Think about a time—maybe as a student, a teacher, or another environment—when you had to write something in a genre that was new or unfamiliar to you. What did you do? How did you figure out what was expected?   I’ll never forget how out of place I felt in my first graduate seminar in applied linguistics. I had done my undergraduate work in literature, and I didn’t have the first clue about how to structure a graduate seminar paper that reported data I had collected. I tried to write something that looked like the thesis-driven essays I had learned to write as an undergrad, and I was stunned by the grade on my paper and the comments about cryptic things like “a literature review,” “a methods section,” and “limitations of the current study.” I was a fish out of water.   Many of our students will experience this feeling at some point in their undergraduate careers, or perhaps in their professional lives after they leave our classes. Yet, as Yancey, Robertson, and Taczak point out in their book Writing Across Contexts: Transfer, Composition, and Sites of Writing (Utah State UP, 2014), students who have been successful writers in school are reticent to change up what they’ve been doing. If it’s worked well thus far, why change course?   My goal as a writing teacher is to make sure that my students have a set of effective tools to help them figure out what to do when they find themselves in unfamiliar writing territory. But if they haven’t yet realized that they will be called upon at some point in the near future to write things that don’t look much like five-paragraph essays, my first job is to help them discover what professionals write in their areas of interest.   When I taught a first-year writing course this summer using An Insider’s Guide to Academic Writing, I asked students to do a couple of assignments at the very beginning of the course that introduced them to writing in their majors and future professions: An interview. I ask students to interview an upper-level undergraduate or graduate student in their field of study to ask them about the kinds of writing they do and how they learned what was expected. I used to ask students to interview a faculty member, but sending dozens of first-year students out to interview faculty across campus can make you unpopular quickly, even though you have the best of intentions. Students learn a great deal from speaking with others in their field of study, and their interviewees have an ethos that you, as a writing teacher, don’t necessarily have. A rhetorical analysis of an article. One of the major projects in my course is always a rhetorical analysis of an article written by someone in their field of study. I ask students to try to find a piece written by one of their professors. I encountered an interesting challenge this summer with a student of dance, who couldn’t find a scholarly article by one of his faculty members. We found several reviews and other pieces they had written, though, and so he was able to think about the various kinds of writing his faculty members do. He also made exciting connections between dance and the composing process. A rhetorical analysis of other writing assignments. I also like to have students analyze writing assignments they are completing in other classes. They can learn a lot by looking at the expectations of assignments in different fields of study and by comparing what they bring to class with the assignments from their classmates. I wrote more about this activity, introduced to me by Rachel Buck, in “Low Stakes Writing in a WID-Based Curriculum.”   Giving students the opportunity to hear about writing from professionals in their fields of study is invaluable. Of course, hearing from faculty members on their own campus is very effective, but it can be time-consuming to build partnerships with colleagues across campus. The videos that accompany An Insider’s Guide to Academic Writing in LaunchPad Solo give you the opportunity to introduce students to writing in different fields from professionals who do that writing on a regular basis.   What are some other ideas you have about helping students understand the different contexts in which they will be asked to write in college and beyond? What are the biggest questions and concerns that you have about trying a WID approach? If you’ve tried it already, what are some of the strategies you have found to be most effective? ... View more

It's a bit amusing to read the reviews of Britney Spears' performance at the recent VMA awards ceremony.  As far as I can tell, the two main complaints appear to be that Spears is not Beyoncé,  and that she is stuck in a 1990s time warp.  Well, it's a relief to hear that the event wasn't a twerk-fest this time around.    The particular details of Spears' not-very-overwhelming comeback attempt are not of especial semiotic interest, of course, but they do get me thinking about some things that are.  And one of these is what it means to live in a youth culture.   American culture—especially its popular culture—is so grounded in youth worship that it is very easy to take it all for granted, but the whole thing probably began just under a century ago in the Roaring Twenties, when Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald were the self-appointed idols of a youth movement that swept America for a delirious decade—complete with a reverence for the latest in popular music, daring women's clothing fashions, and (in spite of Prohibition,) lots and lots of alcohol—until the Great Depression and the Second World War ended the party.  Not until the 1950s would America's march towards a fully-evolved youth culture be recommenced.   Of course, with a good deal of help from such outliers of their parents' generation like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, it was the Baby Boomers who completed our evolution into an all-out youth culture in the 1960s.  "Don't trust anyone over thirty" was a popular slogan for a generation that is now in its sixties and seventies.  "Will you still need me/Will you still feed me/When I'm sixty-four," sang a man who is now seventy-three.  "Hope I die before I get old," the surviving members of The Who still declare.    This is something worth remembering for Boomers as we see ourselves castigated by Millennials for ruining their world.  I mean, we started it.  And since we started it, it is probably only well, you know, our karma that now that we aren't young any longer in a culture that patronizes old age (at best), or sneers at it, or neglects it, no one really cares about what lessons we may be able to share about what life holds for the young.  If every generation in traditional societies that have reverence for old age has managed to repeat the errors of their parents, why should our youth culture be any different?   But as I watch all the tittering at poor 34-year-old Britney from the vantage point of sixty-two, I can think of a few things that never get said in a youth culture that I rather wish had been said to me—not that I would have really listened, probably.  The first is that, believe it or not, though your body changes with the years, you don't—at least not all that much.  Others may not recognize you, but you do, and if, as Wordsworth said, "the child is father to the man," there is a remarkable amount of that child still around, even as the years go by. But time is not the same, no matter how much of the child remains.  I recall very well what time was like when I was young.  Though it passed very slowly compared to the way it passes for me now, it also was packed with change.  I look back on my late youth and young adult years and am amazed at all that happened.  It seems to be squeezed together in some way.  The flow of time now, though faster in its way, is also more regular, steadier, more evenly paced.    The change in one's experience of time is something a youth culture doesn't prepare you for, because, in effect, a youth culture has no past or future tense.  Grounded in an eternal present in which youth is expected to last forever (or until thirty, the age at which a twenty-something Scott Fitzgerald pledged he would commit suicide by .  .  . until he reached it), a youth culture ignores not only the fact that you get old, but that being old is a far longer stretch of life than is being young.  The popular culture that a youth culture creates only exacerbates this by insisting that one's life should be a constant series of excitements and diversions, "burning with a hard gemlike flame" (as Pater put it), or insisting that "it is better to burn out than to fade away" (as Neil Young put it when he was still young).   But no one is "Nineteen Forever," as Joe Jackson's rather remarkable song warns.  Perhaps someone should tell that to Britney Spears, or to whoever is running her life these days.  There are some rather interesting life stages that we go through past the early ones, but you won't hear much about them in a popular culture wherein now is somehow always forever—literally the last word.    But it never is.  After all, believe it or not, someday even Beyoncé will get old. ... View more

Work has always been a significant factor in my life, and I have counted my blessings every day for the work of teaching. Growing up, I watched members of my extended family engaged in hard physical labor—working in the fields, caring for animals, making clothes, cooking, cleaning. On it went from early morning until sundown. Now our society tends to think of “leisure activity” as involving some kind of physical activity: for my grandparents, aunts, and uncles, “leisure” meant getting away from physical activity for a while; it meant sitting on the porch in a rocking chair telling a story or two before bedtime.    This week I’ve been trying to observe all the work and workers around me, taking note of all those who make others’ lives easier through their labors. I watched closely as the post office clerk climbed a tall ladder to retrieve packages; I listened in as a young waiter took orders with a smile; I observed workers on a wayside cleaning crew scouring the area for litter and trash. I marveled at the teachers pouring back into their classrooms, ready for another year with their young charges.   Work, as we know, comes in all colors and flavors: Mike Rose has written eloquently on the dignity of work in The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker (which includes a chapter on Mike’s mother, who waited tables.) We also know that work can be grinding – beating people down to exhaustion and beyond.    Still, at least in this culture, we seem drawn to work, in part perhaps to help give our lives meaning. I think it’s worth taking time to talk with students about their conceptions (and preconceptions) of work—what they think it is and what they think it is for.  I often introduce such discussions with a favorite poem, like this one by Marge Piercy:   To be of use The people I love the best jump into work head first without dallying in the shallows and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight. They seem to become natives of that element, the black sleek heads of seals bouncing like half-submerged balls.   I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart, who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience, who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward, who do what has to be done, again and again.   I want to be with people who submerge in the task, who go into the fields to harvest and work in a row and pass the bags along, who are not parlor generals and field deserters but move in a common rhythm when the food must come in or the fire be put out.   The work of the world is common as mud. Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust. But the thing worth doing well done has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident. Greek amphoras for wine or oil, Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums but you know they were made to be used. The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.   On this Labor Day week,  I’m grateful for work that is real – and for all those who labor. ... View more

Aristotle defined a rhetor as a good man skilled in speaking. What we are teaching and you are learning when you study argumentation is rhetoric—the use of words to move listeners—or, in this course, to move readers. Aristotle taught the concepts of logos, pathos, and ethos, and we still do. Campaign season is usually a good time to look for timely examples of speeches that illustrate logos, pathos, and ethos. The presidential campaign of 2016, however, has rewritten the rules about balancing the three appeals—logical, emotional, and ethical.   Few would deny that Trump has won supporters through the power of personality, or ethos. In classical times, a speaker won over an audience in part through the ethos he projected, convincing his listeners through his demeanor and his words that he was a good man and thus should be believed. Ironically, Donald Trump has stood that idea on its head by winning supporters by being brash, rude, and crude. His supporters are sending a message that the relative decorum of past campaigns is a part of the political system that they would like to see dismantled. The fact that Trump has gone from being entertainment to being the nominee of his party shows just how effective his unorthodox tactics have been. His most recent campaign manager has clearly tried to get him to use a teleprompter rather than talking extemporaneously, but the jury is still out as to whether coming across as more reasonable and thoughtful will lose more supporters than it will gain. (And as to whether Trump can change that much.)   Analysts covering the two political conventions this summer were quick to point out the difference in tone between the two, and what they were discussing was pathos. Pathos is appeal to the emotions. It was quite noticeable that Trump was using fear tactics, painting a dark picture of all that is wrong with America. In order to sell the slogan “Make America Great Again,” you have to prove that it is not great now. He played on his audience’s fear of terrorism, crime, and illegal aliens. Clinton took the opposite approach and had an upbeat convention, stressing what is already great abou t America.   Trump has been criticized for lack of substance in his speeches. Before, during, and since the convention, he has depended on fear to replace detailed plans. One of the most specific proposals he has offered is the wall he would build between the United States and Mexico. The promise of a wall to block the arrival of illegal aliens and the crime that he attributes to them is enough to make his supporters forget to ask how he is going to make Mexico pay for this wall, which he has consistently said that he will do. He plays on the fear of terrorist attacks when he proposes to deport hundreds of thousands of “bad dudes,” even if these “bad dudes” are American citizens. The harshest criticism he has received the whole campaign came when he criticized the parents of a Muslim soldier who died in battle. Even then he tried to turn the attention away from what many saw as disrespect for a dead soldier and his Gold Star parents (and the threat of taking away rights of immigrant groups) to say that what he was fighting was the type of people who killed the son.   There is no denying that Trump’s tactics have worked amazingly well. Back when more than a dozen candidates were competing for the Republican nomination, few took him seriously. Hillary Clinton has had to take him very seriously because many Americans find what he has to offer appealing. Some tried-and-true means of predicting political success just haven’t worked this time because Trump has broken from what is expected—and it has worked. Source:  Anthony Majanlahti, Cicero, on Flickr  ... View more

Many basic writing and first-year composition courses require students to conduct research and integrate the sources they find into their written work. The research paper poses challenges for instructors for a number of reasons: the changing nature of information literacy, the variety of disciplinary expectations for presenting and citing research, and the complexities of managing summary, paraphrase, and quotation, problems which were highlighted in the work of Rebecca Moore Howard and her colleagues in the Citation Project. In addition, faculty from other disciplines may view research as a generalizable skill set which can and should be covered in English courses; as a result, they expect students to arrive “research-ready” in their introductory and sophomore-level courses. My college recently selected information literacy and research as our new Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) topic. I was asked to lead plan development and draft a literature review over the summer. While at first reluctant, I have found the work to be directly related to what I am doing in the composition classroom and what I am reading about threshold concepts and teaching for transfer. One resource in particular stands out: The Association of College and Research Libraries’ (ACRL) Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education, which was adopted earlier this year. The Framework approaches information literacy not as a set of discrete skills, but rather as a connected set of threshold concepts which have been identified and refined by experts in the field (similar to the methods employed by Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle to determine threshold concepts for writing studies). These fundamental concepts echo and complement writing instruction: Authority is constructed and contextual Information creation as a process Information has value Research as inquiry Scholarship as conversation Searching as strategic exploration Under each concept, the Framework lists “knowledge practices,” which describe activities to foster development of the concept, and “dispositions,” which characterize emotions and attitudes of students who successfully acquire and apply the concept (the dispositions are similar to the “habits of mind” in the Framework for Success in Post-Secondary Writing). I believe the Framework can lead to new avenues of collaboration, research, and reflection for first-year composition instructors and their library colleagues. The framework also provides instructors like me with new tools for assessing the effectiveness of our pedagogy. Let me provide one example. In my composition classes, I require a researched essay.  Students begin finding sources early in the semester and build an annotated bibliography throughout the course. This 10-week search for sources is designed to emphasize reading skills, summary writing, and a sense of the on-going conversation connected to the issue chosen by the student.  Once the bibliography of ten sources has been accepted, students write the researched essay. One student, after completing his annotated bibliography this summer, submitted an eight-page paper in which every sentence after the introduction was followed by a parenthetical citation. There were no signal phrases, no discussion of credentials, and no attempt to distinguish between types of sources, which included both scholarly research, online news and periodicals, and a political blog.  After reading the paper, I tried to articulate for myself—and for the student—why the paper did not fulfill the expectations of the course. The ACRL framework provided two answers. First, in integrating his sources, the student did not “assess the fit between an information product’s creation process and a particular information need,” which is a knowledge practice associated with the “information as process” concept. Thus, while well-organized and grammatically sound, when addressing different parts of the research question, the paper did not distinguish between the reflections of a political blogger and the results of an academic study. In addition, the student did not meet the goal of the semester-long project to develop his “own authoritative voice,” which is a practice associated with the concept that “authority is constructed and contextual.”  I must ask if I provided opportunities to develop these knowledge practices. While I focused on the thinking and writing required to integrate multiple sources in a paragraph, and while I spoke about genres and authority as students searched for sources, I did not address these two together. In other words, when we worked on source integration, we didn’t discuss types of information and how to assess whether a particular source was a good fit for the paragraph.  In fact, I used the literature review from an article by Howard, Serviss, and Rodrigue to illustrate how sources could be integrated, without acknowledging that such a literature review draws only from academic research studies.  I want to address source integration and student voice differently this fall. In teaching research, it is very easy to present information literacy as a package of skills that begin with using search engines and end with punctuating an in-text citation appropriately. But a reductionist focus on the skills of information literacy, much like a reductionist focus on skills in writing, may not help students function as consumers and producers of information, even though it allows us to check assessment boxes easily enough. Students should be able to do more than plug terms into a search engine or database; they need to understand the differences between the two and how those differences can influence the outcomes research.  The ACRL Framework provides English instructors with an alternative theory of information literacy, one which recognizes the contextual complexities of research. ... View more

Seems like I’ve been thinking about abilities/disabilities a lot lately. I’ve written about Brenda Brueggemann’s brilliant work—and recommended her “Why I Mind,” which is on YouTube—and our Bread Loaf class has been doing quite a bit of soul searching in terms of our relationships, as teachers, to students with varying abilities/disabilities. And now comes Shoulder the Lion, a documentary film by Erinnisse Heuver and Patryk Rebisz.  Because a good friend is featured in the film, I drove to the Rafael Cinema House in San Rafael a few days ago to see a screening.  Knowing my friend, I expected it to be good: but in fact it was so far above good that I was just stunned.  This searing documentary tells the stories of three artists:  Alice Wingwall, an artist and photographer who lost her sight in 2000; Graham Sharpe, an Irish musician whose advancing Tinnitus makes it impossible for him to participate in his beloved band; and Katie Dallam, a veteran and psychologist who lost half her brain in a boxing match (“Million Dollar Baby” was inspired by this event).  The film moves back and forth among these stories, as the artists speak directly to viewers of their ongoing work and the emotions that accompany it.  In the Dallam sections, we learn that losing half her brain left her with “nothing, nothing at all.” She had no memory, and she had to re-learn absolutely everything, from eating to speaking.  Eventually, Dallam discovered art and found that her “disability” had taken away all her inhibitions.  The results are fantastical, larger than life, monstrous, fabulous, riveting sculptures and paintings. Sharpe never tells us how his tinnitus developed or whether doctors have tried any treatments, but he dwells on his emotional state as he sank into and eventually accepted the fact that no matter what he would hear ringing in his ears:  the sound, he says, is like TV static, with no reception, and it’s LOUD.  He turned his talents to building a music festival in Ireland, which after ten years had won the reputation of “Best Small Festival” in the country. At the end of the film, we see him sitting in a field, strumming his guitar, and writing lyrics, something he continues to do even though he can’t really play them. Alice Wingwall, a dear friend for well over a decade now, speaks eloquently of losing her vision, of her deep anger at being blind, of her realization that “seeing” is about more than vision, of her sadness that so many sighted people today do very little true seeing—bombarded by images as we are—and of her determination to keep on capturing images.  And so she does, as brilliantly and dramatically as displayed in the film.  With her husband, architect and writer Donlyn Lyndon, she answered questions after the film in her typical straightforward, witty way.  And we met Rumba, her guide dog, who took the entire screening in stride, as though she knew she was a “star” of the show. This film, and the artists represented in it, give testimony to an argument Shirley Brice Heath has made throughout her career: that some form of art (music, dance, sculpture, painting, drama) is essential to human development.  Heath’s work with youth groups across the country has engaged young people in artistic endeavors, and for decades she has documented the progress they have made and the way in which art has enriched and changed their lives.  Of course, I think of writing as an art—and speaking as well.  That’s one reason I want writing teachers everywhere to focus on the ART of and in writing/speaking.  The style, the rhythm, the cadences, the syntax, all of which bring a written or spoken performance to life.  As teachers, we need to remember that all people have artistic potential (just ask comics artist Lynda Barry, and check out her books!), and especially so those with “disabilities.” ... View more

­­ Like many Americans, I stayed close to a TV on July 26, listening to the prime time speeches during day one of the Democratic Convention, just as I had done a week before during the Republican Convention.  I knew there would be protests, that Sanders supporters were set to make a stand, and that Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Michelle Obama, and Bernie Sanders would speak. I expected all the speakers to do well—to deliver their messages with pride and passion.  And they did.  But from the moment the first lady stepped onto the stage, I sensed a change in the convention hall.  She was radiant in deep blue, with that wide smile and direct way of looking at her audience.  As she began to speak, the raucous crowd quieted; all eyes on her, and then she delivered what to me was the most impressive speech of either convention so far.  In roughly 1500 words, she supported her husband’s legacy, showed why Trump would be an inadequate president at best (without ever mentioning his name), explained why she supports Hillary Clinton (and why it’s important that girls everywhere think of it as routine for a woman to be President), and underscored her (and Clinton’s) focus on children and families.  This brief speech packed a powerful yet subtle punch.  I took a closer look at the speech today, and came away impressed again with our first lady’s ability to connect to audiences and with the strategies she uses to do so.  Of the roughly 1500 words in this speech, 43 of them are “we” “our,” or “us”—and another 35 are words that refer to young people—“kids,” “daughters,” “sons,” “children,” “our children,” and so on.  The repetition of these key words hammers home her message: that the decision we make in November will affect how our children are able to lead their lives. And in this endeavor—this focus on the good of our nation’s children—Ms. Obama aligns herself with Secretary Clinton, as mothers who care above all for “our children.” So repetition is one key to the power of this speech, but alliteration and parallelism also work to make the words very memorable:  “the lash of bondage, the shame of servitude, the sting of segregation”; “character and conviction”; “guts and grace”; and many more.  And the use of simple word choice and syntax underscores and amplifies sentences like “I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves.”  So this is a speech to savor, and to save.  I plan to use it in classes, asking students to read it and then carry out their own mini rhetorical analyses, then to watch the speech as Michelle Obama delivered it, noting her pacing (flawless), her pauses, her facial expressions and body language.  My guess is that students will learn a lot about how they can improve as speakers and presenters. And that they will have more insightful and thoughtful responses to the message the speech sends from having done so. [Image: Official portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama in Green Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy.)] ... View more

My oldest daughter graduated from college in May; she will begin an M.A. program at a public Midwestern university in the fall. She will fund her graduate studies by teaching in the university’s first-year composition program. I watch her and wonder if this teaching will be a means to an end, or if she will settle into this role, integrating composition pedagogy into the professional identity she is constructing for herself. I certainly didn’t see composition instruction as central to my career when I came to graduate school at the University of South Carolina in 1989; I had settled on theoretical linguistics as a career path. At least some teaching would be required, however, since appointment as a TA provided a much needed tuition waiver and stipend. Given that I chose a focus on second language acquisition, my first assignment was a sheltered ESL section—or “B section”—of the first-year composition sequence. I pushed myself into a basement classroom one hot August morning, and faced students whose names I could not pronounce, some of whom were older than I was, and who trusted, implicitly, that I could teach them. After a few weeks, I settled into this classroom role comfortably enough, managing the requisite balance between my own coursework and the demands of lesson preparation and grading.  I saw the balance, unfortunately, as management of disconnected and disparate identities, with my coursework fully privileged over the work of the classroom. Two semesters later, Professors Nancy Thompson and Rhonda Grego invited me to join them and three other graduate students for a directed reading and research group investigating pedagogy through action research. I accepted. I had taken “Teaching College Composition” the previous year, but the focus there had been on practical classroom organization and management strategies—surviving, in effect, the first year of teaching. As a theoretical inquiry, I did not know that “writing studies” existed. The research group unsettled me and my sense of a disciplinary identity; I was troubled by concepts and theoretical frameworks that were completely new to me. Members of the research group adopted Elbow and Belanoff’s text, A Community of Writers, for our students, and we tackled a number of additional readings for ourselves, including Peter Reason’s Human Inquiry in Action, Marie Wilson Nelson’s At the Point of Need, along with articles from Mike Rose, Peter Elbow, Michael Polanyi, Janet Emig, Ann Berthoff, Mina Shaughnessy, and many others. Contrasted to theoretical work in second language acquisition, lexical semantics, and syntax, this was, for me, a foreign language. Each reading and group session raised more questions, and suddenly, my sense of identity didn’t seem settled any longer. Christie Toth has coined the term “transdisciplinary cosmopolitanism”—a convergence of multiple areas of expertise and professional interests—to describe the particular identities of community college English instructors. Participation in the research group invited me to settle in a new “academic home,” and although I could not have foreseen this outcome at the time, it prepared me for my role as community college instructor. I recently found my journal from that practicum, buried in a filing cabinet. I see in it now the first inklings that composition pedagogy, applied linguistics, and theory could connect and enrich each other, that pedagogical research could be theory-driven and just as intellectually rewarding as traditional linguistic inquiry. My research project, in fact, examined the relationship between reading and writing, using two case studies: a basic writer and an ESL writer.  I think, at times, we assume community college instructors—especially those who have been through standard doctoral training—have had bad luck; they’ve “settled for” a community college teaching position because, for whatever reason, a university post hasn’t opened for them.  They do the drudge-work of teaching composition; they are disengaged from more lofty academic inquiry. I disagree. I did not settle “for” this identity; I settled “into” it. “Into” implies both a bounded space and a movement; the space may be bounded, but it is not static. I’m not “stuck” teaching basic, ESL, or first-year writing at a community college; I am doing intellectual work—work that I love—in my own “laboratory.” I attend conferences and read journals in composition studies, developmental education, reading, TESOL, and linguistics. At the moment, I am also doing background research on threshold concepts in information literacy for our college’s next QEP; this new work is a privilege, not a burden, because it challenges and expands what I do in the classroom.  I teach writing at a community college; I practice “transdisciplinary cosmopolitanism.” I wouldn’t settle for less. Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Join the Macmillan Community to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! ... View more

I am writing this post on July 4, shortly after writing to the class called Writing and Acting for Change that I am team-teaching at Vermont’s Bread Loaf School of English.  Though it’s a national holiday, Bread Loaf classes meet on the 4 th , and though I am not on campus physically right now I am in touch with the class through e-mail, Twitter, and our private class blog. When I got up this morning, a student in the class had added a similar but much more eloquent post: A good reminder of the need for embodied action indeed.  In our class, we are reminding ourselves every day that we must go beyond talk to ACT if we intend to create any real change.  Thanks to Frederick Douglass for providing a brilliant example and for giving us food for thought on every 4 th of July. [Image: Frederick Douglass, by Political Graveyard on Flickr] ... View more

This past April, at the Council on Basic Writing’s Wednesday Workshop at 4C16, Houston’s Writers in the Schools teaching artist Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton offered a session on writing and movement.  In the late afternoon of a very long day, Deborah had teachers of Basic Writing out of our seats and striking pose after pose. The purpose of this exercise was twofold. First, we learned how and why to use movement to break the frame of classrooms generally tethered to desks and often glued to screens and social media. Second, we learned to apply our learning to facilitating a more embodied and physically present writing situation for our students. The directions for the exercise are simple, and that simplicity allows students to understand complexity from a kinesthetic perspective: Invite someone to strike a pose. Ask the audience to describe the pose. Have someone else interrupt and change the pose. Discuss with the audience what changed and why the change was significant. I brought this activity back to class when we were working on analysis. The students asked for a bit more direction, so I invited them to strike a pose that has to do with the writing process. At the end of the semester, we were actively seeking motivation to regenerate writing for a strong finish. One student took a water bottle and enacted an exaggerated scene of partying, pretending to imbibe the water as if it were a magical elixir. —What does that have to do with the writing process? I inquired. —It’s why we’re having trouble writing, someone suggested. Too many distractions. —Okay, I said, someone change the scene. Make it productive. Students shifted a bit in their chairs, while the student holding the water bottle tried to stay still in the pose. Finally someone stood up to transform the scene. The second student held the water bottle up to their eye, as though it were a telescope. The first student sat down. All of us applauded. —But what does that have to do with writing? we wondered. The conversation that followed focused on turning around stereotypes and expectations. In the ninety-degree heat of the desert in April, one might think that all students would prefer partying to studying. Yet the movement activity showed how easily someone could break the frame. The water bottle, first an instrument of leisure, became an illustration of extreme focus, a necessary part of the writing process. —Does the scene also show resilience? I asked. We had discussed resilience quite a lot in class, about finding the strength to carry on when dealing with the contradictions and frustrations of student life in 2016. How was it possible to create quality time for writing in the face of gatekeeping first-year classes and full-time jobs to pay high tuition and fees? —Yes, the students answered, the scene shows resilience. It shows that it’s possible for us to stop partying and go back to studying when we need to. Additionally, I used this scene to discuss the idea of rebuttal. Some people complain, I said, that all students want to do is party. However, as you have suggested, that assumption is incorrect. Students need balance in their lives. After taking time away from their studies, students are better able to focus. The two scenes illustrate these seemingly opposing views by showing how an instrument of distraction becomes an implement of deep concentration. By the next class period, I knew I wanted to write a blog post about this idea, and I asked the students to take photos as I reenacted their poses from the day before (above). Doing this work helped me to remember my own experiences as a teaching artist with Writers in the Schools, just after the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) was signed in 2002. Some of the second graders that I had taught during that time had already graduated or were about to graduate from college. I remembered the movement activities from our time together and how much those activities contributed to our focus on writing. NCLB was repealed in 2015, and the world has changed a great deal in this last decade and a half as these children have grown to maturity. Perhaps we are more apt to argue for the importance of screen time and multimodalities to facilitate writing. But movement also is a modality, and we need to remember the significance of breaking the frame. For these reasons, I remain grateful for Writers in the Schools and Deborah Mouton’s work with the Council on Basic Writing. She reminded us of the potential of movement as an inseparable step in the deeply transformative process of writing. ... View more

Ever since the International Center for Media and the Public Agenda at the University of Maryland conducted an experiment in 2010 on student digital usage, it has been pretty well known that there is something quite literally addictive about life in the cloud.  Reporting that students who were asked to refrain from accessing their digital devices for only 24 hours experienced physical and emotional withdrawal symptoms usually associated with opiate drug addiction, the investigators provided some of the first hard evidence that all that time spent updating Facebook pages and posting to Snapchat is a lot more than a matter of communication and convenience.  More recent reports (like this one or this one), citing the emergence of such phenomena as digital addiction rehab programs, indicate that the problem is only intensifying as mobile technology use becomes nearly universal.  But lest you fear that this blog is going to turn into one of those "kids these days" rants, have no fear: adults are almost equally likely to be addicted to their digital devices (just watch your colleagues, or yourself, at a faculty meeting some time!).  So the matter isn't generational; it isn't even cultural: it's human.  And it begs for some semiotic attention. Not that the affects of digital technology on people haven't been getting a whole lot of attention already, especially on the part of the corporate players who have made, and stand to make, practically inconceivable sums of money by exploiting whatever it is in human nature that draws people from around the world, regardless of cultural origin or condition, to the same apparently irresistible gadgets.  Finding, for example, that people will do almost anything to get a lot of "Likes" tallied up on their digital contributions, web administrators everywhere have adopted the Facebook model, itself adapted from MySpace, and have applied it to their sites.  Heck, you can even "like" this blog (as if). Indeed, any semiotic analysis of digital addiction would do well to begin with an analysis of the hegemonic role that corporate profitability has played in creating and encouraging the phenomenon, for in a postindustrial economy dominated by digital capitalism, it should hardly be surprising to see the psychographic techniques originally applied to advertising now transferred to the world of smart phones and social media.  Think of it as The Hidden Persuaders Move to Silicon Valley. Still, there's hegemony, and there's hegemony, and whatever hegemonic forces are at work in the proliferation of digital addiction, they would be largely ineffective if there wasn't something in us all that makes us ripe for manipulation.  But what is it?  MRI scans indicate that specific pleasure centers in the brain light up when we log on, but that doesn't take us very far.  Of course there is something pleasurable about the matter, but not only are there quite a number of non-addictive experiences that also light up the pleasure centers, digital addiction also involves, paradoxically enough, a certain measure of pain as well—as the much-cited misery factor in Facebook usage can attest.  Indeed, what makes digital addiction so puzzling is the way that, when we think about it closely, it is constituted by paradoxes all the way down. Consider, for example, the social/anti-social nature of the Internet.  On the one hand, it seems to be irrefutable that part of the universal appeal of life in the cloud lies in the essentially social nature of human beings.  In short, we like to commune with each other, and digital devices enable us to be in constant contact with literally innumerable numbers of people from all over the world.  Such predecessors of mobile technology as the telephone, television, and even Ham radio anticipated this capability, but not at anything like the same scale. But at the same time, for all the socializing that takes place in the digital hive, there is not only a whole lot of anti-social behavior to be found (I hardly need to provide examples of that), there is also the mind-boggling phenomenon of digital desensitization—that is, the declining capacities for emotional empathy experienced by many who have been brought up in the social network, along with a certain atrophying of the ability to handle simple face-to-face socializing.  Couples on dates staring not into each other's eyes but into their smart phones, groups of people sitting together, but not together because they're sending text messages and posting to Instagram, gamers who have trouble talking to other human beings .  . .  the list of paradoxical anti-social digital affects is practically unending. Then there is the paradox that digital technology is simultaneously a means of democratic access to media control and a major agency in the ongoing economic redistribution of wealth upward as such corporate giants as Apple, Google, and Facebook enjoy a top-down relation to billions of Net-addicted consumers whose every move they can track and monetize. Indeed, there are so many paradoxes involved in the question of digital addiction that it is impossible, at this still early stage, to fully assess what is going on.  But if there is one thing that you should be telling your students these days, it is that they would do well to give the matter a good deal of thought, with as much self-awareness and objectivity as they can muster.  And to do that, they will have to log off for a while, because the kind of critical thinking that the digital era requires is best conducted when not under its spell.  [Image Source: Duncan Harris on Flickr​] ... View more

[[This post originally appeared on September 27, 2012]] Sometimes literary theory is pretty distant from the practical work of teaching. Think back to that time you brought your panopticon or your phallus (Lacan’s, I mean!) into the classroom, and to the moment in the middle of your excited explanation of the revolutionary ideas delivered to you across the Atlantic and through that one class in grad school when you realized it wasn’t helping  your students understand “A Rose for Emily.” The connections between the work with theory that we do in our training and our research often can seem part of another world than the one in which we teach. I was reminded the other day—on the occasion of one of those curious confluences of events that happen when you’re doing a lot at once and all of the different things swim together in a river of caffeine—that this is not always the case. I’d just read D. T. Max’s new biography of the late David Foster Wallace, and in an interview I did with him (here​) asked him about the revelation that Wallace had voted for Reagan. It seems to have been a surprise to many of his readers, who had come, through their reading of Wallace’s fiction and essays, to see him as squarely on the other end of the ideological spectrum. They thought they had a sense of the man from reading what he wrote, and this bit of news blurred the picture they’d constructed of him. That same day the interview came out, I had a meeting of my course on the rock novel (fiction about, inspired by, and formally influenced by rock and roll, a course I’m teaching for the first time and not at all because I get to play a lot of loud music in class).  We were reading Lewis Shiner’s Glimpses, a little-known but interesting quasi-sci-fi novel about a man, Ray, who has an obsessive relation to the history of rock music, and many students, despite the course’s own obsessive concern with that history, were finding the main character’s behavior a bit much. Why was Ray driven to such lengths by his obsessions? One answer to this conundrum—which kept some students from identifying with Ray—was supplied by another student who raised the idea that Shiner, in his presentation of Ray, was actually critiquing the character. That is, maybe there was some ironic distance between Ray’s behavior and the author’s opinion about that behavior. With this issue raised, I played The Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” a second time, because it’s awesome, and class was over. One of the pitfalls of reading (and teaching) fiction is the temptation to think we know an author. Readers of Wallace think they know him, especially because some of his work seems intensely personal. Another pitfall is the tendency to conflate the main character in a story or novel with the author, especially in an autobiographical work like Shiner’s. Decades of literary theory have explored the relationship between author and work, arguing alternately that we must ignore the author, that he is dead, that he is a conduit for the knowledge available given the social structure of his time, etc. In fiction, narrative theory, narratology, and theory of the novel have kicked around different responses to the problem, from Wayne Booth’s idea of the implied author to John Brenkman’s rejection of that concept as, well, a fiction, and not a very helpful one. Similarly, theories of narrative and the novel have worked over the relation of character to text, none better than Lukacs, who understood the relation of the modern novel to its writer as one in which the writer divides his subjectivity between a main character who gets the world wrong and a story that refuses to tell us what right is. We want our stories to hold together—those that we read and those that we construct about the world. Many of the best stories, however, admit a complexity that challenges their coherence. The picture we have of an author can’t really hold a book together, just as the belief that the author completely agrees with the main character—or completely doesn’t—can’t really hold a book together. Things are more complicated than that. One of the gifts of teaching fiction is the chance to help students see how, for all kinds of stories, complicated ≠ bad. One of the ways to help them see this is to bring in the literary theory that has helped us to see it. ... View more

During a recent visit to the writing program at San Jose State, I had a chance to see the outstanding work they are doing – reevaluating, streamlining, and updating the curriculum for their writing courses and getting an ambitious, directed self-placement program underway. So no more “remedial” courses at SJSU. Rather, students choose to enroll in one or two semesters of writing (this is a “stretch” course that students can place themselves into). Then they will take a second-year course (English 1B) on critical writing, a course that may be taught from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Richard McNabb, who heads up the composition program, Tom Moriarty, who is in charge of Writing across the Curriculum, and Cindy Baer, who coordinates the “stretch program,” are all excited about the possibilities for students taking on more agency, more responsibility for their own learning and about the changes they are making to their curricula.  And they, wisely, plan to follow the students carefully, monitoring the progress of those who elect one course and those who elect two. By this time next year, they hope to have a rich data set to share and to compare. SJSU is also, wisely, working with the two-year and other colleges in the area that send students to them. In fact, the day I visited there were teachers from five area schools, all sharing information and eager to learn about what SJSU is doing. So if their work with the revised curriculum and directed self-placement is successful, it will surely have a ripple effect on other schools. I’m wondering what other schools have similar programs, especially since directed self-placement has been around for quite a long time and research supports its efficacy, if implemented carefully and well. In the meantime, I’m impressed with colleagues and students at San Jose State. ... View more

As pioneers of the analysis of popular culture, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno don't pull very much weight these days, especially among the followers of such writers as Dick Hebdige, Simon Frith, and Stuart Hall, who, one way or another, have embraced a "populist" approach to cultural studies, characterized by the conviction that, rather than being a top-down mode of social control, popular culture is actually a site for working-class "resistance" and "subversion."  But if certain contemporary events can be trusted, it appears that while the populists are right about the subversive potential of pop culture, that subversion can be startlingly reactionary rather than revolutionary.  Because in the curious march of Donald Trump towards the Republican nomination for the presidency, we can see how the uses of popular culture can lean to the right just as much as they can to the left.  Let me explain. As I have been saying for many years in Signs of Life in the U.S.A., America today is an entertainment culture—that is, a society in which the old lines between high culture and low, work and play, the "serious" and the "non-serious," have been blurred, or even abolished.  In an entertainment culture, everything is expected to be entertaining, and while this has been the case for quite some time in American politics, the rise of Donald Trump signals its full coming of age. One could say, of course, that Trump's RTV-style candidacy was anticipated by the cheerleader's campaign of Sarah Palin.  And before Palin there were Reagan and Schwarzenegger.  But the real foundation for the Trump campaign lies in the legacy of such call-in radio and television talk show hosts as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.  A volatile synthesis of talk radio (there's an element of Howard Stern in the mix too) and shock-schlock TV (think Jerry Springer), Trump's candidacy has been expressing the frustrations and anger of working and lower-middle-class Americans who feel left out of the conversation.  Giving them a voice, Trump has created the apparently oxymoronic spectacle of a multi-billionaire carrying the banner of a populist revolt. In such circumstances, I would hardly be surprised if the Donald—in an effort to shore up his support among evangelical Christians—were to choose Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty as his running mate.  And why not?  For when politics and pop culture have become one and the same, what should be surprising about a Donald/Duck administration? ... View more

Recently, I’ve been leading a month-long discussion on Stanford’s Book Salon, an online group started by the late great Diane Middlebrook. Diane was the noted biographer of Anne Sexton and Ted Hughes as well as of Billy Tipton (The Double Life of Billy Tipton chronicles the life of the jazz pianist who, for over 50 years, “passed” as a man—check it out!).   Diane was also a brilliant and supportive colleague and teacher; students literally lined up to get into her seminars. And she was a big fan of memoir. I’ve now hosted two of these salons, and each one has given me a chance to remember Diane and also to engage participants in reading and exploring graphic memoirs. The one we are currently working on is Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?   That’s Chast on the right, facing her parents, George and Elizabeth, to whom the book is dedicated, as they insist that they will talk only about “pleasant” things, among which are not death and plans for their very late years.   I find that graphic narratives work extremely well for memoir: the combination of words and images allow Chast to speak in her own voice and, through speech bubbles, allow her parents to speak for themselves; her drawings of them etch them firmly in readers’ minds. Especially haunting is the series of sketches of her mother that Chast drew during the last day of her mother’s life. No words needed there.   What has struck a chord with the people participating in the book salon is Chast’s unblinking honesty in describing her parents’ long decline and the part she played in their lives. An only child, Chast got more support/empathy from her father than her mother, who was the one IN CHARGE of the family in just about every way. Chast seems a lonely child, one left alone every day after school and often ignored, especially by her mother. When she married and moved away, Chast didn’t visit her “deep” Brooklyn home much, but that changed when her parents reached their late 80s and 90s and obviously needed help – though they would never admit it. As Chast describes it, they were “a unit,” timeless and everlasting, without a need for any other person at all.   Chast perseveres, however, though she hates doing it and hates not doing it: and that is the dilemma readers react very powerfully to. Many have found themselves in similar situations with aging parents: it’s not easy and it’s not pretty, yet children want and need to do what they can, while loathing many aspects of the work. Chast brilliantly captures the tensions, contradictions, and ambivalences in her own encounter with her parents’ last years.   She also manages to capture the absurdness of aging often in hilarious ways. Her father, moving slowly into dementia, moves in with Chast while his wife is in the hospital—and he becomes obsessed with a bunch of bankbooks back in his apartment (most of them acquired on a special “deal” that, for depositing $100, gets George and Elizabeth a “prize” of some kind—a toaster, blender, etc.). Convinced that evildoers are trying to break in and steal the bankbooks, he talks endlessly of them as if they are themselves survivors of some dreadful ordeal.   I have taught graphic memoirs since shortly after Art Spiegelman’s Maus won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 and I realized that I should be paying a lot more attention to comix, as he termed it. I’ve never had a student who was not moved by Maus: in the early days, when they had never heard of the book, some were dismayed that the Holocaust was the subject of a comic book. As soon as they entered the world of the narrative, however, they were captivated: over the years, a number of students told me they had disliked history until they read that book. I also loved teaching Lynda Barry’s One! Hundred! Demons!, a coming of age memoir, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Are You My Mother? And of course there are so many others: Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese; Belle Yang’s Forget Sorrow; GB Tran’s Vietnamerica—I could truly go on and on.   But I do not teach these works in literature classes—but in writing classes. I have found that college-age students are drawn to memoir and that the image/word combination resonates especially strongly with them. So we analyze the panels and gutters, studying how they carry the story forward silently, and we look at the structure of the entire work and imagine “translating” it into a research-based essay or another genre, looking at the rhetorical strategies at work in each version. Inevitably, we do some drawing too (I am the worst in the room at this!), and several students have gone on to create graphic memoirs of their own and to publish them online.   What I absolutely love about all the possibilities open to writers today is the freedom it offers students as they literally write/draw themselves into being. College is a time of self-representation, of identity-creation, of learning about who you are. To me, graphic narratives in general and graphic memoirs in particular make a perfect vehicle for exploring these questions. ... View more