Young writers often get the advice—and sometimes the assignment—to eavesdrop.  I’ve always found this a little funny, since after all, don’t most of us spend large portions of our lives in conversation?  Why do we need to listen in on somebody else’s conversation in order to learn about conversation?  I wasn’t sure of the particular value of being outside of the conversation.  So I decided to try it. Like many a writer, I often find myself in coffee shops.   But I also happen to live in a town that is a prime destination for people in recovery programs, who also naturally find themselves in coffee shops.  And so one of the first things I heard was one highly caffeinated young guy saying to another, “It was a tell-tale sign when we did free hugs and Ted wouldn’t hug anybody.” A few days later, walking out of the gym behind a young woman and her probably four-year-old son, I heard this exchange: Toddler: I want a snack. Mom: I have something in the car for you. Toddler: What is it? Mom: Juice. Toddler: What kind of juice? Mom: Orange juice. Toddler, with outright exuberance: Hallelujah, baby! Later, sitting in a Barnes and Noble café near the customer service counter, I heard this: Female customer, probably sixty-something, brandishing the bondage bestseller Fifty Shades of Grey:  Do you think this would make a good gift? Customer Service Rep: Well, I wouldn’t give it to someone you didn’t know well. Next customer, a very thin woman around seventy in a denim mini skirt and high-heeled sandals: I need a ride home. Customer Service Rep: But we’re a bookstore. Meanwhile, someone I know posted on Facebook that he heard an old woman on the subway turn to the homeless guy next to her and say, “You smell like my husband.  He’s dead.” The website Overheard in NY is full of such gems.  The truth, I guess, is that we’re a nation of eavesdroppers, whether we mean to be or not, and we find our fellow Americans pretty amusing. There are lessons to be learned from these moments, sure.  The guys in recovery had a very particular vocabulary that they shared and used fluidly.  They were also way more intimate in the way they spoke to each other than most any other group of twenty-something males I have ever seen in conversation. And the child shouting Hallelujah for his juice was surely imitating adults he has heard.  Kid talk is often funny for the way they use words correctly but in slightly inappropriate contexts.  It was a touching scene, too, showing how well the mother knew her child, as well as how much he appreciated her knowledge.  And living here in South Florida, I’ve certainly observed the infinite variety of the elderly (some of the stereotypes are true—the driving is pretty terrifying), but as with any demographic, the individuals are many and they can be found everywhere, saying just about anything. So a student given the assignment to eavesdrop certainly could learn this or that about the ways we speak to each other and who we are.  I might try an exercise where I have students copy down things they overhear over the course of a week, then share the best bits with the class so that the group can collectively determine what lessons can be learned from the snippets.  And I could see creating a writing exercise based on any of the snippets.  Part of what’s interesting about eavesdropping is how the absence of context sparks your imagination.  What kind of kid “Hallellujahs” orange juice rather than a bag of chips?  Who is Ted and why wouldn’t he participate in free hugs?  Did that lady ever get home from Barnes and Noble? (Last I saw she was talking to a very patient cop.)  And is that other lady pulling a “Rose for Emily” thing with her dead husband? Eavesdropping works as an assignment because you can listen without the social obligation of participating in the conversation.  You can sit in on conversations by demographics of people you might not otherwise speak to (assuming those demographics speak to each other in public places).  But really I don’t know that it’s so important to go out and spy. Just now as I sit here writing, the guy fixing my air-conditioning said, “You can go ahead and close up the joint.”  My house has never been called a joint before, but I like it. I suspect the real value in the eavesdropping assignment is not so much that it encourages students to be spies, but that it encourages them to be observant.  Go out into the world in your writerly identity, it says—and pay attention.  The writer’s life is one big eavesdropping exercise, though there are some problems inherent in that, as well. Jane Smiley’s hilarious satire of academia Moo takes down the eavesdropping assignment pretty effectively.  One workshop student listens in on her roommate’s inane conversations and creates inane writing.  Louise Fitzhugh’s children’s novel Harriet the Spy also makes clear the hazards of eavesdropping on your close comrades.  They don’t care for it so much.  Especially not when they are twelve years old. So what is the difference between overzealous, shameful Harriet-the-Spying and being a writer?  I guess in part it’s the dishonesty of it, of pretending not to be listening when you are listening, and it’s how you use the material you get hold of.  It seems safe to take a snippet of conversation from a context you don’t know and make it your own story,  less so to take your roommate’s private life and transcribe it. But then again, I bet Harriet the Spy was a pretty great writer. What do you think? Is all material fair game? [This post first appeared on LitBits on 7/5/12.]  ... 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I was just talking with a colleague about possible new directions for the writing program at our school and one of the things we started thinking about was genre.  As the content and apparatus for Emerging might suggest we’ve traditionally focused on academic expository writing in our classes—the class argument-driven academic paper.  But it occurs to me that Emerging does offer entry points for those interested in exploring some different genres.   Roxane Gay’s “Good Feminist?” is a good starting point and an interesting model for students.  One might call Gay’s work an autobiographical essay, but it’s one that engages the writing of others and makes a strong argument, as well.  But I think it also models for students one way to engage in autobiography that moves from simple narration to a kind of positioning.  After all, Gay is interested in her relationship with feminism (or with what is considered being a “good” feminist) and her essay offers an interesting model for students to positions themselves within and against other markers of identity or political positioning.  Dan Savage’s and Urvashi Vaid’s “It Gets Better” and “Action Makes It Better” are also useful for thinking about genres that bridge the personal and the political.   For something that moves towards the multimodal, Tomas van Houtryve’s “From the Eyes of a Drone” is a good bridge for thinking about the visual essay.  Throughout his essay, the images and the text work together to form an argument.  That use of text in conjunction with image might be particularly useful in getting students to think about the visual essay or in working in the visual essay to a more traditional writing classroom.   Finally, there are some essays that are, classically, essays.  David Foster Wallace’s “Consider the Lobster” is probably the stand out example, but you might also consider Michael Pollan’s contribution.  I think Yo Yo Ma’s essay is a particularly good example of the genre, especially as it is written from someone not only outside academics but within the music profession, as well.   Ultimately, of course, if your class is all about genre-based writing, then this probably isn’t the text for you.  But it’s interesting to think about the small moments of flexibility allowed by this reader and interesting as well to imagine where one might go with it. ... View more

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

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

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

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

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