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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good writing begins with good planning. I like to formalize planning with a required document—a project plan. You might do something similar. For a researched argument, I’ll have individual students complete a worksheet I call “Nutshell Your Argument.” In this one-page document, students identify the topic, the thesis, the audience, the main lines of argument, the counterarguments, and the sources of evidence. The assignment helps students get a fix on just what they are going to accomplish. They must consider the difference between topic (or subject) vs. thesis (or argumentative stance or purpose). They develop ways of thinking and talking about “lines of argument”—what that means and how to apply such thinking to their writing. They think about intended audience and the counterarguments an audience member might launch. The nutshell provides me with an early check on assumptions about source requirements, allowing me to guide students toward academically respectable source material, and gives me a chance to intervene early in the assignment process. When we have time, each student briefs the class on his or her nutshell, offering a chance to clarify thinking through oral presentation and Q/A. I keep the presentation low stakes—everyone who does it gets credit. With team assignments, I ask for something similar—a team project plan that presents the following: Problem statement: what issues are being addressed or what problem is being solved Significance or importance of project Team information: contact information and team roles Team rules or work expectations Task breakdown Schedule of work (typically as a chart or table) with project milestones Anticipated hours to be spent on project (budget) Cost (hours x hourly rates) Writing a team plan accomplishes a number of goals. It forces teams to plan ahead and start to formulate individual commitments to team goals. It helps them think through how successful teams reach shared goals. It clarifies the anticipated outcomes and scopes the work to be accomplished. It ensures students know how to contact each other and helps them think about who will do what. It also underscores the adage “Time is money.” Students consider what the project is worth and what time they are willing to commit over the course of the project. The team plan also works really well as a document design project. I ask students to use headings and to tag those headings, paragraphs or other elements in the style sheet. I encourage a visual presentation, with sections presented in tables or charts. I show students (in a mini-lesson) how to set up a document template, select or create styles, and format headers and footers. These are skills every writer needs. We post our plans to our discussion board so teams can see what other teams are up to and can “borrow” good ideas or design elements. A formal plan can be updated for major projects in the form of a progress report. That allows teams to think through the difference between a prospective plan and a progress report, considering what to reuse and what new information should be added. The repurposed document can later be used as the backbone of the final report or an oral presentation. The final document can also chart the hours spent on the project and compare cost estimates to actuals. We often think of planning and invention as synonymous. But a conceptual move from planning as gathering ideas to planning as project management will equip students with a valuable toolset and encourage them to see writing as a way to manage various activities, either individually or as a team member. Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Join the Macmillan Community to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! ... View more

I want to report this week on the documentation classroom activity that I proposed last week to help students understand how to cite the various resources that they include in multimodal projects, like videos and audio recordings (see Documentation Troubles, or Can I Just Link to It?). I was particularly interested in helping them learn how documentation works in situations where MLA bibliographic form isn't appropriate. Let’s say that it’s been educational. I introduced the project as I described it last week. I talked about fair use and creative commons, and we reviewed the Best Practices for Attribution from Creative Commons page. I thought that would give students enough context. I shared this list of resources to evaluate, without the details I have added on why I chose them: Photo of a Winter Bee (public domain) Cartoon on Duck and Cover (public domain) Photo of a SuperCat (CC BY 2.0) Audio of Birds (CC0 1.0) Wikipedia article on The Undertaker (CC BY SA 3.0) The 1932 film of A Farewell to Arms (copyright not renewed, public domain) The book Writer/Designer (copyrighted) Sound effect of creepy music (Royalty Free) Video of The New Day entrance (copyrighted, embeddable via YouTube) Article on National Poetry Month (copyrighted, audio embeddable) I assigned groups the resources and asked them to send me their work at the end of the class. When I checked their work, I found that I didn't begin to give them enough help. Every one that I opened was incomplete or inaccurate. So I redesigned the activity and tried again. In the next class session, I explained that there had been problems and that I was going to demonstrate the process. I have three sections, so I selected three images by Dorothea Lange that are available on the Library of Congress site: Along the highway near Bakersfield, California. Dust bowl refugees & Google Doc Motherless migrant children. They work in the cotton & Google Doc Negro field worker. Holtville, Imperial Valley, California. & Google Doc I used a think-aloud protocol to explain exactly how I would complete the citation activity if I were a student, creating the Google Docs that are linked above in the process. My think-aloud even revealed the shortcuts I could take, like copying the entire series of citations from the Best Practices for Attribution from Creative Commons page and then replacing the information with the details for the photos that I was working with. I added the modified and derivative photos to the documents later, to help make the example more relevant in the future. Students were not required to create modified or derivative examples (though some surprised me and did so anyway). I extended the activity by creating examples of citations for other media. The Best Practices page seems best suited for text-heavy publications, like webpages or blog posts. I created another Google Doc that demonstrated how to cite one of the Lange photos in a video or PowerPoint and how to use the Birds in Aviary sound effect in an audio recording. For citation of the Lange photo in the end credits of a video, for instance, I demonstrated how to create this citation, following similar music credits on p. 74 of Writer/Designer: Along the highway near Bakersfield, California. Dust bowl refugees Photographed by Dorothea Lange Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Online Catalog Licensed under Public Domain After talking about how and why the citations changed for different uses and genres, students practiced by adding citations for other genres to their best practices pages. I spot-checked their work in the classroom, and they seem to finally get it. I won’t know for sure, however, until I see their next project. I’m hopeful! How do you teach students about documenting multimodal resources in their projects? I would love to hear more ideas and activities, so please leave me a comment below with your suggestions. I look forward to hearing from you. [Photo: "Along the highway near Bakersfield, California. Dust bowl refugees" by Dorothea Lange, photographer, is under Public Domain.] ... View more

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