In this series of posts (see also Teaching the Election: Intro and Teaching the Election: Appiah) I’m talking about how to teach the election without promoting a single political point of view or allowing students to get stubbornly stuck in us vs. them political positions. Another great reading to help with that is Gilbert. Daniel Gilbert, in “Reporting Live from Tomorrow,” looks at how truly awful our imaginations are at predicting our future happiness. And really that’s what any election is all about: which candidate will lead in a way that offers me the most happiness for the next four years? Answering that kind of question, Gilbert shows, is anything but easy. Unless you use surrogates. For Gilbert, surrogates are people who are living an experience you hope to have. For example, if you want to find out if you’re really going to be happy as a doctor, then you should talk to someone who is a doctor. I think you could have students explore this concept, and its limitations, in relation to the election. What kind of surrogates might we locate to help make our voting decision? Of course, Gilbert also points out that people are loathe to use surrogates, believing that they are so special that in no way could someone else’s experience predict their own future happiness. That’s something for students to explore as well, considering the challenges to using surrogates in election decisions and life more generally. Critical thinking often lies, I believe, in complication. Thinking about future happiness in the context of the presidential election is a wonderful way for students to work on complicating Gilbert’s ideas. In the process, not only will they become more adept at working with ideas in general but perhaps they will, if nothing else, examine their own thinking processes in relation to their political choices. 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

Other creative writing teachers may be surprised how much time the typical playwriting class spends in the act of reading aloud. In my classes, students rarely if ever take their classmates’ scripts home to read silently.  Since plays are meant to be performed, writers learn a great deal more by hearing how their words function in the mouths of actors.  While, in an ideal world, readings would be rehearsed and conducted by trained performers, in reality most readings in a beginning playwriting class will be unrehearsed—“cold” readings—with members of the class.  Though imperfect, these early performances still stand to teach a lot—at least, insofar as they remind beginning writers that words are tied to and derive their significance from performance. Unfortunately, many instructors do not spend time on the skills of out-loud reading, sometimes called “oral interpretation.”  To help facilitate cold readings, instructors should discuss the reading as a form itself, as a type of performance.  By providing guidelines on author and actor preparation, the instructor can ensure a more valuable experience for all.  First, playwrights should prepare their scripts for easy reading. They should familiarize themselves with current playwriting format.  They should pay careful attention to stage directions.  While in rehearsed, fully-staged theatrical productions, all stage directions are performed; in a reading, though, they must be read by a narrator figure.  I suggest that writers take care to determine which directions must be read aloud and which directions can be suggested by the actor.  For example, “Pause” and “Sadly” can be acted.  In contrast, a stage direction like, “He walks in dressed like a bird,” should be read aloud or the audience may not understand.  As another example, if one character suddenly and quietly kills another, the audience may be confused unless that stage direction is read aloud. In their book Scriptwork, David Kahn and Donna Breed lay out guidelines for actors in an unrehearsed reading.  From my classroom experience, my best advice boils down to urging actors to refrain from making bold choices.  For example, I have occasionally heard an actor read a character a certain way—for example, as very lazy or as having a British accent—only to learn as the reading progresses that that interpretation is wrong, leaving the audience confused.  It is far better to read lines tentatively, without undue emphasis on how the speeches fit together.  In other words, at a cold reading, it is the playwright’s job to build a character, not the actor’s.  The actor’s job, then, is simply to express what is present on the page.  In a fuller production, the actor adds details and fleshes out the character; in a cold reading, to avoid an uninformed and incorrect interpretation, the performer should aim simply to neither to add nor detract. The skills of the reading are different from the skills of production.  But, if considered and thought out, they can yield a positive experience for all. ... View more

There’s been a very interesting thread on the WPA listserv about feedback recently. All the posts have been very thoughtful:  some argued that too much negative feedback is not helpful to students; others said that we live in an age when “the student is never wrong” and are afraid to give tough criticism.  Jerry Nelms reminded everyone that neither positive nor negative feedback can be helpful if students don’t understand it or have a chance to respond to it.  Maja Wilson quoted Peter Elbow to illustrate the kind of exploratory response she finds effective:  This discussion got me thinking about my own research on teacher feedback (or response).  In the 1980s, Bob Connors and I assembled a large random sample of first-year student writing and wrote a series of articles based on our analysis. One of them was on teacher response, and what we found was a clear preponderance of negative commentary, some of it well meaning, some of it downright mean spirited.  (See “Teachers’ Rhetorical Comments on Student Papers.” College Composition and Communication. 44.2 (May 1993): 200-223.)  Over 20 years later, Karen Lunsford and I attempted to replicate the study Bob and I did, and while we focused on an analysis of formal errors in the large sample of writing we gathered, we also took a close look at teacher feedback. Once again, we noted a great deal of negative commentary, though we were glad not to find the ad hominem slash and burn comments I had seen in the 80s.  (We wrote about this study in “'Mistakes are a fact of life': A national comparative study.”  College Composition and Communication. 44.2 (May 1993): 200-223.) Over the decades, I’ve experimented with all kinds of response:  for a while I was so worried about intruding on students’ texts that I wrote all my comments on post-it notes.  I’ve taped my oral feedback, used email for extensive commentary, and talked with students about what seems most helpful to them. Eventually, I found that what seemed to work best for me and my students was for me to give my most extensive response on drafts:  this I provide in a running commentary on the draft, noting what is working well, what I don’t understand, what questions I have, what I might suggest for the next go round.  Such responses are in writing—but they are a prelude first, to the student’s response to my comments, given to me in the form of a memo, and second, to a conference where the student and I focus together on the draft and simply talk through the ideas in it and brainstorm about what to try for in the next draft (which is often the final one).  This mixture of writing and talking leaves a lot of leeway for the student and allows for, I hope, frank interchange, ideally the kind of “dialogic interaction” that students in the Stanford Study of Writing identified as moments when they learned the most.  As always, I benefit from reading the postings on WPA and think back to how often that group has been of tremendous importance to me and my students—and to our field.  I wonder if any of you read this thread and, if so, what your responses were, and what mode of feedback seems most effective to you. [Photo via: Marcin Bajer, on Flickr] ... View more

As students were working on a Narrative Branding Remix assignment recently, I asked small groups to review example videos and compile a list of strengths and weaknesses. The group discussion strategy wasn’t groundbreaking. What was new for me was the technique I used to ask groups to report on their findings. Most often I ask students to simply choose someone to be the presenter, and that person summarizes the group’s observations. I usually ask each group to email me the notes with their names so that I can compile the ideas into a single document and share the notes with the entire class. That process meant extra work for me, however, and often delayed getting the notes to students who were absent or needed a notetaker. I began trying ways for students to gather their ideas into one document themselves, so that they would all have immediate access to the notes. We tried using Padlet, which I have used for class brainstorming (see Using Padlet for Class Brainstorming), but it was too distracting to have the different groups all on the same screen. Further, screen space became an issue, since the class was limited to one screen. I switched to asking groups to write their notes in a shared Google Doc. We then read and scrolled through the Doc as groups shared their observations. The shared Google Doc solved the problem with everyone writing on the same screen, but it introduced difficulties with scrolling and formatting. Even when I added a linked table of contents, groups had problems finding the right section of the document for their notes. If they wrote extensively, one group might end up creeping into another group’s page. Last, when groups turned to present their findings, I had to attempt to quickly reformat the entire document to make the text large enough to read on the screen. The process was better, but still not ideal. When it came time for the class discussion of example videos last month, I was reluctantly preparing to set up Google Docs for the groups to use when inspiration struck. Suddenly it occurred to me that I was using the wrong Google tool. Students were going to present their observations, so I should be using presentation software, not word processor software. I created a Google Slides file with a slide for each example video and placeholders for students to fill in, like this example: I was nervous when I introduced the idea to the class the next morning, but I worked to convince myself that the students in my classes all had the experience to make it work. They knew how to use slide presentations, and they had worked in collaborative Google Docs earlier in the term. I was just asking them to combine skills they already had. I told students that it might sound crazy, but we were going to give it a try. Happily, I can report that it was a grand success. Here are their slideshows: 10:10 class Branding Video Tips 11:15 class Branding Video Tips 01:25 class Branding Video Tips Once the groups finished gathering their ideas, I projected the slideshow and groups reported their observations while I clicked through the slides with the remote. It was easy to focus on each video as the groups analyzed them. I was free to move around the classroom, instead of being tied to the teacher workstation to scroll the Google Doc. The slide format helped students write more concise comments than they had with Google Docs. There was one significant change that I need to make. I had numbered the example videos (from 1 to 10), but I had included a title slide in the Google Slide files. That meant that Example Video #1 corresponded to slide #2, Example Video #2 corresponded to slide #3, and so forth. There was a bit of confusion, with some students ending up on the same slide. It was easy enough to sort out, but I could have avoided it by listing the slide numbers rather than simply numbering the list. I will know better next time—and I will definitely be using this technique again! Have you used collaborative composing in your writing classes? Do you have strategies that work or success stories to share? Please share your thoughts by leaving a comment below. [Top Photo Credit: Cropped from Duke Ellington DNG 349, by US Department of Education on Flickr, used under CC-SA-BY 2.0 license] ... View more

This entry was originally posted on December 9, 2014 on the Bits Blog. What you see in the photo on the right is the Logitech Professional Presenter R800 with Green Laser Pointer, one of the best purchases I have ever made for the classroom. Last spring, one of the students in my technical writing class had a remote like this Logitech Presenter, which his group used as they made their presentation. It seemed like an  awkward “pass the conch” game, as group members passed the remote back and forth to give their portion of the presentation, but it was better than all of them shuffling around at the keyboard. Seeing the tool in action, I realized that I needed a similar remote for  my Writing and Digital Media class. In that class, students give two individual presentations. Because of the classroom’s configuration, I open the presentations on the teacher’s workstation so that they can be displayed on the large screen. As they present, students, who stand on the other side of the room, call out, “Next slide please” to let me know when to advance the slideshow. It wasn’t the best set-up, but it worked. This fall, I forgot about ordering a remote on time, so my Writing and Digital Media students did their first presentations using that “next slide please” method. When sign-up time came for their second presentations, I ordered the remote and tried it out in the classroom while they were doing peer review on their projects. I hadn’t planned on experimenting on students, but as it turned out, I had seen them all do their first presentations without the remote, and I am now seeing them all present with it—and I cannot believe the difference that having the right technological gizmo has made in their presentations. With control over the progression of slides, students move fluidly from point to point in their presentations. There are no awkward pauses, when they are waiting for me to realize I need to advance the slide. Their transitions are smooth, and  students have been far more polished than they were during their first presentation. Even better, because I am no longer distracted by watching them for cues to advance the slides, I have been able to pay better attention to their presentations and take better notes on what they were doing. At $70, the remote was a pricey personal investment, but students have been so much better during their second presentations, that I’m glad I spent my money on it. It reminded me how important it is to make sure students have the right tools, instead of just trying to make do with what’s available, what’s cheap, or what’s free. Have you found something that completely changed students’ performance? Do you know of a piece of software or hardware that makes a difference? Tell me more by leaving  a comment below. ... View more

Since the fall, I’ve visited several colleges and universities to review writing programs and their curricula, and I’ve had a chance to see many outstanding course descriptions, syllabi, and related materials. The teachers and administrators I’ve spoken with were all thoughtful, engaged, and committed to students and to student writing. They had worked hard to craft assignments and choose texts that students could enjoy, as well as learn from. But in looking at syllabi, one thing in particular leapt out at me: while all these programs listed a handbook as one of the class texts, that’s about as far as it went. Nowhere did I see a handbook even mentioned in daily class work, much less fully integrated into the course. Now maybe I’m touchy since I’ve written some handbooks myself. And maybe teachers are using their handbook in class but not showing it on the syllabus (I didn’t ask teachers about this issue, though perhaps I should). At any rate, I expect that more often than not, the handbook is assigned—but not taught. If this is the case, it’s no wonder students complain about textbook costs: they don’t want to spend money on a book they never use. I wonder if others have encountered this situation or have thoughts about it. In my experience (50 years of it now!), I need not only to introduce my students to a handbook, working through front matter and previewing in detail the parts of the book and how to use them, but also to work with the handbook in class, modeling for students how it can serve as a support for all their writing. I’ve written earlier about a series of interviews I did with first-year writers across the country about a year ago, interviews in which a number of students said, for example, that they didn’t know where the index was or what to use it for. So I remind myself frequently that my students don’t know what I take for granted—like where to find an index. In fact, I try not to take much of anything for granted, remembering what I felt like as a bewildered first-year college student trying to learn the ropes of academic discourse. And that means that I look for ways to get students into a handbook and to use it in class. Here are just a couple activities that have worked for me: 1. I introduce my students to our handbook on the first or second day of class and walk them through it so they will begin to be familiar and “easy” with it. I try hard to engage students by asking them to work in pairs or small groups with their handbook to answer questions like these (and I like to give a little prize of some kind for the group who finds the information most quickly and successfully): Where do I find information on using italics for emphasis? How do I cite a TV program using MLA style? How do I use quotation marks with poetry? Where can I find advice on working collaboratively? Should I say “compare to” or “compare with”? How can I find help in moving from a topic to a thesis? 2. I hold “tools of the trade” days, and include them in my syllabus: 15 minutes once a week (or more if it feels necessary) when students bring in every question they have about grammar, usage, punctuation, or any other aspect of writing. No question is too small or too “dumb.” They also bring questions they have about a particular choice they need to make in a draft they’re working on. Then we break into groups to answer the questions, documenting just how we have come up with tentative answers. Finally, we share information and discuss what we’ve learned. 3. I teach writing and research processes with the handbook, and we all have our handbooks ready at hand during every revising and peer reviewing workshop. Of course, any textbook is only as useful to our students as we make it, but that seems to me to go double for handbooks. We have to use it—or they will lose it! [Photo credit: Lendingmemo on Flickr] ... View more

Good writing begins with good planning. I like to formalize planning with a required document—a project plan. You might do something similar. For a researched argument, I’ll have individual students complete a worksheet I call “Nutshell Your Argument.” In this one-page document, students identify the topic, the thesis, the audience, the main lines of argument, the counterarguments, and the sources of evidence. The assignment helps students get a fix on just what they are going to accomplish. They must consider the difference between topic (or subject) vs. thesis (or argumentative stance or purpose). They develop ways of thinking and talking about “lines of argument”—what that means and how to apply such thinking to their writing. They think about intended audience and the counterarguments an audience member might launch. The nutshell provides me with an early check on assumptions about source requirements, allowing me to guide students toward academically respectable source material, and gives me a chance to intervene early in the assignment process. When we have time, each student briefs the class on his or her nutshell, offering a chance to clarify thinking through oral presentation and Q/A. I keep the presentation low stakes—everyone who does it gets credit. With team assignments, I ask for something similar—a team project plan that presents the following: Problem statement: what issues are being addressed or what problem is being solved Significance or importance of project Team information: contact information and team roles Team rules or work expectations Task breakdown Schedule of work (typically as a chart or table) with project milestones Anticipated hours to be spent on project (budget) Cost (hours x hourly rates) Writing a team plan accomplishes a number of goals. It forces teams to plan ahead and start to formulate individual commitments to team goals. It helps them think through how successful teams reach shared goals. It clarifies the anticipated outcomes and scopes the work to be accomplished. It ensures students know how to contact each other and helps them think about who will do what. It also underscores the adage “Time is money.” Students consider what the project is worth and what time they are willing to commit over the course of the project. The team plan also works really well as a document design project. I ask students to use headings and to tag those headings, paragraphs or other elements in the style sheet. I encourage a visual presentation, with sections presented in tables or charts. I show students (in a mini-lesson) how to set up a document template, select or create styles, and format headers and footers. These are skills every writer needs. We post our plans to our discussion board so teams can see what other teams are up to and can “borrow” good ideas or design elements. A formal plan can be updated for major projects in the form of a progress report. That allows teams to think through the difference between a prospective plan and a progress report, considering what to reuse and what new information should be added. The repurposed document can later be used as the backbone of the final report or an oral presentation. The final document can also chart the hours spent on the project and compare cost estimates to actuals. We often think of planning and invention as synonymous. But a conceptual move from planning as gathering ideas to planning as project management will equip students with a valuable toolset and encourage them to see writing as a way to manage various activities, either individually or as a team member. 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 want to report this week on the documentation classroom activity that I proposed last week to help students understand how to cite the various resources that they include in multimodal projects, like videos and audio recordings (see Documentation Troubles, or Can I Just Link to It?). I was particularly interested in helping them learn how documentation works in situations where MLA bibliographic form isn't appropriate. Let’s say that it’s been educational. I introduced the project as I described it last week. I talked about fair use and creative commons, and we reviewed the Best Practices for Attribution from Creative Commons page. I thought that would give students enough context. I shared this list of resources to evaluate, without the details I have added on why I chose them: Photo of a Winter Bee (public domain) Cartoon on Duck and Cover (public domain) Photo of a SuperCat (CC BY 2.0) Audio of Birds (CC0 1.0) Wikipedia article on The Undertaker (CC BY SA 3.0) The 1932 film of A Farewell to Arms (copyright not renewed, public domain) The book Writer/Designer (copyrighted) Sound effect of creepy music (Royalty Free) Video of The New Day entrance (copyrighted, embeddable via YouTube) Article on National Poetry Month (copyrighted, audio embeddable) I assigned groups the resources and asked them to send me their work at the end of the class. When I checked their work, I found that I didn't begin to give them enough help. Every one that I opened was incomplete or inaccurate. So I redesigned the activity and tried again. In the next class session, I explained that there had been problems and that I was going to demonstrate the process. I have three sections, so I selected three images by Dorothea Lange that are available on the Library of Congress site: Along the highway near Bakersfield, California. Dust bowl refugees & Google Doc Motherless migrant children. They work in the cotton & Google Doc Negro field worker. Holtville, Imperial Valley, California. & Google Doc I used a think-aloud protocol to explain exactly how I would complete the citation activity if I were a student, creating the Google Docs that are linked above in the process. My think-aloud even revealed the shortcuts I could take, like copying the entire series of citations from the Best Practices for Attribution from Creative Commons page and then replacing the information with the details for the photos that I was working with. I added the modified and derivative photos to the documents later, to help make the example more relevant in the future. Students were not required to create modified or derivative examples (though some surprised me and did so anyway). I extended the activity by creating examples of citations for other media. The Best Practices page seems best suited for text-heavy publications, like webpages or blog posts. I created another Google Doc that demonstrated how to cite one of the Lange photos in a video or PowerPoint and how to use the Birds in Aviary sound effect in an audio recording. For citation of the Lange photo in the end credits of a video, for instance, I demonstrated how to create this citation, following similar music credits on p. 74 of Writer/Designer: Along the highway near Bakersfield, California. Dust bowl refugees Photographed by Dorothea Lange Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Online Catalog Licensed under Public Domain After talking about how and why the citations changed for different uses and genres, students practiced by adding citations for other genres to their best practices pages. I spot-checked their work in the classroom, and they seem to finally get it. I won’t know for sure, however, until I see their next project. I’m hopeful! How do you teach students about documenting multimodal resources in their projects? I would love to hear more ideas and activities, so please leave me a comment below with your suggestions. I look forward to hearing from you. [Photo: "Along the highway near Bakersfield, California. Dust bowl refugees" by Dorothea Lange, photographer, is under Public Domain.] ... View more

Blogging started for me with the desire to enter our vast digital public square for conversation. As a writing teacher, I love watching my students’ fearlessness as bloggers. They understand the blogosphere as an open, experimental space, where they can self-publish, posting their passions and opinions.  As a writer, I wanted to experiment with new subjects, improvise with new forms, and write to the world to see what the world has to say back. When given the chance to blog for Huffington Post’s lifestyle page—“Life Begins at Fifty”—I started, tentatively, writing more of a 600-word exploratory essay than a blog.  And, mostly, I got blogging wrong, in that first post, by violating the first principle of composition—know your audience! But I was immediately hooked—hooked on the freedom of the form and the opportunity to test and try out ideas. My subject, in that first blog, was choosing a name for myself as a grandmother. It turns out, in the world of grandmothers, you get to choose an affectionate name for yourself, a name like a stuffed animal with comforting sounds—Granny or Gammy, Bubbe or Omi—names that didn’t fit comfortably when I tried them on.  As I started thinking about the subject, it occurred to me that my knowledge about grandmothers comes less from my memories as a granddaughter and more from the decades of reading students’ essays about their grandmothers. I wrote the blog in the familiar voice of a composition teacher who loves reading students’ essays about their storybook grandmothers handing down family history while standing at the stove.  And I wrote to an audience I know—my fellow composition teachers—who have also read hundreds of grandmother essays and understand why students don’t easily revise essays about grandmothers: grandmothers aren’t a venue for critical thinking.  What I didn’t do is to write to Huffington Post’s lifestyle audience or shape the purpose of the blog to meet audience expectations.  It would take further experimentation to learn how to write to the thousands of anonymous readers on the other side of the screen. Since that first post, I’ve blogged about a range of topics— family and food, birth and death, exercise and health. What I’ve learned is that successful blogs convey one point, a single idea clearly, concisely; they do not begin mid-conversation, as essays often do. They are ephemeral, intended to be read in a minute or two, and to vanish from the Huffington Post within a day or two.  And to be successful, they need to create a role for the audience to participate in the blog—whether as a reader who likes and links it, giving it thumbs up, and passing it forward to friends, or a more basic, human role to converse with a writer whose voice and sensibility are simpatico.  Without an active role for readers, there is no conversation around a blog. Readers move on. Yet something quite wonderful happens for a writer in those few moments when a blog is most alive.  That something, it seems to me, is the essence of why I write. It is the pleasure of finding an audience who will run with my words, add their own, amplify and expand my story.  Blog readers want to participate in this public, collective, conversational form of writing. And as a writer, I want to create roles for them to participate. At CCCC, on April 8 th , 2 PM, I will be talking about blogging  and what I’ve learned as a writer from the freedom of the form and the pleasures of writing for a new audience.  I look forward to seeing you in Houston! ... View more

Earlier in my career my teaching assignments, which were primarily introductory composition courses, had me working with students who elected any major other than English. These days I more often teach students who have chosen to major in English, but even so I regularly have students in my courses who would really rather not have to write about literature. They’ve been attracted to the English major because they love creative writing or love reading, but not writing, or are frankly not entirely sure why they’ve found themselves in this pursuit. I’ve thus always had to make a case for why writing about literature is valuable to students. I first tried a very common approach—the “reading literature makes us better people” approach—and found it as inspiring as any “take your vitamins” persuasive speech. This may be because I am no Robin Williams in Dead Poets’ Society, but it also might be because while on some levels I believed what I was saying, on other levels I did not. I do truly believe that the patient unpacking of literary texts plays a role in our leading thoughtful, reflective and even ethical lives. Interpreting literature often involves exploring how we should live in complex circumstances or understanding how our culture came to shape our identities. Doing this in ways that respect texts and their writers requires an ethical attention to detail and a willingness to truly listen and consider possibly layered and simultaneously conflicting understandings of what a text means. All that said, understanding how literary study affects our values is such a complex terrain that we would be wise to tread cautiously in making quick claims about a one-semester course contributing to the shaping of all students’ belief systems. I am also too aware of the fact that throughout history a liberal arts education that has placed literary study at its center has surely yielded some of humankind’s greatest thinkers, but also some of humankind’s most despicable despots. It isn’t so easy to say that simply studying literature makes us better people. The approach I have found more persuasive, both to myself and to my students, is to work on honestly revealing how the enterprise of writing about literature is a “real world” practice, not only or merely a classroom practice. To understand this “real world” practice means we have to explore how literary analysis is both a task and a genre owned and used by literary scholars. The MLA, for instance, is not merely a citation style, but an actual association filled with people who deliberate, share ideas, have some common goals and, yes, develop and constantly revise some conventions for doing things like crediting the texts they use. It means we draw on the idea of a “discourse community” from rhetoric and composition in order to see that the writing we engage in and the tools we use to interpret have very human histories to them. Newcomers—students—need to learn these ways, tools, and genres in order to participate in such a community or risk unintentionally flouting convention, offending, or misunderstanding the enterprise they are engaged in. Taking this sort of anthropological approach to seeing our work as quite consciously entering a new community has obvious “buy in” with students who readily wish to enter this community and become literary scholars. But again, I know few such students. What is more interesting is considering how this approach works with students who have no intention of going on to become literary scholars themselves. While they may not wish to enter permanently the discourse community of literary scholars, they do wish to enter other professional discourse communities, and they do have past experiences with joining and learning to navigate other discourse communities. Helping them see that what we are doing is no different allows them to draw from these past experiences, to clarify for themselves what they learned from them, and to train their vision for what to pay attention to in order to successfully navigate the communities they wish to join later. While the genres, conventions, tools, and ways may differ from community to community, the rhetorical savvy needed to analyze the new situations and draw upon this analysis to make successful contributions is not. What I most like about this approach is that it reframes the sometimes frustratingly difficult experiences of learning to write about literature. Instead of interpreting this frustration and difficulty as a sign of failure or lack of intelligence, we can interpret it as a normal part of the process of learning the ways of an unfamiliar yet long-established community. I encounter this frustration myself when I am called upon to write in an unfamiliar genre for audiences my usual reading and writing habits have taught me little about—things like grant proposals or obituaries. When I see the difficulty as one that’s normal, and that I can overcome with some research and help from discourse community “insiders,” I am less demoralized and more motivated to tackle the challenge. I’ve seen this in my students as well. Suddenly they see “real world” reasons for some of the otherwise seemingly nonsensical conventions of writing about literature (present tense verbs, anyone? No plot summary allowed?). The professionalism of our whole enterprise increases even as it remains fun. We playfully explore many possible meanings of texts while also engaging in a rigorous seriousness as we genuinely try to motivate members of this discourse community to accept still further interpretations. This mixture of play and professionalism prepares students for other “real world” writing contexts for which writers have to offer novel contributions that their audiences will take seriously. So if literary study does make them better people, they’ll be better equipped to share that wisdom with others. ... View more

The balance of powers among the three branches of the federal government has been one of the foundations of American politics from the beginning. The fact that members of the Supreme Court serve for life largely removes the threat that they will be unduly influenced by a single sitting president. Congress writes the laws that the Court must uphold; the president holds over Congress the power of the veto. The choice of a Supreme Court justice is always controversial. Replacing Antonin Scalia has been even more so because of the timing. Obama has now announced his choice for Scalia’s replacement. Even before he did so, however, Republicans in Congress had decided not to approve him. How does this work as an argument? There is a claim of policy on each side of the argument: President Obama, of course, is arguing that, because of his qualifications, Merrick Garland should be appointed a justice of the Supreme Court. The Republican leadership made clear early on that their claim would not be based on qualifications. That claim: No individual nominated by President Obama should be considered for appointment as Scalia’s replacement.  According to the Constitution, the president "shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint . . . Judges of the Supreme Court." The relevant article of the Constitution says nothing about the time frame. However, according to Michael Gerhardt, a professor in constitutional law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, "not a single president has ever refused to make a nomination to fill a Supreme Court vacancy, regardless of its timing. No president has ever abdicated this authority, not even when they were lame ducks. In fact, six lame-duck presidents have made six Supreme Court appointments." A case like this one can give students a chance to analyze the support on each side of a controversy. President Obama, in this instance, has an easier case to prove. He has proceeded with the nomination process as he would have at any other point in his presidency and has presented for consideration a candidate whose credentials he believes warrant the appointment. Republicans who do not want to consider any candidate nominated by Obama have a more difficult case to support because they are essentially arguing that the normal procedure for appointing a Supreme Court justice should not be followed in this case. To accept that argument, one has to be willing to accept their reasons. There are a number of reasons they do not want to support an Obama nominee. Your students can easily come up with these: They do not want another liberal on the Supreme Court. To add a liberal judge will give liberals on the court a 5-4 advantage in making decisions. They want the next president to nominate Scalia’s replacement, and they hope the next president is a Republican. None of these is support for not considering an Obama nominee. The Republican leadership undermined their argument when they very vocally declared an unwillingness to even consider an Obama nominee. Had they instead quietly refused to approve Garland—or anyone else—it would have been impossible to prove that they were acting on anything other than the nominee’s credentials. When they started saying no to Obama’s nominee before that nominee was named, they opened themselves up to charges of partisanship. ​[Photo source: David on Flikr] ... View more

On May 5, America is going to get entangled in another civil war. Well, to be precise, Captain America is, along with Iron Man, Black Widow, Black Panther, and a lot of other Marvel superheroes in the latest installment of the never-ending Avengers saga. Captain America: Civil War, the thing is called, soon to be in a theater near you. Not to be outdone in the civil war department, the DC franchise is set to release something called Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice the day after this blog is scheduled to appear. And while this movie is not explicitly identified as a civil war per se, what else are we to call something that pits America’s original superheroes (Superman, b. 1938; Batman, b. 1939) against each other in violent conflict? Both movies are sequels to previous films, carrying on story lines that began years before their up coming release dates, with the Avengers flick in particular picking up a comic book conflict from 2006. But I still find it significant that they are appearing now, as America continues its ever-more-alarming spiral down a rabbit hole of red state/blue state divisiveness, Fox News/Comedy Central shootouts, Tea Party rebellions, government shutdowns, rancher uprisings, and, most recently, a presidential campaign free for all in which it appears that everybody is against everybody. Which is to say, that at a time when America’s great divide has suddenly widened to Grand Canyon proportions, it is not surprising to see the superhero syndicates jumping on board. What an opportunity! Not only do you get a guaranteed box office but you can leverage an already boiling-over cauldron of political passions into a frenzied demand to see cinematic justice done against those miscreants who just don’t seem to see things your way. If you think it is too far fetched to see civil war allegories in a movie called Captain America: Civil War, just consider the premise of the thing: Captain America and his allies go to war against Iron Man and his allies, over the matter of government regulation. If that’s not enough to trigger obvious ideological associations, there’s the fact that Captain America’s entire shtick is to be a poster child for old fashioned, corn-fed American patriotism, while Iron Man’s deal is to be a sophisticated urban industrialist. Something very similar is going on when that small town farm boy who fights for “truth, justice, and the American way” goes after a slick urban financier with a bat fetish. I mean, they could have cast these things with nothing but elephants and donkeys. The whole thing is like those professional wrestling theatricals, where the bad boys of the day stand for whatever is bugging the core audience, while a muscle-bound good guy fights for the right. Of course neither movie, I gather, is going to take us all the way to Appomattox, because in films like this there is always someone worse in the room (or universe), who poses such a colossal threat to the fatherland that the heroes suspend their spat and start pulling together to defeat the larger menace. But reality, unfortunately, is a whole lot messier than that. If, fifteen years ago, al Qaida managed, albeit briefly, to pull America together, ISIS isn’t doing that at all this time around. Americans continue to face off against Americans in ever more non-negotiable combinations, and while the movies can make that sort of thing entertaining, they sure as shooting can’t bring it to an end.   [Photo via: Election 2016 by DonkeyHotey, from Flickr] ... View more

What does it mean to think? And how do you know you’re doing it? Let’s consider the question in three different scenarios: listening to a lecture; driving; writing a college essay. Is thought necessary in any of these scenarios?  When I discuss these questions with my students, a consensus emerges that the mental activity in the three scenarios differs. In a lecture, one is passive, receiving the auditory data and processing it as best one can. Behind the wheel, the monitoring of the inbound data requires constant attention, so that one can react as the unfolding situations demand.  While thinking is possible in each situation, it is also possible to do each without actively making decisions. This is clearly the case with listening, as one can’t stop the sounds from entering one’s ears, but one need not attend to them. And, while it may seem that driving is of a different order altogether, the inability to recall huge chunks of a long drive suggests that, whatever mental activity turning the steering wheel and hitting the brakes requires, the vast majority of the experience is defined by routine. So routine, in fact, that drivers feel they can drive and text, drive and carry on phone conversations, drive and shave, etc. Writing seems a different beast, doesn’t it? When my students tell me that writing requires a different kind of thinking, I’m skeptical. With twenty-five years’ experience reading and responding to student work, I have plenty of evidence to the contrary. Sure, you can’t write while shaving, but it sure seems like I receive a lot of writing that has been completed while watching streaming video or chatting or skyping. Writing that has emerged during the defining experience of our time: multi-tasking. I press the point and a distinction emerges. Sure, driving involves a multitude of micro-decisions that leave no trace in memory, barring something cataclysmic, but writing seems to require a different kind of mental activity, as is evidenced by the fact that the micro-decisions that result in writing leave behind their traces for us to consider—as words on the screen or scratches on the notepad. We can use those traces to get a glimpse of what is going on in the writer’s mind. In the final scene of Boyhood, Richard Linklater’s loving evocation of the experience of aging, the film’s main character, Mason, is sitting with Nicole, a girl he’s just met on his first day at college. They’ve skipped freshman orientation, ingested some pot brownies, and driven out to Big Bend National Park to watch the sun set. Nicole, leaning towards Mason, asks rhetorically, “You know how everyone’s always saying, ‘Seize the moment’?” Once Mason avers, Nicole says, “I don’t know, I’m kinda thinking it’s the other way around. You know, like the moment seizes us.” In standard Hollywood fare, the scene would end with the two kissing. But, that’s not how the movie ends. Mason agrees: “Yeah. Yeah . . . I know. It’s constant, the moments, it’s just . . . it’s like always right now, you know?” And Nicole says, “Yeah.” Then there’s a few more awkward seconds of silence and the screen goes black. Credits. On the threshold of adulthood, Mason is experiencing time as: now and now and now, ad infinitum. Those who haven’t seen the movie might be tempted to argue, based on the dialogue alone, that Mason is experiencing a version of enlightenment, but there’s nothing in the film to support this reading. Mason hasn’t been on a spiritual journey and he’s an especially thoughtful or remarkable young man. He’s just older than he was when the film started—twelve years older, in fact. His life as a thinking person, if he’s going to have one, lies ahead, on the other side of the rolling credits. I asked students in my 21 st Century Narrative class to reflect on the representation of time in Richard Linklater’s film Boyhood and any of the other texts we’d worked with in the course so far. To a one, the in-class written responses connected Linklater’s film to one of the other texts via the word “and.” This, despite the fact that Boyhood: is the only film we’ve watched in the class so far; was filmed with the same actors over a twelve year period, so as to visibly document the passage of time on screen; and has no sustained narrative action, but rather is a series of vignettes. Somehow, the task of writing obliterated all the differences between Boyhood and the other texts we’ve encountered so far in the course, leaving behind a pile of responses showing that Boyhood and text X were both about time. Is writing of this kind evidence of thought? Instead of grading these responses, I came to class and wrote on the board: Boyhood + text X = time And then I said, “Having said this, what do we know that we didn’t already know?” Not much, the students had to admit. Indeed, since the writing wasn’t going to be graded, we were free to wonder: could text X be any text at all and still support the observation that both were connected “because of time”? As long as the connection is kept at that level of generality, sure. Is this thinking? In its most rudimentary form, yes. Like to like to like, ad infinitum. It’s not the kind of thinking I am interested in, though. I’m looking for thinking that makes connections via distinction, qualification, nuance. I’m looking for thinking that delights in subtleties and complexity. And, although the initial written responses my students handed in didn’t evidence this, they know how to do this kind of thinking. They just don’t have much practice at it. So, I start over.  Is the flow of time in Boyhood like the flow of time in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad? The short stories in George Saunders’ Tenth of December? The second season of Sarah Koenig’s Serial podcast?  Not really. To move beyond this observation, the students need to get into the habit of making connections that qualify and connections that offer alternatives. They need to start using “but” and “or” as the hinges of thought, so that they can move from thinking exclusively through similarity and begin to think through difference. And, as they practice making connections that qualify and that consider alternatives, they will be acquiring the habit of self-reflection—the habit of seeing that the way one first sees the world is not necessarily the only way to see it. ... View more

Guest blogger Kim Lilienthal is an English M.A. candidate at NC State University in the rhetoric and composition concentration. Her research interests include co-curricular writing, reflection assessment, and service learning in composition. Guest blogger Emily Jo Schwaller is an English M.A. candidate at NC State University in the rhetoric and composition concentration. Her research areas include digital reading experiences and communities, feminist literacy, and composition feedback practices. The First-Year Writing (FYW) classroom is an ideal space for community building because of its often smaller class size, student-centered focus, and process-based models of learning. For first-year students, building a community of peers and social support networks is essential to their holistic development at a new university, as “involvement creates connections...that allow individuals to believe in their own personal worth” (Schlossberg, 1989). Kinesthetic activities facilitate this community building and involvement because they require students to work together outside the scope of a traditional classroom environment. Further, kinesthetic activities allow students to engage their bodies and become involved with the knowledge making process because minds and bodies are always linked (Fleckenstein, 1999). In a Writing-in-the-Disciplines (WID) program, it is important to help students see writing as similar to other learning processes (e.g. labs, experiments, conferences). In this blog post, we suggest various ways we engage our students in active learning in order to emphasize WID principles and to reinforce how writing is present and important for everyone. Note: Each activity contains a hyperlink to detailed instructions and materials. Humanities Activity Idea: Rhetorical “Infomercials” In this unit, students apply rhetorical concepts by creating infomercial skits. Each group advertises a silly product, such as a “mustache glitter” for “wizards who want to appear magical,” to an imagined audience. The audience determines which infomercial is the most rhetorically effective based on the appeals they learned. Once each group has judged the infomercials, we discuss why certain appeals or rhetorical moves were effective and how similar moves can be incorporated into writing. This activity helps introduce the rhetorical analysis assignment, reinforce rhetorical concepts, and build a community. Science In this unit, students accommodate a scientific journal article into an article for a popular magazine. To help students understand how to translate scientific methods for the general audience, they develop instructions for paper airplanes and then exchange with other students. We test which airplanes go the farthest, and not surprisingly those with diagrams and clear language always win. This allows us to debrief about how images and clarity enhance audiences’ understanding of complicated scientific processes. Business Writing Activity Idea: High Intensity Interval Writing Inspired by high intensity interval training (HIIT) workouts, designed to provide maximum physical activity in minimum time, high intensity interval writing allows students to practice several writing skills in a short amount of time. In this unit, students write a recommendation report for an imagined community partner organization with suggestions on how to improve their website’s rhetorical effectiveness. They rotate among stations, completing a small component of the report based on the evidence provided to them. At the end of the activity, each team has a skeleton of a recommendation report to use as a guide for their own reports. We debrief by discussing the skeleton reports’ level of success. Social Sciences Activity Idea: Living Burkean Parlor To help students overcome the barrier of “entering the scholarly conversation” as individuals, we create a Living Burkean Parlor so students find themselves physically inside the abstract idea of an unending conversation. Students are divided into groups and one person from each group volunteers to leave the room. Each group receives a conversation topic or question to spark vigorous discussion, such as “If you get away with committing any crime, what would you do?” After conversation is rolling, the people who left the room return to their groups. Without knowing the topic, and without being explicitly invited into the discussion, they attempt to contribute something new to the conversation based on what others are saying. To debrief the activity, we talk about the challenges of joining a conversation without knowing the topic, the strategies used to join the conversation, or whether the conversation ended up changing. From there, we introduce students to the idea of Kenneth Burke’s unending conversation, and prime them to enter it themselves in their next assignment. Concluding Thoughts Kinesthetic activities allow students to socialize while building knowledge fundamental to their success in the collaborative classroom and workplace settings they will encounter. Students’ anonymous feedback on such activities has been consistently positive: “I got to bond with my classmates, which helped me feel comfortable and allowed me to have a better learning experience.” “Making the class more interactive, like the activity of making the commercials for different audiences, helped me learn.” “The [HIIT] stations activity was one of the most important pre-writing activities I did; it gave me a lot of new ideas.” What kinesthetic activities do you include in your classroom? Join the Macmillan Community to tell us in the comments below and start a conversation! ... View more

Assignment instructions for Living Burkean Activity for a Social Sciences Writing Unit. For more, see Roy Stamper​'s post Low-Stakes Kinesthetic Activities for the First-Year Writing Classroom. ... View more