In today's "What We've Learned" video, Heather Sellers (@heather_sellers), author of The Practice of Creative Writing, discusses the unique structure of an online course, equating creating an intentional online course to structuring a short story or a poem.  ... View more

In an excellent February 2021 article in the Atlantic entitled “5 Pandemic Mistakes We Keep Making,” Zeynep Tufekci contrasts the recent reception of the COVID-19 vaccine with the reception of the polio vaccine in the 1950s: “When the polio vaccine was declared safe and effective, the news was met with jubilant celebration. Church bells rang across the nation, and factories blew their whistles. ‘Polio Routed!’ newspaper headlines exclaimed. . . . People erupted with joy across the United States. Some danced in the streets; others wept. Kids were sent home from school to celebrate.” In contrast, on November 10, 2020, “[t]he first, modest headline announcing the Pfizer-BioNTech results in The New York Times was a single column: ‘Vaccine Is over 90% Effective, Pfizer’s Early Data Says,’ below a banner headline spanning the page: ‘BIDEN CALLS FOR UNITED FRONT AS VIRUS RAGES.’” We teach our students how slanted language can affect an audience’s reaction, how the connotation of individual words can influence opinion. We are also influenced by what is included and what is left out or, in this case, what is emphasized and what is relegated to a single column. Why is there so much emphasis in the media on the negative possibilities of the vaccines and so little celebration of the fact that they exist? Have we become so cynical that we worry about the new variants to the point that we can’t appreciate the drugs’ effectiveness in saving lives? This type of media coverage plays into the hands of anti-vaxxers who welcome any opportunity to denigrate vaccines. Opponents of vaccines in general or of these in particular like to argue that there is really not that much more that Americans can do once they have had the vaccine than they could before it. Yet well below the glaring headlines are the sweet stories about grandparents finally getting to hug their grandchildren again and of nursing homes cautiously opening their doors to visitors. Does the news media’s reluctance to celebrate the vaccines arise from political partisanship? Perhaps. After all, former President Trump issued a statement recently on pseudo-White House stationery, trying to take credit for their existence: "I hope everyone remembers when they’re getting the COVID-19 (often referred to as the China Virus) Vaccine, that if I wasn’t President, you wouldn’t be getting that beautiful 'shot' for 5 years, at best, and probably wouldn’t be getting it at all. I hope everyone remembers!" His choice of verb tense (“if I wasn’t president”) reflects his refusal to admit that he lost the 2020 election, or perhaps he’s just not that astute a student of grammar. His supporters might celebrate with him his gift of the vaccines to the American people, but for others, the very thought of Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic from the beginning might dampen down any spirit of enthusiasm.  However, it’s not as though we have to give credit to former President Trump for the existence of the vaccines, but rather to the scientists who labored to create them and the volunteers who participated in the development trials. Should our optimism be guarded because these vaccines were developed quickly? It was unprecedented to develop a vaccine, let alone several, in a matter of months instead of years. As Tufekci put it, “Vaccines that drastically reduce hospitalizations and deaths, and that diminish even severe disease to a rare event, are the closest things we have had in this pandemic to a miracle—though of course they are the product of scientific research, creativity, and hard work.” They show what can be done when the full power of the scientific and pharmaceutical communities come together in a shared mission – something, again, to be celebrated rather than feared. Unfortunately, our nation is not prepared to come together, as a nation, to celebrate anything at this point. We could not celebrate together the inauguration of a new president - not when large numbers of Americans believed the former one’s claims of a stolen election. Nor could we, as a united nation, celebrate democracy and the peaceful transition of power because of those same dissenters, some of whom turned to violence in an effort to stop the lawful counting of electoral votes and disrupt the election of Joe Biden. For the moment, everything is seen, still, in political terms. In a nation where wearing a mask to prevent the spread of COVID or not wearing one became a political statement and led to injury and death for some trying to enforce mask mandates, rolling up one’s sleeve for a vaccination can hardly be seen in apolitical terms. Likewise, it’s hard to celebrate the “reopening” of America when many feel it is coming too soon. We long ago left behind the idea of news as an objective account of the world’s happenings. To deny the political leanings of the news networks would be ludicrous. Maybe the time has come to move back toward some type of balance at least. Ideally a network would report any problem with the vaccines while also reporting successes in getting the vaccines out to more people and making strides toward ending the pandemic—and to keep both sets of facts in proportion. Maybe a time will come when, even if Americans don’t take to the streets in celebration, we can at least breathe a collective sigh of relief that we are returning to something closer to normal, in our news media and in our lives.   Image Credit: "A newspaper with the headline Coronavirus News"  by Jernej Furman, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

Well, of course, The Social Dilemma is the title of the much-watched and much-reviewed documentary film by Jeff Orlowski. It includes a series of hair-raising interviews with many of the people who brought us social media in the first place but have now had second, and third, thoughts about its dangers—so much so that many of them make sure that their children are NOT users of social media. I have a grandniece whose access to screens and social media has not been curtailed, and watching this film practically set my hair on fire. I could relate many of the stories told in it to what I’ve seen in my wonderful grandniece’s experience and behavior. I came away shaken. And so, as we teachers do, I watched the film again and did some reading of reviews, including a neutral one in the New York Times, two critical ones in The Verge and Nir and Far, and several largely positive ones, including a review in Variety. I also went back to re-read Jaron Lanier’s page-turner of a book, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. Lanier is featured in The Social Dilemma and I’ve followed his work for many years, finding him reasonable and fairly even handed. Indeed, he concludes his Ten Arguments by saying he knows it is asking a lot to delete all social media and so he asks simply that readers take a pause—a week, maybe a month—and then assess how they feel free of the constant invitations to click, click, click—and to be manipulated. So I’ve often recommended Lanier’s book to my students, asking them just to hear him out and them to consider taking a break from all social media. Some have taken up the challenge, but a lot have not. So I’m left this week not with answers but with questions. Just what is the “dilemma” that social media pose to us and especially our students? How clearly and persuasively is it delineated in Orlowski’s film, or how much is the argument there itself exaggerated in an attempt to manipulate us? And most important, what is our responsibility, our obligation, to our students in continuing to bring these issues to them, to insist that we try working through them together? For my part, I have not deleted my social media accounts yet—but I rarely use them beyond sharing my blog posts. I would very much like to hear your take on the “social dilemma” of our times. Image Credit: "Social Media" by magicatwork, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

Today's "What We've Learned" video features Stuart Selber, one of the author's of Technical Communication, on thinking of online environments as models of technical documents, showing the type of technical communication that is asked of from students. ... View more

As long as I’ve been teaching—thirty-one years now—I’ve been witness to a phenomenon that strikes me as a quintessentially human. Whenever I assign an essay, a significant percentage of my students ignore what is in the prompt in favor of what they wish were there. For the most part, it’s not that the students willfully disregard the assignment; instead, they seem to be subconsciously remaking it into something more conducive to their own interests. The problem, of course, is that an instructor’s grading rubric is designed to respond to the prompt that’s actually there, and if the students and teacher aren’t, literally, on the same page, grades suffer and frustration is general. Moreover, I can’t help thinking that in a world where we too often look past anything we don’t want to see, carefully following an essay prompt is an excellent way to return students’ attention to the almost lost art of close and honest reading. Consequently, I make a big deal out of scrutinizing essay prompts. In Hello, Writer (forthcoming from Bedford/St. Martins, September 2021) I ask students to read the prompt carefully, not just once or twice, but three times. On that third read-through, I encourage them to approach the prompt as they would any other assigned reading. Annotate it thoroughly: write questions in the margins for the professor, look for keywords, underline unclear vocabulary words, and make connections between different parts of the text. I then ask students to return to the prompt yet again, this time with a specific set of goals in mind: Determine the focus. Students should be able to accurately respond to someone, not in the class, who asks: “What are you supposed to be writing about in your essay?” This first step not only helps students zero in on appropriate content, it just as importantly alerts them to what’s not on the table for this assignment. Pay special attention to instruction verbs. A prompt’s verbs are at the core of an instructor’s expectations. An essay asking students to “discuss” a single article is, for instance, very different than one requiring them to “compare and contrast” two articles. Look for limits. Most instructors have realistic expectations about what their students can accomplish in a limited amount of time with a limited amount of knowledge. Part of the process of understanding a prompt is identifying overlapping areas between what the student finds interesting and what the instructor wants to see in the essay. Know the scope. Just as the prompt sets limits, it also indicates how ambitious the essay should be. Often a word or page count indicates the scope, but there may be other markers specifying the ideal extent of the essay’s content. Note any required features. This may be the most important, and most frequently ignored, element of a prompt. Students need to realize that it doesn’t matter if they “would prefer not to” address certain parts of the assignment. If something essential is left out, the instructor’s final assessment will reflect that fact. Use the required style. In early-semester essays, professors may be more forgiving of formatting and documentation errors. However, the deeper the due date falls into the semester, the more insistent professors are likely to be that there are sweeping differences between, say, MLA and APA. Note details about submission. This is the nuts and bolts of this assignment. Is there a late penalty? Is there a date after which the assignment cannot be submitted at all? Because due dates may seem like a long way off when the prompt is first distributed, it’s important for students to calendar those dates in a place and format they encounter frequently. Ask for help. Students often don’t want to appear bashful or uninformed, but I encourage them to reach out to me directly. In a face-to-face class, I’ll ask students to write questions about the prompt anonymously, on scraps of paper, which I answer aloud in front of the class. Online, I open up a Google doc in which everyone can write questions. Ideally, by the end of the semester, students consider it only normal to have a lively and informative back and forth with the professor about every prompt they receive. Granted, I can easily imagine a colleague thinking, So much about prompts! With all the other elements involved in the creation of an academic essay, is spending this much time and energy on them really necessary? I think it is. To thoroughly explore, question, and understand the prompt before a single word of the essay is written ensures that the prompt is central to the composition process. The prompt becomes the “still point of the turning world” of the assignment, the center to which students return whenever they feel lost or uncertain how to proceed.   To learn more about Hello, Writer, and opportunities to pilot in the fall, please contact Michelle.Clark@macmillan.com or something similar.   ... View more

In today's "What We've Learned" video, Stuart Selber, one of the authors of Technical Communication, reflects on the challenges of being present and available for students in online environments, and creating channels for interacting with and providing feedback to students. ... View more

In today's "What We've Learned" video, David Starkey (@davidstarkey), author of upcoming first edition Hello Writer, emphasizes the importance of following up with students who might be dropping off the radar and of giving feedback to all students, even those who are already engaged.  ... View more

I live on the coast of California about 150 miles north of San Francisco in a community called The Sea Ranch. It has quite a history, of which I was completely unaware when—after love at first sight—I bought a lot here in 2000 and eventually saved enough money to build a home. Now I am a ‘full-timer” here and over the years have come to know a lot about this place. It was the home of the Pomo people before a “settler” received a Mexican land grant in 1846 for the property. In the early sixties, an architect surveyed the ten miles of coastal land before a group purchased the property and engaged a distinguished group of young architects to design a community whose watchword was to be “living lightly on the land.” Graphic designer Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, known for her supergraphics, designed the Sea Ranch logo, which you can see below, as well as large and very striking interior paintings for several of the original buildings.  And here’s where fonts come in. As they wrote materials about The Sea Ranch, the founders settled on the very modern, very “in” Helvetica font. As I got to know more about The Sea Ranch and became friends with one of the original architects—the fabulous Donlyn Lyndon—I got curiouser and curiouser about this favored and pervasive font and learned of its rise to prominence as “the most famous” Swiss Style typeface. Launched in 1957, the neutral sans serif design was meant to be versatile and unobtrusive—to go unnoticed. But noticed it certainly was, soon becoming the go-to font for many brands, from Target to Apple’s Macintosh, from Yankee Stadium to the side of NASA’s space shuttle. Wow. Learning a little bit about this history, about the rise and fall and rise of Helvetica, of the wars between those who loved and those who loathed it, made me think of asking students what they know about fonts and why they choose them. I have them work in pairs to choose a font they admire and then see what they can find out about its history, about who created it and why, and about where and by whom it is used. Then we use their findings to launch a discussion of different font “personalities” and to write up little bios of a couple of fonts, describing them, giving them nicknames and character traits. We have some fun along the way, and students become much more conscious of the design choices they are making, often without even thinking of them. So the next time you give an assignment, ask students to pay special attention to the font they choose—and to append a memo to you at the end of the assignment explaining their choice. I always find these explanations fascinating! Image Credit: "helvetica 50" by _Nec, used under a CC BY 2.0 license (top); Photo by Andrea Lunsford ... View more

In today's "What We've Learned" video, David Starkey (@davidstarkey), author of upcoming first edition Hello Writer, reflects on teaching in small, 2-3 minute chunks and the necessity of focusing on the most important information to communicate to students, as well as the surprising opportunities offered by the pandemic for reflection, mindfulness, and equity mindsets. ... View more

On Tuesday March 10, 2020, after six and a half weeks together, my students and I met in person for the very last time. Lockdown appeared on the horizon, but uncertainty remained. In class, we stayed on schedule. We watched the first half of Ryan Coogler ‘s 2018 film, Black Panther and planned to watch the second half in class two days later. However, by Thursday March 12, the university system had canceled classes.  We were told to prepare for the transition to online instruction. Soon afterward, our state was on lockdown and our city became the epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic. Contemplating this anniversary has not been easy. After a long and difficult year, the challenges of lockdown almost seemed to fade in the distance.  At the same time, commemoration feels necessary and significant. What we have learned might be of use to others. With that hope in mind, I found several artifacts (edited for clarity) to illustrate the labor of transition.  Remnants of My Last Commute Before Quarantine 10 March 2020  (Discovered in my bag several weeks later and reassembled on a yoga mat) Objects arranged on a purple yoga mat clockwise from the top: black gel pen; public transit pass; black dry erase marker; lip balm; six colored pencils; hair tie  Photo by Susan Bernstein   Introduction to Distance Learning (from the revised syllabus) My hope is that through distance learning we can create a space of mutual aid and support.  Please check in with questions and concerns-- about class or anything else.  I will be available online on google.docs and email during all of my scheduled class times and office hours. We can arrange group and individual video conferences with at least 24-hours notice. You can use the suggested schedule, or create your own schedule based on your own needs and responsibilities at this difficult time. Please email me with your questions and concerns.   Writing Project 2: Envisioning Beloved Community (from a reconceived assignment sheet) Many of our sources this semester have addressed the question of creating a Beloved Community.. That is, another more, sustainable world. In Black Panther, for example, the question arises about how to best use Wakanda's resources: Hide in plain sight?  Share with others in deep need? Combat colonizers and other oppressors?  Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, James Baldwin, and other activists and sources we have encountered this semester addressed similar questions. Dr. King, for example, identifies this situation as "the fierce urgency of now."  Writing Project 2 asks you to imagine a proposal for creating a Beloved Community for a specific audience and purpose. In your proposal, you can engage deeply with one of our sources. For example: How would you enact the ideas put forth by Dr. King, Malcolm X or Baldwin?  What would you say in a conversation with Okoye, Nakia, Shuri, or Raymonda or another character from Black Panther?   As you grow your ideas, consider your concerns and the concerns of your audience. What agreements or disagreements might you have? How would you envision and enact a Beloved Community for a more sustainable world?   Spoiler Alerts: Black Panther Interrupted (from my spring 2020 teaching journal) I don’t know how much we accomplished in 6 ½ weeks. We were ½way through Black Panther, and then we had to stop. I had taken more time this semester setting it up, showing cultural connections, talking more about the Black Panthers, including watching excerpts from Stanley Nelson’s film Black Panther: Vanguard of the Revolution. When class ended, the story felt suspended in air, plot lines left unfinished. N’Jadaka/Erik/Killmonger was dragging Klaue’s body out of his airplane at the border of Wakanda.  N’Jadaka had not yet beaten T’Challa in ritual combat, but we did already know his identity as T’Challa’s first cousin. T’Challa had already confronted Zuri in the Garden of the Heart-Shaped Herb And then our world turned as upside down as Wakanda after N’Jadaka became King, seasick upside down.  I want to resist becoming a bot, a disembodied head on the screen. Online instruction does not ease the seasickness, does not remove  bodies, minds, and affects. I still want to imagine that another world is possible. Real life slips through the cracks of rigidity. Those cracks are Sisyphean moments of joy. That joy is the hope I want to remember.   The one-year anniversary of this pandemic might be difficult for us to contemplate, and for our students as well. We have lost family and friends. We have lost celebrations of rights of passage that students might have anticipated for years, such as high school graduation, and other face-to-face events shared with loved ones. The emotional labor of reflection might bring unimaginable challenges for many of us. For this reason, I would offer students an ungraded space for writing and multimedia, and as well as options to keep their work private. At the same time, for those who choose, it might be helpful to reflect on how to commemorate this anniversary. How would you commemorate the one-year mark of the pandemic? What would be important to remember? How might students reflect on significant memories of this past year?  What would you want future generations to know about this time in our lives? ... View more

In today's "What We've Learned" video, Quentin Miller, author of The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature and Literature to Go, reflects on taking advantage of the opportunities presented by technology to broaden the types of assignment and engagement available to students.    ... View more

Gina Atkins Gina Atkins (recommended by Casie Fedukovich) is pursuing her MA in English with a concentration in Rhetoric and Composition at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC. She expects to finish in May 2021. She teaches English 101: Academic Writing and Research and serves on the First-Year Writing Program Council as the MA Representative. She is also CRLA III certified. Her research interests relate to developing antiracist pedagogy, antiracist praxis, accessibility in the writing classroom, and linguistic justice. Eric D. Brown Eric D. Brown (recommended by Kyle Jensen) is pursuing his PhD in Arizona State University’s Writing, Rhetorics and Literacies PhD program, where he studies writing technologies, writing pedagogy, and writing program administration. He has taught First-Year Composition, Persuasive Writing and Public Issues, Writing for the Professions, and Business Writing. Eric is also Assistant Director (AD) of Writing Programs, where he aids the director in growing the scope of Writing Programs and creating professional development for faculty. As Assistant Director, he also co-runs the National Day on Writing, ASU’s annual Composition Conference, and is an editor of Writing Programs’ bi-annual newsletter, Writing Notes. Emily Gresbrink Emily Gresbrink (recommended by John Logie) is pursuing her PhD in Rhetoric, Scientific and Technical Communication at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities. She expects to complete her degree in 2024. Emily currently teaches University Writing, housed in the First-Year Writing program. Her research interests encompass technical communication, the rhetoric of health and medicine, pandemics, rhetorical analysis, archives, bioethics, and mentoring. She also serves on the University of Minnesota’s College of Liberal Arts Assembly as a Graduate Student Representative, co-chairs the graduate student mentoring subcommittee for the Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication (CPTSC), and works with the mentoring committee for the Online Writing Centers Association (OWCA). Brendan Hawkins Brendan Hawkins (recommended by Elias Dominguez Barajas) is pursuing his PhD in English with a concentration in Rhetoric and Composition at Florida State University. His research, teaching, and faculty development interests and experiences span rhetorical genre studies, histories of rhetoric, online writing instruction, and general education composition classes. He serves as a College Composition Program assistant director where his primary responsibility is mentorship for first-year teachers. Hyoung Min Lee Hyoung Min Lee (recommended by Dr. Claire Carly-Miles) is pursuing her PhD in English at Texas A&M University. She teaches Writing About Literature as a graduate teaching assistant. She has also taught Rhetoric and Composition and worked as a grader for Technical and Business Writing. She is interested in teaching 20th- and 21st-century American literature with a focus on diversity and social justice. Her research interests include theories of race and biopolitics and 20th- and 21st-century American literature, especially African American literature. Courtney A. Mauck Courtney A. Mauck (recommended by Rachael Ryerson) is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric and Composition at Ohio University. She expects to finish her degree in Spring 2022. At OU, she serves as Assistant Director of Composition and primarily teaches first-year writing courses. She also teaches junior composition courses themed around feminist game studies and has co-taught two graduate courses, “Teaching College English” and “Learning Transfer.” Additionally, she has received her certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality studies. Her research interests include digital rhetorics, multimodal composition, social media, game studies, learning transfer, and first-year writing pedagogy. Michael A. Reyes Michael A. Reyes is pursuing his MA in English with a concentration in Rhetoric and Composition at Cal State LA. He teaches in the First-Year Writing program and leads creative writing workshops in LA public schools and organizations. His research interests are critical affect theory, decolonial rhetorics and pedagogy, contemporary poetry and poetics, creative writing pedagogy, and anti-racist and formative assessments. Jacob Richter Jacob Richter (recommended by Megan Eatman) is the Assistant Director of First Year Composition and a PhD candidate in the Rhetorics, Communication and Information Design (RCID) program at Clemson University. Jacob’s research has appeared in Computers & Composition, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, Prompt: A Journal of Academic Writing Assignments, and Textshop Experiments. He teaches First-Year Composition, technical communication, and business communication courses, and is the Assistant Communications Editor for Xchanges. Jacob’s research examines rhetorical theory, composition pedagogy, and writing in digitally networked environments. Rhiannon Scharnhorst Rhiannon Scharnhorst (recommended by Samantha NeCamp) is pursuing her hybrid PhD in Writing Studies and Victorian Literature at the University of Cincinnati, where she expects to defend her dissertation Willful Objects and Feminist Writing Practices in May 2022. She teaches a variety of courses in writing, from first-year composition to advanced topics classes, including Writing with Style and Food in Literature. She has also served as the Assistant to the Composition Program, writing and designing the department's handbook, overseeing graduate student education, and hosting the annual graduate conference. Her research draws on feminist rhetorics to make sense of objects in writing studies, including typewriters, cookbooks, and other tools. She also writes about materiality, embodiment and writing practices of nineteenth-century women writers in Great Britain.   Leah Washburn   Leah Washburn (recommended by Wallace Cleaves) is pursuing her PhD in English Literature at The University of California, Riverside and hopes to graduate in Spring 2023. She graduated from University of Central Florida in 2018 with an MFA in Creative Writing, where she taught Intro to Creative Writing. She also worked two years on The Florida Review, coordinating undergraduate interns and providing administrative support. During her undergraduate years, she worked as a writing fellow at Rhodes College for three years. Her research interests include digital media, ludology, narratology, contemporary speculative fiction, and postmodern fiction. ... View more

Today's "What We've Learned" video features Quentin Miller, author of The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature and Literature to Go, on being conscious of the type of requests instructors make of students in online learning, and the resilience shown both instructors and students.   ... View more

So Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the Beat world's true renaissance man—best-selling poet, publishing entrepreneur, and literary impresario supreme—is gone, having shown the world that you can sail the drunken boat without destroying yourself on the journey and have a whale of a good time besides. And while posterity seems to prefer the poet maudits—the Rimbauds and Kerouacs and Morrisons—who crash upon the shoals of Romantic excess, I can't help but think that it is the Ferlinghettis who have really mastered the game of life—not to mention the Gary Snyders, who are still around to show the way. But what has any of this to do with popular cultural semiotics? Actually, quite a lot, because it was Ferlinghetti, along with Allen Ginsberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan, and a good many others from the world of mid-twentieth-century art whose names I don't have room for here, who led the way in the deconstruction of the traditional boundary between high and popular culture that is so easily taken for granted today. Before there were poetry slams, there was Ginsberg, dragging poetry out of the seminar rooms and turning it into performance art. Before there were graphic novels, there were Lichtenstein's cartoon canvases and Warhol's Pop posters; and when Dylan plugged it in, rock met poetic rhyme, even as the Beatles were importing string quartets into teenaged love tracks. So when we consider how Stan Lee's comic books have come to attain the cultural stature once commanded by high lit (how Lee must have enjoyed seeing his Black Panther become a kind of Prince Harry to Killmonger's Hotspur!), it is to artists like Ferlinghetti that we must turn to understand how it all happened. There is a flip side to this history the mid-twentieth-century art rebels did not intend, however, for they wanted to open up high culture, not abolish it, to extend its boundaries, not erase it. But when the line between the fine arts and the commercial ones got blurred, it was commerce that eventually won out. Driven by the capitalist imperative to entertain, artistic creativity today is dominated by those productions that can command the largest audiences. With high art driven back into the museums (where it subsists on a kind of life support provided by a dwindling number of rich patrons and private foundations), there effectively is no high culture/pop culture divide any more. What we have now is an all-encompassing entertainment culture driven by the mandates of the market. As I say, this isn't what Lawrence Ferlinghetti envisioned when his Coney Island of the Mind became that rarest of poetic fauna: a full-fledged best-seller. But as another poet who once brought "high" culture and "low" together has put it, “The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, Gang aft agley."   "Lawrence Ferlinghetti" by Christopher.Michel is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

Actress, playwright, and author Anna Deavere Smith speaks eloquently about listening as the basis of her craft. Describing the intensive interviewing she did to prepare for her one-woman show Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, in which she appears and speaks as a series of people involved in the riots that sparked after Rodney King was beaten almost to death, she refers to “the difficult, heart-filled, ethical work of listening” —that very empathetic and deep listening she had to do in order to inhabit the experiences of the people she portrayed. She had to interrogate her own biases and assumptions and set them aside in order to listen in this way, to listen so that she could experience what her interviewers had experienced. Smith’s concept of listening underscores something we know—that listening can bring people together. Think again of Anna Deavere Smith’s extraordinary one-woman play Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 as well as another of her one-woman “verbatim theatre”-style plays, Fires in the Mirror: each deals with explosively dangerous situations (the 1992 Los Angeles riots, the 1991 Crown Heights riots) and both of them involve racial conflict (between the Korean-American and African American communities in LA, between the Jewish and African American communities in Brooklyn). As audiences across the country watched Smith “become” these characters—turning herself into a small Korean shopkeeper one moment, the Reverend Al Sharpton the next—and speak their truths, and as audiences listened to these truths, their views on the riots and those involved in them often changed. Such changes were partly in response to Smith’s amazingly powerful depiction of the people involved, and to her giving voice to their feelings and thoughts in ways that first got people to listen and second got them to understand the situations as being much more complex than they had thought beforehand. So listening can lead to change. But such changes were also, I believe, partly due to the power of storytelling. As Anna Deavere Smith’s work demonstrates and as novelist Richard Powers says, “The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.” I agree with Powers, which is one reason I encourage student writers to consider using stories/narratives in much of their college writing, from analyses to proposals to reports, and why I have urged that we work toward establishing narrative justice wherever and whenever possible—that we create narratives that can counter what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls “the danger of the single story” that has labeled and categorized and oppressed so many groups of people throughout history. (See past posts I’ve written on narrative justice here and here.) We need to create and promulgate such just counternarratives, and then we need to work to make sure that others hear them, and not just hear them but listen to them. This is one reason why some advocate public listening “as a way to open up the possibility for new outcomes, new opinions, and new understandings of [others] —even as it also recognizes the nervousness, fear, and hesitation that can also inform our listening practices,” as Nicole Brittingham Furlonge describes her work in Race Sounds: The Art of Listening in African American Literature. In fact, researchers working on listening in Uri Hasson’s Princeton lab make a strong case for the power of stories as well as for the importance of listening to them—based on an intense series of experiments involving brain scans of people telling and listening to stories. These researchers studied the brain scans of speakers and listeners over time and in different configurations, and discovered that as the speaker tells a story, the soundwaves of the story begin to “couple” the listener’s brain responses to that of the speaker’s. In these experiments, sometimes the speaker tells the story as written; other times the speaker might read it backwards or in random order of sentences or in other scrambled ways. While some more minor coupling occurred even in these scrambled sequences, it did so only cursorily. So it seemed to be important that the narrative structure hold in order for strong coupling to take place. In Hasson’s words, “the better the listener’s understanding of the speaker’s story, the stronger the similarity between the listener’s brain and the speaker’s brain.” As a commentator remarked after studying this neuroscientific research, “a great storyteller literally causes the neurons of an audience to closely synch with the storyteller’s brain.” Hasson’s research seems especially important in this moment, when so many people are locked into their own echo chambers, hearing the same stories over and over again, to the exclusion of any others. All those brains coupling and synching around one narrative, reinforcing it at every turn and making it harder and harder to build common ground and to comprehend any alternative or counternarratives. People in such echo chambers build common ground with one another, all right, but that very fact keeps them from establishing common ground with anyone outside that echo chamber. They turn away from stories representing different points of view and thus effectively prevent communication. Hasson’s research convinces me more than ever that if we don’t listen openly and carefully to one another and one another’s stories, we can’t hope to gain understanding or insight into their motivations, hopes, and goals. So let’s tell stories to each other, but more important even, let’s LISTEN to those stories. Image Credit: "Dad's Radio" by cogdogblog, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more