or one that has spawned so much discussion on social media. Words take on a life of their own as they get recorded and shared in ever-expanding ripples. The written and digitalized record of this campaign is not one that any of us as Americans can be proud of. Credit:  Stockicide, by stock78, on Flickr, used under a CC-BY 2.0 license ... View more

I’ve been reading Xiaoye You’s Writing in the Devil’s Tongue: A History of English Composition in China and, as you might imagine, learning a lot in the process. In the past, I often taught a course on “The History of Writing,” but it focused primarily on Western systems of writing, since those were the ones I knew best. But during those years I did learn something about the origins of writing in different cultures: for example, whereas writing in ancient Greece was associated from very early on with practical matters of trade, early Chinese writing systems were importantly linked to rituals that led to the way (dao). My interest in feminism led me to Enheduanna, Sumerian high priestess who wrote in Cuneiform and whose texts in praise of the Goddess Inanna date to the 23 rd century BCE. And I was thrilled when I read Damian Baca’s Mestiz@ Scripts, which traces early pictographs back as far as 50,000 BCE, and when I learned more about the Mayan glyphs, the earliest (some say the only) writing system developed in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. And now in You’s fascinating book, I am learning more about writing in ancient China and, later, in schools which required writing in English. You notes that learning to write in China came with “heavy ethical burdens.” Confucius stresses over and over again how “gentlemen” will develop through following traditional rituals that will “align them with symbolic act that reflect the true spirit of the Way” (18): as Confucius puts it, Let a man be first incited by the Songs, then given a firm footing by the study of ritual, and finally perfected by music” (Analects 134). Eventually, this educational plan was institutionalized in the Chinese Civil Service exams, which held sway from the early 7 th to the beginning of the 20 th century. The preparation and the exams themselves “instilled in students unique rhetorical sensibilities with a Confucian conscience,” according to You’s analysis (21). Reading You’s work and revisiting Baca’s has made me think a lot about how much, if anything, we teach our students about the history of our subject, writing, and especially about writing systems in other cultures and the values embedded in those systems. In our multiethnic, multilingual, multicultural country, even with its ongoing tolerance for “English only,” writing teachers can and should take the lead in making sure our students understand that writing itself is a serious subject of study, that writing systems differ dramatically and thus carry differing value structures, and that pluralistic approaches to and understandings of writing seem necessary in the 21 st century. [Image: Confucius Temple in Taipei by edwin.11 on Flickr] ... View more

In this series of posts I’m thinking about what teachers of writing can learn from the implementation of peer feedback practices in other disciplines and departments.  While my goal is to explore these practices broadly across the university, I’m going to start very close to home in our English department.  English at FAU encompasses literary study, creative writing, and rhetoric/composition. Our department is deeply collegial, with each of the areas respecting and supporting the others (I know, sadly, that cannot be said of all departments).  I was thus delighted to chat with two of our creative writing faculty, Papatya Bucak (who also blogs for Bedford) and Becka McKay, who is currently running our MFA program in creative writing.  Both are super colleagues—accomplished, smart, funny, and generous.  I sat with both of them to talk about how workshopping happens in the creative writing classroom and each also shared with me handouts about workshopping that they use in their own classrooms.  Based on all of that, I’ve made some observations I hope are worth sharing.    “I use it on all levels,” Papatya shared, referencing both undergrad and grad workshops, “because I think it works,” a sentiment that Becka echoed.  Though the shape of workshopping can vary across creative writing classes, one common element that struck me is that it tends to contain two components: a written one and an oral one.  That oral component (and its particular shape) feels somewhat unique to me.  When workshopping happens in class, all of the students comment on one author’s work; the author generally stays silent throughout.  Papatya’s gives her grad students a handout that explains: “the class covers strengths, intentions, and suggestions while you listen.  Writer has the option of asking questions or making comments at the end. Writer can interrupt discussion if they have an urgent question or believe some major misunderstanding is occurring.”   I’ve occasionally done something similar in my writing classroom, when working with a sample paper or when placing students into peer revision groups.  But when I use sample work I tend to do so anonymously and when students discuss their work in group, each author is usually getting comments from only the other two people in the group.  I’m starting to think about what it might mean to adopt this structure in the writing classroom.  It would not be without logistical challenges (both of them noted the smaller size of the creative writing workshop and Becka also observed that it’s easier when she is teaching poetry) but nevertheless I think it’s worth exploring a significant and sustained oral component for peer revision.   Having an oral workshop isn’t without challenges even for creative writers.  When I asked Becka what would make a workshop disastrous, she noted that “a workshop needs trust and respect so if students do anything to break that or are disrespectful, then it’s a disaster,” going on to say that breaking trust can take a few different forms, from students in the class not doing the work of careful reading and so having nothing to say, to attacking the writer instead of critiquing the writing, to the author displaying defensive body language.  Anything that threatens the “circle of trust,” as Becka named it, would in turn threaten the value of the workshop.   But when it works, the students in the class form a community that becomes very nurturing.  More than that.  Papatya noted that the goal of the workshop is to find your reader and that “having someone who’s a good reader of your work is a holy grail.”   Scaling this practice up to the writing classroom feels daunting even as I write this—but not impossible.  And that sense of community feels quite seductive.  If you’re thinking about exploring a sustained in-class, oral peer review for your students here are some tips I’ve cribbed from Paptya and Becka that you might want to adapt:            The oral component is accompanied by a written critique.  Since I usually have students do that writing during peer revision in class, incorporating an oral component means a written critique outside of class.  And while both noted that workshopping will work with only one of these components, both also regularly use both together.  (I’ll talk more about what that written component looks like in my next post.)          Both Paptya and Becka offer detailed guidelines for all components of workshopping, particularly for their undergrad students.  Otherwise, as Becka noted, it’s “the blind reading the blind.”  I imagine most of us scaffold written peer revision with some sort of handout or worksheet but you may want to do the same if you attempt an oral critique as well.            Even when everything works, students need a good model for what good writing should do.  Both Paptya and Becka noted that students are inclined to say “this is nice” because they genuinely believe the writing is.  Papatya commented that what students think good writing should do sometimes isn’t what Papatya thinks good writing should do.  Becka also commented that often students new to workshopping are too eager to praise and that she ends up having to walk them back from that.  Offering models of what good writing does is one way to counter this inclination.  I love the way Becka put it: “You would think they just want to be stroked and told what great writers they are, but once they read the stuff we give them and they see what great writing is and they know we can show them a path that gets them there, they want to learn how to do that.”   Maybe the oral workshop model is one way to get them there.   Next week, I’ll look at some of the unique elements of written workshop comments.  In the meantime, if you’ve ever used an oral workshop mode of peer review in your FYC classroom, please share your experiences with us.  How did it work logistically?  How did it work for students?  What might you change?   ... View more

Don’t be afraid.   These are the words I’ve been telling myself often this semester. You’d think after twenty years of teaching first-year writing I’d find a way to reduce my anxiety in and out of the classroom, but it still hits me every day. I envy teachers brimming with confidence and enthusiasm. I really do. I marvel at the layers of skill that my colleagues who teach have mastered. I think I’ve gotten okay. Maybe even pretty good. But there is still a deep and nearly omnipresent fear that every lesson plan, every classroom exchange, every attempt to motivate students toward authentic and original thought could go terribly wrong.   I’m beginning this semester with a literacy narrative, a genre I’ve come to appreciate fairly late in the game as first-year writing faculty. I guess I should nod in the context of this blog post to the fact that the literacy narrative is one of the projects we discuss in An Insider’s Guide to Academic Writing (p. 14). I can’t know how many of you have taught this genre, and that frustrates me, so I would just like to talk about how I’ve overcome my fears so far this semester teaching such a beautiful, delicate, vulnerability-inducing genre and how I think it contributes to shaping me as a teacher and the students who teach me every day.   The diversity of students I teach at the University of Arizona are unlike anywhere else I’ve taught: Navajo, Apache, Latino, Black, White, affluent, poor, middle class, West Coast, East Coast, Midwest, Southwest, Southeast, Northwest, International students.   Building relationships and trust in order to create a safe space wherein students can reflect on and articulate the experiences that shape their identities in front of total strangers who look only alike in age has proven awkward and at times shocking.   But reflect and articulate they have. Stories of abandonment. Stories of having a paper torn in half by a high school teacher and thrown in a trashcan. Stories of drive-by shootings and murder. Of parents and families on the brink of collapse. Drug addiction. Abuse. Neglect. Previous teachers who don’t really care seems to be a common theme in FYW literacy narratives.   It’s a lot to process.   There’s a tendency to see students as “students.” Like some generic group of automatons who write papers for us to grade and correct and believe we somehow improve with our degrees and experience and comments in the one-inch margins surrounding their text. But it’s too bureaucratic, if you see it that way.   Students learn best when the agency of knowledge comes from within. I’ve always mistrusted “authority” figures and mistrusted even more systems where authority is rigidly structured.   I suspect, if you’re reading this blog post, you likely believe that writing has the power to improve your life. In the classroom, this only works if students believe you care about them, are sensitive to their experiences and identities, and are willing to embrace the awkward, painful, and uncomfortable moments in a classroom with compassion, openness, professionalism, and enough humility to learn from the very people we are supposedly teaching.   I love the literacy narrative because it sets the stage for the rest of the semester. It reveals character and truth, and if done well, encourages students to be courageous, open, curious, willing to learn, motivated, reflective, metacognitive. It teaches them about who they are, why they are here, and how they can move optimally forward in a complicated world.   What follows is a set of activities I employ to teach the literacy narrative.   We begin the semester by talking about our student learning outcomes. I think it’s good practice that students know 1) we have goals for achievement in this class, 2) what those goals are, and 3) where they come from.   A table in the preface of An Insider’s Guide to Academic Writing illustrates how the book aligns with the WPA Outcomes Statement. The FYW course goals at the University of Arizona arise from the WPA Outcomes Statement and the Framework for Success, so I think it’s wise to acknowledge that with my students.   Activity 1 – Generating Ideas for a Literacy Narrative One process-oriented group activity I use in the class to connect our outcomes to the literacy narrative is cluster mapping.   Students select one of our four outcomes and put it in the center of the cluster map on the white board in our room. They branch out and make a list of subtopics that include activities, genres, processes, or past writing projects that may have contributed to their development with that outcome.   One of our course goals is the development of reflection and revision processes.     The point is to get them thinking about our goals and the kinds of writing they’ve done in the past in order to generate ideas for what they might write about in their literacy narratives.   Activity 2 – Analyzing Sample Literacy Narratives I usually follow this activity by introducing the project assignment sheet for the literacy narrative. I provide students with at least four samples of a literacy narrative. I prioritize developing group dynamics, and so one activity I’ll use is to ask students to read one of the sample literacy narratives, and then as a group they use a grading rubric to assess the sample. They have to negotiate the point values they would assign to all the criteria, and they present their sample literacy narrative and discuss how they graded it.   Activity 3 – Brainstorming and Drafting a Scene It’s at this point that I try to highlight the unique features of a literacy narrative and point out how different it is as a genre than a research paper or a thesis-driven argumentative paper. This semester I’ve asked students to develop three scenes using sensory detail that follow a narrative arc representing a beginning, middle, and end to their narratives. We spend a day brainstorming potential scenes from their past experiences as writers and students, and then I ask them to draft one scene using sensory detail.   I give them a prompt I call “When I walked into the room I saw ________” and I ask to make use of at least three different sensory descriptions (sight, sound, touch, smell, taste) in writing five to seven sentences that describe their scene.   Generally students love this kind of writing. It’s creative and reflective and often a new genre for them. That said, a good number of students fall back on summarizing too heavily, and so I’ll use the drafts (usually done in an online discussion board) to point out the differences between effective use of sensory detail and summarizing events.   Activity 4 – Developing Dialogue in a Literacy Narrative We spend a day on dialogue. I point out the unique features of dialogue attribution, paragraph breaks for each new speaker’s line, punctuation around dialogue, and stylistic nuances regarding effective dialogue.   I’ll ask students to draft a dialogue-rich continuation from the sensory detail scene they composed the previous day, and then I’ll ask them to act as directors and choose actors to perform their written dialogue. Some students love to act. Moreover they generally find it exciting to hear their dialogue come to life in a performance by their peers.   Activity 5 – Five Objects, Mood, and the Final Scene Near the end of the unit, I ask the students to brainstorm a list of potential final scenes with which they might conclude their literacy narratives. Once they have three to choose from, I ask them to select one. For that one scene, I ask them to write down the setting (time and location), characters featured in the scene, and the main idea or insight they want readers to understand about them by reading their literacy narratives.   We discuss these points. I offer feedback. Then I ask them to make a list of five objects that appear in the scene and to describe the mood they want to convey.   A student might write: library bookshelves, the table, my notebook, the clock on the wall, and flashcards. The student may write about the mood she wants to communicate. She may say she wants to convey the stress she felt or the anticipation of her final high school exam.   We discuss this stuff. I push them to explain how the mood of their final scene aligns with the main idea or insight they want readers to understand about them by reading their literacy narratives.   Then I ask them to write their final scenes using the setting, the characters, the five objects, and the mood they’re trying to convey. I would love to hear back from y’all on this one. What activities or strategies have you used to teach the literacy narrative? What has been most helpful in the classroom?   As always, please like and share this post, if you found it meaningful. Thanks so much, everybody! Peace. ... View more

I've been reading James Knowlson's big biography of Samuel Beckett, Damned to Fame—an experience that not only transports me back over forty years to the days when I was writing my undergraduate Honors Thesis in English on Beckett, but also sets me to contemplating again the relationship between "high" cultural creation, and "low," or popular, culture. While Beckett's incorporation of such popular cultural materials as vaudeville-style slapstick and Charlie Chaplin's tramp into Waiting for Godot undoubtedly helped to erode the traditional barriers between high and low culture, his own lifelong devotion to the highest of the elite arts (classical music and literature, philosophy, and fine art) also comes through very powerfully in the story of his life.  Though in rapid decline even within his lifetime, the "cultural capital" of high art still stood for something in Beckett's formative years in a way that is almost unimaginable in an era when the Oscar, Emmy, Grammy, and VMA awards (etc.) are effectively our society's supreme expressions of esthetic taste.  And this, paradoxically, is why the semiotic analysis of popular culture is itself an activity of high cultural importance; for if we are to come to an understanding of who and what we are as a society—which is one of the more profound aims of esthetic creation—we have to look at what really matters to us.  And for some time now, what really matters has been pop culture.   In saying this, I am going against the grain of such cultural theorists as Lucien Goldmann, who believed that social knowledge comes through the study of "high" cultural creation.  Perhaps that was once so; it certainly isn't the case today, however, when traditional high culture is on life support.  While there has never been a mass audience for the elite arts, what has changed has been the economic basis of esthetic creation: the centuries-long shift from a system of aristocratic patronage to one of commodity capitalism in a market economy. Chaucer, that is to say, paid the bills by living in the palace of John of Gaunt, and Michelangelo sought commissions from the Church.  Today, "high" art poets must seek out teaching positions to survive because poems have little commodity value, and painters hope for the kind of awards and critical reviews that will attract wealthy speculators to their work in a kind of fine art stock market.    An apprehension that the economics of artistic production was changing everything was behind the rise not only of Modernism, but of Romanticism as well, as artists began to feel alienated from their audiences—no longer coteries of patrons and friends, but a mass market of anonymous consumers—and so, in defiance, they turned away from seeking popularity to create generations of avant-garde art that only helped to reduce what audience for high art ever existed in the first place.  The result has the been the creation of what I have called a "museum culture," as high art has retreated to ever more beleaguered bastions of cultural preservation, while popular culture, with its seemingly limitless market potential, has flourished.  (I know, you may have attended the opera recently, or a symphonic performance, and that you may spend your free time rereading War and Peace, rather than The Arkham Asylum, but even so, you cannot have missed the signs that those are unusual choices today.)   Cultural semiotics doesn't complain about this shift in cultural tastes (history, after all is history); and it doesn't attempt to apply the critical standards of high art to works of mass culture.  Rather, taking as its basis the recognition that cultural production in a market environment will produce what the market desires, cultural semiotics analyzes that desire itself, seeking its significance.  For therein lies the consciousness of our society, the revelation, finally, of who and what we are. ... View more

The students in my technical writing course have just submitted their coursework proposals, which outline the projects that they will complete for the rest of the term. This assignment is a crucial part of my plan to increase the role of choice for students this term. As I discussed last week, one of my goals for the new school year is to give students more choice in their assignments. Two previous activities have built up to the coursework proposals. First, I asked students to conduct an investigation of writing in their field, reporting their findings in a table that listed the kinds of writing and their key characteristics. Based on that investigation, I asked them to choose writing superlatives for their fields. In their coursework proposals, students reflect on the information they have gathered about writing in their fields and propose up to three projects that they will complete during the remainder of the term. Specifically, I have offered them these choices for their three projects: Open Projects Chosen from Your Analysis Table (up to three) Genre Analysis Report (counts as two projects, as it is a longer project) Midterm Exam on Readings The coursework proposal assignment itself follows a customary proposal format, asking students to explain their proposed plan, provide justification for their choices, and suggest a schedule for completing the projects. The proposal gives students the chance to customize the second half of the course to focus on projects that specifically meet the needs of someone in their fields. Let me provide an example. A student in computer science has explored the kinds of writing that she will likely do as an Android developer. While she has completed an internship and three years of coursework, there are kinds of writing in her field that she has had little practice in doing. She has written internal documentation in the code that she has developed, for instance, but she has never tried creating external user documentation. For one of her three projects, she wants to write a short user manual on how to install an Android app and customize its settings. My goal with this course structure is to ask students to focus on projects that will make a difference in their future, rather than random assignments that may not connect to them at all. The projects that are right for the Android developer simply aren’t right for everyone in the class. A student in environmental science, for example, may not need to write user documentation, so that student chooses a different path, proposing to write two reports on an environmental study she has conducted—one for other scientists, and one for the public. As promising as this free-form approach is, there are challenges. In particular, asking students to demonstrate such a high level of agency in their coursework leads to some confusion. Students rarely have much input in what they study in a course, so they have questions about how to proceed. Some students wonder if this structure is some kind of trick on my part, asking me if they can really write what they want to. I realized how much of a challenge this system was for them when about a third emailed me or posted in the course forums for clarification. Now that students have submitted their proposals, I look forward to seeing how they took advantage of the choices that the assignment offered. I know I will find other challenges to address as read students’ submissions, and I am already thinking of changes to make when I teach the course again. I’ll share more on what I find as I read their work in my next post. In the meantime, if you have a question or suggestion, please leave me a comment below. I look forward to hearing from you.     [Photo Credit: Choices by Jason Taellious, on Flickr, used under CC-BY-SA 2.0 license] ... View more

Young writers often get the advice—and sometimes the assignment—to eavesdrop.  I’ve always found this a little funny, since after all, don’t most of us spend large portions of our lives in conversation?  Why do we need to listen in on somebody else’s conversation in order to learn about conversation?  I wasn’t sure of the particular value of being outside of the conversation.  So I decided to try it. Like many a writer, I often find myself in coffee shops.   But I also happen to live in a town that is a prime destination for people in recovery programs, who also naturally find themselves in coffee shops.  And so one of the first things I heard was one highly caffeinated young guy saying to another, “It was a tell-tale sign when we did free hugs and Ted wouldn’t hug anybody.” A few days later, walking out of the gym behind a young woman and her probably four-year-old son, I heard this exchange: Toddler: I want a snack. Mom: I have something in the car for you. Toddler: What is it? Mom: Juice. Toddler: What kind of juice? Mom: Orange juice. Toddler, with outright exuberance: Hallelujah, baby! Later, sitting in a Barnes and Noble café near the customer service counter, I heard this: Female customer, probably sixty-something, brandishing the bondage bestseller Fifty Shades of Grey:  Do you think this would make a good gift? Customer Service Rep: Well, I wouldn’t give it to someone you didn’t know well. Next customer, a very thin woman around seventy in a denim mini skirt and high-heeled sandals: I need a ride home. Customer Service Rep: But we’re a bookstore. Meanwhile, someone I know posted on Facebook that he heard an old woman on the subway turn to the homeless guy next to her and say, “You smell like my husband.  He’s dead.” The website Overheard in NY is full of such gems.  The truth, I guess, is that we’re a nation of eavesdroppers, whether we mean to be or not, and we find our fellow Americans pretty amusing. There are lessons to be learned from these moments, sure.  The guys in recovery had a very particular vocabulary that they shared and used fluidly.  They were also way more intimate in the way they spoke to each other than most any other group of twenty-something males I have ever seen in conversation. And the child shouting Hallelujah for his juice was surely imitating adults he has heard.  Kid talk is often funny for the way they use words correctly but in slightly inappropriate contexts.  It was a touching scene, too, showing how well the mother knew her child, as well as how much he appreciated her knowledge.  And living here in South Florida, I’ve certainly observed the infinite variety of the elderly (some of the stereotypes are true—the driving is pretty terrifying), but as with any demographic, the individuals are many and they can be found everywhere, saying just about anything. So a student given the assignment to eavesdrop certainly could learn this or that about the ways we speak to each other and who we are.  I might try an exercise where I have students copy down things they overhear over the course of a week, then share the best bits with the class so that the group can collectively determine what lessons can be learned from the snippets.  And I could see creating a writing exercise based on any of the snippets.  Part of what’s interesting about eavesdropping is how the absence of context sparks your imagination.  What kind of kid “Hallellujahs” orange juice rather than a bag of chips?  Who is Ted and why wouldn’t he participate in free hugs?  Did that lady ever get home from Barnes and Noble? (Last I saw she was talking to a very patient cop.)  And is that other lady pulling a “Rose for Emily” thing with her dead husband? Eavesdropping works as an assignment because you can listen without the social obligation of participating in the conversation.  You can sit in on conversations by demographics of people you might not otherwise speak to (assuming those demographics speak to each other in public places).  But really I don’t know that it’s so important to go out and spy. Just now as I sit here writing, the guy fixing my air-conditioning said, “You can go ahead and close up the joint.”  My house has never been called a joint before, but I like it. I suspect the real value in the eavesdropping assignment is not so much that it encourages students to be spies, but that it encourages them to be observant.  Go out into the world in your writerly identity, it says—and pay attention.  The writer’s life is one big eavesdropping exercise, though there are some problems inherent in that, as well. Jane Smiley’s hilarious satire of academia Moo takes down the eavesdropping assignment pretty effectively.  One workshop student listens in on her roommate’s inane conversations and creates inane writing.  Louise Fitzhugh’s children’s novel Harriet the Spy also makes clear the hazards of eavesdropping on your close comrades.  They don’t care for it so much.  Especially not when they are twelve years old. So what is the difference between overzealous, shameful Harriet-the-Spying and being a writer?  I guess in part it’s the dishonesty of it, of pretending not to be listening when you are listening, and it’s how you use the material you get hold of.  It seems safe to take a snippet of conversation from a context you don’t know and make it your own story,  less so to take your roommate’s private life and transcribe it. But then again, I bet Harriet the Spy was a pretty great writer. What do you think? Is all material fair game? [This post first appeared on LitBits on 7/5/12.]  ... View more

I was just talking with a colleague about possible new directions for the writing program at our school and one of the things we started thinking about was genre.  As the content and apparatus for Emerging might suggest we’ve traditionally focused on academic expository writing in our classes—the class argument-driven academic paper.  But it occurs to me that Emerging does offer entry points for those interested in exploring some different genres.   Roxane Gay’s “Good Feminist?” is a good starting point and an interesting model for students.  One might call Gay’s work an autobiographical essay, but it’s one that engages the writing of others and makes a strong argument, as well.  But I think it also models for students one way to engage in autobiography that moves from simple narration to a kind of positioning.  After all, Gay is interested in her relationship with feminism (or with what is considered being a “good” feminist) and her essay offers an interesting model for students to positions themselves within and against other markers of identity or political positioning.  Dan Savage’s and Urvashi Vaid’s “It Gets Better” and “Action Makes It Better” are also useful for thinking about genres that bridge the personal and the political.   For something that moves towards the multimodal, Tomas van Houtryve’s “From the Eyes of a Drone” is a good bridge for thinking about the visual essay.  Throughout his essay, the images and the text work together to form an argument.  That use of text in conjunction with image might be particularly useful in getting students to think about the visual essay or in working in the visual essay to a more traditional writing classroom.   Finally, there are some essays that are, classically, essays.  David Foster Wallace’s “Consider the Lobster” is probably the stand out example, but you might also consider Michael Pollan’s contribution.  I think Yo Yo Ma’s essay is a particularly good example of the genre, especially as it is written from someone not only outside academics but within the music profession, as well.   Ultimately, of course, if your class is all about genre-based writing, then this probably isn’t the text for you.  But it’s interesting to think about the small moments of flexibility allowed by this reader and interesting as well to imagine where one might go with it. ... View more

Last week, I wrote about my goal to increase participation by having students track their contributions to discussions and in small group work. My hope is that by making the participation assessment more transparent, students will be more likely to engage in class discussions and activities. Another of my goals for the new school year is to improve students’ communication with me. Too often on our campus, we hear stories from students in online courses who are surprised that there are real people behind the courses. They’re so used to automated modules and robograding that they are shocked when a real person responds to their questions. I decided to try something that would let them know that I’m real from the first days of the course. I had already emailed them a “welcome to the course” message, and I included biographical details on the course website to tell them about myself. I’m not sure any of them ever read that information, though. I wanted something catchier, something more engaging. I decided to add an AMA discussion forum in the CMS. AMA stands for “Ask Me Anything,” a kind of discussion popular on Reddit. Typically a celebrity or an unusual or interesting person hosts the AMA session. Readers post questions, and the host replies. It’s something like a personal interview conducted by the public. To introduce the discussion on our course CMS, I shared this list of ten things about myself with the basic instructions for the discussion: Inspired by the AMAs on Reddit, I'm here to answer any questions you have. Since we are in Canvas instead of Reddit, this discussion forum will be open through Monday, August 29. If you see a question from someone else that you want me to answer, click on the Like button. I'll answer your questions (within reason, of course). This forum isn't graded, but it counts toward your participation grade. To get started, let me tell you a bit about myself. I graduated from Virginia Tech with a B.A. and an M.A. in English. I worked at a small educational software company in Austin, Texas, doing documentation, tech support, and software design. I next worked as a website manager, coding and writing content for sites used by English teachers. I blog about teaching and writing on my own sites and in a textbook publisher's online community. The first computer programs I wrote used punch cards.  When I was in high school, we had a computer in the math classroom with a telephone modem, and when we finished our work we could log on and play 21 against the computer. I like to make handmade cards and study how technical writing works among cardmakers and scrapbookers. I am a life-long Girl Scout and have been working locally with the nut and candy sale in the fall and the cookie sale in the winter/spring. Since I was 7 years old, my family has always had at least one poodle. We currently have three. I love stickers and washi tape. I chose the facts that I shared purposefully. I wanted to share details from my work experience that demonstrate my qualifications to teach technical writing, as well as my experience with technology. The idea was to create some shared experiences with the class. I ended the list with some personal information unrelated to the class or technical writing. About a third of my students asked me a question in the forum. Some questions were meant to clarify or expand upon the information I had shared. For instance, I was asked how many poodles we had had overall and what technical writing had to do with scrapbooking. I was also asked questions about what I like to read, restaurants I like, and how campus had changed since I was a student. By the end of the discussion, I felt that I had engaged students in a way that I hadn’t in previous courses, and I knew I had found a strategy that I would use again. How do you connect with students so that they see beyond their stereotypes and assumptions about English teachers? How do you demonstrate that you are more than a robograder? I would love to hear your strategies. Please leave me a comment below!   Credit: Question Mark Sign by Colin Kinner, on Flickr, used under CC-BY 2.0 license ... View more

When Ann and I started writing Habits of the Creative Mind, we were motivated by a desire to represent writing as creative engagement with the world. There’s no best place to start and there’s no predetermined end point when it comes to making sense of the world; you just dive in. But, it’s in the nature of textbooks to impose linear order on their contents: any subject is made to appear to have a beginning, middle, and an end. This isn’t a problem when the subject at hand is best taught in a linear fashion. But the thing about creativity is that it’s not the result of a linear process. There’s no equation A+B+C that, when followed in order, produces creative output.   When we say creativity is a habit of mind, we mean that it only comes about through regular, deliberate practice. And that practice has many different forms, such as paying attention, exploring, connecting, revising, and so on. One doesn’t practice paying attention exclusively; nor does paying attention always precede exploring, despite what the layout of our Table of Contents suggests. Even beginning doesn’t necessarily come first! All the habits wrap around one another; they refer to one another recursively; each one pulls, dialectically, towards a sense of a coherent whole, on the one hand, and a focus on the smallest of details, on the other.   Imagine, instead, a circular book where you could enter at any point.       You start somewhere. You keep moving. You return and start again. You practice and practice, but you are never done. (Ann has written at length about how she started one course using Habits. That essay starts on page 4 of a pdf that may be found here.)   A course syllabus reproduces the linear distortion of what creative engagement with the world (i.e., writing) entails.  Before our students are even seated, before we have any idea who they are, university policy requires that we have a document for them with deadlines and peer review days, a document that makes it look like all that lies ahead for them is the drafting and revising of papers.   But a syllabus, like a pre-draft outline, is best understood as a provisional itinerary.   SO, if a course is a journey, what do we put on our syllabi? Requirements In our classes, attendance is required. You can’t practice if you’re not there. You have to bring the book and the required readings to class with you. Every class.   You have to check the class website and your email regularly: plans change, assignments get revised, alternate routes emerge. Class meets twice a week, but your education takes place 24/7.   We have our students hand in their papers in digital form in folders that are shared with all the other members of the class. (You can do this pretty easily with Dropbox or Google Docs.)   Grading Policy Our essay, “On Evaluating Student Writing,” is devoted to the discussing how to assess the work students produce in response to assignments drawn from Habits. We recommend making the grading criteria explicit on the syllabus. We tell our students that we are looking for work that: asks genuine questions or poses genuine problems; works with thought-provoking sources; shows the writer’s mind at work making compelling connections and developing ideas, arguments, or thoughts that are new to the writer; explores complications (perhaps by using words like: “but,” “and,” “or”); is presented and organized to engage bright, attentive readers; and makes each word count.   Grading Percentages We think that it’s important to have the syllabus convey the fact that the achievement of intellectual creativity requires steady, sustained practice and that progress in this realm is not necessarily uniform or linear.   So, we take into account: Attendance and participation in class discussion; Timely submission of drafts and revisions.   And, for each student, we weigh these with: The best work each student has submitted.   This means that all assignments are recorded and that the final grade for the course represents an assessment of each student’s sustained level of achievement.   Paper Assignments You’re likely to have these prescribed by your program or department. So, you can say that there will be X number of papers required and produce a calendar with dates. But we recommend describing this work in relation to the overarching goal of Habits: by the end of the semester, we want our students to have produced their best writing to date and for them to leave the class with evidence that they can ask a real question and that they can follow that question wherever it leads.   Plagiarism We think that the idea of plagiarism is best handled as an object of inquiry so, in our syllabi, we direct our students to our essay, “On Working with the Words of Others,” which considers citation and creativity together.   And then, as the semester unfolds, we spend our time together exploring what is entailed in using writing as a technology for thinking new thoughts. ... View more

The undergraduate classroom might seem like the last place to introduce students to archival materials. We have so many other commitments—to coverage of historical periods, to literary interpretation and theory, to improving student writing—that it might seem like an extra activity that might simply take up too much class time. However, students can and should learn about the cultural conventions that affect the transmission of texts, and I would argue that their close readings of these texts is actually central to their understanding of what poems, plays, and short stories are and how they work. Reading various versions of a text can actually get undergraduates—and teachers—to work toward a clearer and more effective definition of close reading. The results of my students’ research consistently demonstrate that textual studies can actually inspire close reading and help students generate the questions that they can use in a variety of literature courses. Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” is one of the most famous poems of the twentieth century. It also provides us with a short, easy way into discussing archival materials. This is how the poem appears in most literature: In a Station of the Metro The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. Immediately, students are engaged with the poem. The title locates us in Paris in the early 1900s, when the Metro system was still a wonderful and terrifying new symbol of modernity. The students are haunted by the “apparition” of the faces, stuck underground like the ghosts of the dead. And they like the surprising comparison between these ghostly faces and the petals on a bough. They see the commentary on the alienation of the modern metropolis. Formally, they can recognize Ezra Pound’s debt to the Japanese haiku tradition (and, as Ezra Pound wrote in his essay titled “Vorticism,” this poem is indebted to the haiku tradition), and the poems mathematical precision: the equation between faces and petals, the loose iambic pentameter of each line. In fact, this poem is so accessible—or at least it seems to be—that it’s easy to forget that it is the result of a variety of editorial decisions, and that the transmission of the text across time actually transformed the poem. This is how the poem looked when it was first published in 1913, in Poetrymagazine (To see the original 1913 publication of Pound’s poem, you can go to this link on the Poetry Foundation website: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse/2/1#20569747😞 IN A STATION OF THE METRO The apparition       of these faces       in the crowd  : Petals       on a wet, black    bough  . Ezra Pound In this version, the title is boldly announced in all caps, the poet’s name appears just beneath the text, and the poem itself seems to be deeply concerned with innovations in typography and design. In this context, the words are transformed by the use of white space between them; and by the change from a semicolon to a colon. With a semicolon, Pound joins two independent ideas, but with this use of the colon, Pound suggests that the second line is an appositive, or description, of the first. In class, we discuss the tiny differences between these two versions, and I ask students which version they like best—not which is best—and I don’t tell them which version has actually become the standard version that appears in literature anthologies until the very end of the class period. As they work through each version, they have to pay attention to the tiny, seemingly superficial choices in layout and punctuation that they might overlook in a reading of just one version in our anthology. In doing so, they are engaging in a critical discussion, even if they don’t know it yet. In recent years, bibliographical scholars have shown how such “accidentals” as punctuation, capitalization, spelling, and overall typographical design contribute to meaning in significant ways. In this example from Ezra Pound, students see that these choices in appearance are indeed substantive, even emotional. [This post originally appeared on LitBits on November 2, 2011.]]   ... View more

My goals for the new school year include both increasing participation and asking students to track their own work. I’m hoping that putting those two goals together will help me succeed in checking them off on my list. I have always had trouble with grading student participation. I like the elementary school options for kidwatching with sticky notes or forms, where you have a place to take notes about each student’s participation and work. The strategy doesn’t seem practical at the college level however, so I need to find something that works for me. Part of the challenge is that students rarely understand what counts as participation, and, as a result, they don’t know when they need to step up their efforts. I found some tips in David Gooblar’s post, “ISO: A Better Way to Evaluate Student Participation.” My favorite strategy is Tony Docan-Morgan’s “participation logs.” I immediately knew I wanted to try them out in all the classes I am teaching. Based on Docan-Morgan’s model, I created my own spreadsheet templates, using Google Sheets,  with details on what students needed to log. In my fully online Technical Writing course, I created tabs in the spreadsheet for each of the following: Class Discussion Small Group Other Participation Self-assessment & Reflection On the Participation Log page on the course website, I provided an overview of the goal, details on how to make a copy of the template, and suggested how to log the work that students had done in the course so far. My Writing and Digital Media class meets face-to-face, so I explained and demonstrated the template for their course in class. It includes the same tabs as the technical writing template, with the questions rephrased to fit the classroom and the course. I’ll add an explanation page to their site before midterm so that they have everything they need for a midterm self-assessment. In addition to giving students the templates, I tell them what the work they are assigned would count for. For the Technical Writing course, I added a simple table, which had links (removed here) to the discussion activities to date in our CMS: If you posted in this Discussion List it on this sheet of your log Questions about the Syllabus and/or Course Logistics Class Discussion I am Traci — AMA (short for "Ask Me Anything") Class Discussion Introduce Yourself with a Short Professional Bio Small Group Ethical Poster Discussion Class Discussion For the assignments that I have given since we went over the logs in my Writing and Digital Media course, I have been including a note that tells them how their work counts with the assignment. The multimodal dig assignment, for example, ended with a note about the end of the grace period and this sentence: “This activity is graded Pass/Fail and counts as part of your participation grade as a class discussion.” So is it working? It’s still too early to tell. The Technical Writing students have only had their logs for a week, and the Writing and Digital Media students for a few days beyond a week. Their response in the face-to-face class to the logs seemed positive. The most positive sign for me, however, happened after a small group discussion of students’ design journals in the Writing and Digital Media class. As I was circulating among the groups, I overheard one of the students reminding the others in her group: “Don’t forget to add this to your log.” I’ll take that as enough of a success for now. How do you encourage participation in your classes? What strategies do you use to track how students participate? I would love to hear from you in a comment!     Source: Cropped from Soulforce at Gordon College - PDR by Zach Alexander, on Flickr, used under CC-BY 2.0 license ... View more