Guest blogger Skye Cervone is a PhD student in Comparative Studies at Florida Atlantic University where she teaches Freshman Composition and Interpretation of Fiction. She holds an M.A. in Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature and is the Student Caucus Representative for The International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts. Her current research focuses on biopolitics and animal studies in Science Fiction. Skye’s work has appeared in Critical Essays on Lord Dunsany and Animalia: An Anthrozoology Journal. While the prospect of addressing racial tension at American universities in our classrooms may seem daunting, the continued student protests at The University of Missouri at Columbia after the resignation of their president, Timothy M. Wolfe and the planned exit of their chancellor, R. Bowen Loftin, highlight the importance of discussing this issue openly and directly with our students. Emerging offers several essays that can provide instructors with important starting points for such discussions. Since many students might be unfamiliar with the current tension at universities such as Mizzou and Yale, it might be helpful to discuss the timeline leading up to Mr. Wolfe’s resignation in The Chronicle of Higher Education as a prelude to engaging the readings from Emerging. I also suggest having students familiarize themselves with the death threats the black students at Mizzou have received and the protesters’ confrontation with a journalist. Rebekah Nathan, “Community and Diversity”—Nathan’s essay offers an important starting point for getting students to think about the kinds of social groups that exist at universities. Nathan problematizes the existence of a cohesive sense of community that includes diversity on contemporary university campuses. Her argument can allow students to interrogate the concepts of community and diversity at Mizzou and see how student experiences at singular locations can be varied based upon whether one is inside or outside of select “communities,” especially along racial lines, leading to a sense of isolation and frustration. Nathan Gladwell, “Small Change” —Gladwell’s essay is, of course, one of the most logical choices when approaching any social change movement, especially a movement aimed at combatting discrimination. By comparing the tactics used by activists involved in the Greensboro sit-ins to fairly contemporary social media campaigns, Gladwell determines strong social bonds are required for high-risk activism. His essay provides students with an important vocabulary and set of concepts to approach how the football team at Mizzou was both willing and able to oust a university president. Jennifer Pozner “Ghetto Bitches, China Dolls, and Cha Cha Divas” —Pozner’s discussion of reality television is a critical piece for introducing students to mass media’s role in perpetuating racial stereotypes and influencing how we talk about race. While many have criticized the Mizzou protestors’ unwillingness to cooperate with the media, Pozner’s essay can allow students to interrogate the social causes for why people of color have reason to be wary of the media and determine ways in which responsible representations can be fostered. Student protests have continued to spread to other universities, so there will undoubtedly be more opportunities to have important conversations about fostering university communities that provide racial parity and inclusiveness. Other essays that might be of interest are Francis Fukuyama’s “Human Dignity,” which discusses the importance respecting our fellow human beings; or Manuel Muñoz’s “Leave Your Name at the Border,” which might allow students to consider how easily non-white people can be othered and the dehumanizing effects of othering. 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

One of my family’s traditions at Thanksgiving was to work our way around the table, with each of us saying what we were most grateful for. I remember one year, during the doldrums of being thirteen, when I snarkily remarked that I didn’t have anything at all to be thankful for, and stared down, or tried to stare down, my aggrieved parents. How wrong I was, of course—and in my heart of hearts I knew it: even during the darkest days of my life filled with grief and loss, I have known I had much to be thankful for. So Thanksgiving is a favorite holiday for me. I like to send cards or notes to people I’m especially thankful for, I contribute to Thanksgiving dinners for those in need (and deliver whenever I can), and I try to find some quiet time that day to reflect. This year I’ve been looking back to some of my earliest years in the profession—the mid-1970s—and to three people I was grateful for then, and now. One was my teacher and mentor, Edward P. J. Corbett, who taught me about rhetoric (or the received notion of rhetorical history at the time) and about composition (by a huge stroke of luck, I was in grad school when Ed was serving as the editor of CCC, and I read every submission along with him and helped put the issues together). But I am grateful for much more I learned from Ed: his enormous curiosity, generosity of spirit, sheer decency, and wry wit made a lasting impression on me, as did his devotion to students. Two others I am thinking about this year, with thanks, are Mina Shaughnessy and Geneva Smitherman. I was incredibly fortunate to be introduced to their work and to meet both of them during those years. In fact, I read Talkin' and Testifyin' and Errors and Expectations​ practically back to back, and I was electrified by what they—especially read together—had to teach me. It was their work that led to my study of “basic” writing and writers and to my dissertation. I often think of what more Mina could have contributed to our knowledge had she not left us so early (she died in 1978). Geneva—Dr. G, as I’ve heard students call her for years—is still teaching me lessons every year. My gratitude to both these scholars runs very deep. But this Thanksgiving, as always, I give thanks for my family and friends—and especially the students I’ve had the privilege of knowing over the course of nearly 50 years of teaching. As I have often said, students in all their vivid differences, their rich histories, and their willingness to learn along with me—these have been the gifts of a lifetime. For them I will always be giving thanks. So Happy Thanksgiving to all—and here’s wishing your day is deeply satisfying. ... View more

Collin College’s Third Annual Trends in Teaching Composition Conference brought teachers of writing from neighboring campuses together in late October, and I had the honor of spending a day with them. My visit actually began the day before, when I attended a graduate seminar in composition theory at Texas Christian and, following the class, a reading group discussion/potluck dinner. I’ve always enjoyed and benefitted from such occasions (and held many at my home over the years), but since I’ve “retired,” I especially savor these times, full of camaraderie, good will, fellowship, and talk about teaching and about students: Teachers enjoying and sharing and learning from one another. These sessions took me back to some of my earliest experiences in teaching graduate courses to new teachers, when I had an opportunity to build an intellectual and personal community that nurtured and shared ideas. Looking back over the years, I can see that these communities inspired a great deal of good research and scholarship as well as lasting friendships. I also see that such communities seem particularly characteristic of the field of rhetoric and writing studies. So now when I get to join one of these groups, even for a day, it feels very much like going home. At the reading group, I soaked up the atmosphere (as well as the great food!), and listened to the ebb and flow of conversation (we were talking about an essay I had co-written about students in the Stanford Study of Writing) swirling around me about research in pursuit of better teaching and learning. Indeed, it felt like home. Joining the conference at Collin College the next day continued a celebration of the best goals of our field. The conference’s theme was on argument, and I got to share my thoughts on the subject (and you know I have LOTS of them!) and then join in a large-group discussion of how best to teach argument today—and, indeed, why we need to teach it. For me, helping students engage successfully in the world of argument—that is to say, in the world we currently inhabit—offers them a way to become active and productive participants in that world, to learn to listen to and respect other viewpoints, to see that their voices are always in response to the voices of others, and to enter the global and endless conversation of humankind. I view argument not as a form or even a genre, but rather as a way of being in the world. We argue to learn what we think and believe, to understand our relationship to other people as well as to ideas, to make the best decisions we can about inevitably complex and difficult issues, and to build and sustain networks of exploration and understanding. We teach argument so that students can and will pursue these same goals. And what a feast of exchanges the conference provided. In a panel on Teaching Comics, scholars talked about how to argue for the inclusion of comics in our curricula and presented brilliant activities and assignments used in their own classes. In another panel, students and faculty from Texas State explored “Strategies for Teaching Argument and Persuasion in Relation to Latin@ Literary and Cultural Spheres,” reminding us that modes and ways of arguing differ from culture to culture and that we still have a lot to learn by paying very close attention to the writing and reading strategies of all our students, including those who attend Hispanic serving colleges and universities. So it’s true: I love writing teachers and being with such teachers. With teachers learning from and sharing their wisdom and successes, their missteps and failures, with each other. Yes, I know that higher education is under attack from all sides, that working conditions for teachers of writing are in many places disgraceful, and that the work we do can be bone-wearying. But I also know that we have been meeting these challenges for longer than I can remember, and doing so with grace and good will and persistence. ... View more

This post originally appeared on October 23, 2012. Some of you may have noticed that my author bio reveals that I’ve recently changed my institutional affiliation—I have left Chowan University in North Carolina and accepted a position teaching creative writing and literature at my alma mater, St. Lawrence University in upstate New York.  I’ve written before (though not for this blog) about my undergraduate years and the vital role that my professors played in turning me into the writer and thinker I am today, so you can probably understand that I’m quite excited to be back, teaching alongside the scholars and artists who inspired me when I was an 18-year-old, flannel-clad Gen-Xer who had a vague idea that he wanted to be a writer, but didn’t quite know how he was going to get there. I’ve been thinking a lot about 18-year-old Bradley these past few weeks.  Part of me almost expects to run into him, walking across the quad or coming out of the dining hall.  Part of me feels like I already have run into him—or run into his doppelganger from 2012, at any rate.  I’m teaching two creative writing classes and one literature class this semester, and these students are—for the most part—really enthusiastic about what they’re reading and writing.  I’ve taught thoughtful and ambitious students before, of course, but never so many at one time.  So it’s been an exhilarating experience. One thing I’ve noticed about the undergraduate writers I’m teaching this semester is that many of them seem savvier about things like publishing opportunities and grad school programs than I was when I studied here.  I’ll be giving a talk later this semester to the students who work on the campus literary magazine, and one thing that the student who organized the talk told me they’d definitely be interested in hearing about was how I got editors to pay attention to my work, and what advice I have to give about getting creative work published. On the one hand, I admire these students for their work ethic and foresight.  It didn’t really occur to me until my senior year that I might try to publish some of the stories and essays I’d been writing, and even then, I didn’t actually bother buying envelopes or printing out the stuff I had on my hard drive.  Playing Mortal Kombat on my roommate’s Sega Genesis seemed like a much more productive use of my time.  These students know about literary magazines and are familiar with small presses, and I think that’s really cool.  They know stuff about their contemporary literature scene that I didn’t know about mine when I graduated 13 years ago.  I’m pleased to see that—it suggests a dedication to reading and knowing good creative work, and who knows?  Such knowledge among the younger generation might be enough to save our literary culture. At the same time, though, I worry a little bit about this focus on publishing.  I’m concerned that the students have sort of picked up on and internalized the “publish or perish” mentality that their professors are working under.  If you want to call yourself a writer, this mentality insists, you’ve got to get stuff published.  Submit to a magazine.  Send query letters to agents.  Most importantly, write the kind of stuff that other people want to read. Of course, it’s important for student writers to be mindful of audience, but I fear that this focus on publishing and “getting the work out there” could be bad for their development.  We don’t get too many opportunities in life to just do what we want to do, to “chase our muse”, if you want to be all writer-ly and precious about it.  When I think back at my own undergraduate writing, most of it was probably pretty terrible, but it was still stuff I was excited about, and it represented my very best attempts at articulating stuff that mattered to me.  I wrote a short story about a barfly whose lost love—dead for decades—returned to him one dark and stormy night.  I wrote a screenplay about love and jealousy and murder.  I wrote a play that absolutely wasn’t about my break-up with my college girlfriend the summer before our senior year (okay—it kinda was; don’t tell her, though).  I wrote an essay about feeling humbled when I saw the Aurora Borealis on the university’s golf course late one night.  I wrote a comic book script about an amnesiac superhero who wound up owning a comic book store in upstate New York.  I wrote several poorly-conceived performance art pieces.  The less said about them, the better. I doubt I’m ever going to revisit these pieces, or write anything like the again.  Although I have been dabbling in fiction lately, I remain pretty committed to creative nonfiction forms—particularly the essay.  But I’m glad I had the experience of spending those years trying out different things, experimenting with style while searching for my own voice.  I’m afraid if I had known that what I was working on—and pouring a ton of effort into—was ultimately “un-publishable,” I might not have bothered.  And that would have been terrible for my writing. I finished my undergraduate career at St. Lawrence during the summer of 1999, after taking some time off due to health problems.  I spent a lot of that summer hanging out and talking with Bob Cowser, who at the time was a young new creative nonfiction professor and who, over the years, has become a close friend and valued mentor.  By that point, I’d seen enough of the world beyond college that I knew I had to think more seriously about the future if I wanted to be a writer.  One afternoon, after he had given me some positive feedback on an essay I’d shown him, I asked, “Do you have any thoughts on where I should send it?” “Why?” he asked. I was surprised.  By that point, I knew I was going on to grad school.  And I knew that if I wanted to be a Real Writer, I would need to publish stuff. “You’re 23-years-old,” he told me.  “You have your entire life and career ahead of you.  Right now, you don’t need to worry about publishing—you need to worry about honing your craft and becoming a better writer.  Seriously, man—give it two years.  Start sending stuff out when you’re 25.  In the meantime, work on getting better.  You probably could start publishing now in smaller magazines—you’re good enough.  But if you wait and continue to get better, you can make sure that, years from now, you can be proud of every publication you list on your CV.” At the time, that advice kind of stung.  In hindsight, though, I think it’s the most valuable advice Bob could have possibly given.  The truth is, I’m glad some of those early attempts didn’t wind up published for all the world to see.  They were important for my development, but they weren’t fully-formed pieces that I could really take pride in.  As it happened, I didn’t really start publishing until I was 27, but the stuff I’ve published since then has been stuff that I’m pleased to call my own. I think, when I talk to those student writers in November, I’ll tell them about cover letters, and reading the magazines they want to send stuff to, and all that.  But I’m also going to give them the same advice Bob gave me.  “Slow down.  Try different things.  Write like you have another 50 or 60 years to worry about publishing.  The work that results may not be brilliant, and it may not be publishable, but you’ll have learned something about your own style, and the voice you find might be your own.” What advice do you have for student writers anxious to get started with their careers setting the world on fire with their prose or verse? ... View more

When I was first trained to teach first-year, introductory composition at the University of Michigan in the late 70s, one of the encouraged class activities asked the instructor to work at the board and lead the class in a discussion contrasting Spoken Language with Written Language. It was always a productive conversation with the class, since students could come up with important differences in sentence and discourse structure, vocabulary and usage. They could raise issues of register, formality, permanence, intimacy and immediacy, considering how language could fit a particular situation, a notion at the heart of rhetorical analysis. We would urge students to be conscious of the differences between speaking and writing, and to move toward the more formal control characteristic of academic writing and Standard English. In the years since, the emerging hybrid genres of electronic communication blur what once seemed fairly comfortable distinctions cast in the useful polarity of speaking vs. writing. Is email more like speaking or writing? What about messaging or Twitter? They have a certain permanence, but what about Snapchat? What about recorded conversations or online meetings or podcasts? What about video? Differences among hybrid media genres are of pressing concern. Hillary Clinton cannot shake the accusations of mismanaging her email communications, but she can be forced to surrender all the email that was not effectively deleted. Email is a written record and therefore discoverable. Would instant messaging, or Skyping, or Snapchatting have the same qualities? Face-to-conversations still provide some measure of confidentiality, but what about phone conversations? Could she have managed her communication, keeping private or confidential or top secret communications all contained within appropriate media? What are the differences among media, the affordabilities and the risks, and how do we choose what to use? From the current vantage point, it is ironic that Nixon got into trouble by choosing to tape oral conversations, while Clinton gets into trouble by trying to hide written conversations. Over the years, I have urged students in business communication classes to choose carefully when to write and when to speak, what to put in an email and what to convey F2F. But we now see an explosion of video coverage and reportage of supposedly spoken messages. Police are caught by lapel cameras and recorders; domestic abusers and homophobes are captured on phone cameras. Everyone is viewed by security cameras, so you can’t even rob a bank anymore without your face being shown on the news. As I write, we have a wave of resignations at the University of Missouri for things people said that were captured and repeated:  a command to bring in some “muscle” to remove video reporters from a campus demonstration site and an email to class about standing up to hatred resulted in the resignations of two professors. The president and chancellor both resigned, more for what they did not say (and do) about campus climate than for what they did say. So even being silent or too quiet can bring down top administrators. We can’t put two columns on the board anymore, contrasting speech and writing. But we can raise awareness of what happens in a media-saturated environment, where it seems that very few communication events are not recorded in some form, and where intended audiences are often not identical with broad, unintended audiences and consequences. As we continue to move toward teaching diverse, hybrid, multimodal genres, we can engage students with thinking about when to communicate, using what technologies, always anticipating how messages will often escape our control. That is still what rhetoric is about. 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

Guest blogger Amanda Gaddam​ is an adjunct instructor in the First-Year Writing Program and the School for New Learning at DePaul University. She holds a B.A. in English with a concentration in Literary Studies and a M.A. in Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse with a concentration in Teaching Writing and Language from DePaul, and her research interests include first-year composition, adult and non-traditional students, and writing center pedagogies. In my first-ever, first-year composition class, I posed the question “What blogs do you read?” to my class, which I felt confident would yield numerous responses and a fruitful discussion.  Instead, my question was met with silence and blinking.  It turns out that my students then—and most of my first-year composition students now—did and do read blogs, but they didn’t and don’t know that they’re reading them.  Fashion blogs, health and fitness blogs, music blogs, tech blogs, and even microblogs like Tumblr—all of these make appearances during students’ daily rounds on the internet, but they aren’t necessarily aware of the fascinating and specific rhetorical choices in arrangement and tone, nor can they identify (right away) the particular conventions that govern these texts.   As Miller and Shepherd note in their 2011 article, “Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog,” blogs make for interesting genre analysis discussions; because they rely so heavily on hypertextual, visual, and audio elements, they also provide for a unique multimodal assignment.  The following project and accompanying activities are designed as a low-stakes way to get students asking the right questions about the material they see everyday and recreating appropriate rhetorical choices in multimodal environments for themselves.  Low-stakes projects are particularly important for multimodal composing because most students, despite the technological proficiency that they might have, tend to be apprehensive about writing in unfamiliar genres and need the safety of a low-pressure composing environment to experiment with non-textual elements like video or audio. ASSIGNMENT Step One I introduce the definition, concept, and purpose of genre analysis in a short lecture. Step Two Students complete an in-class, small-group genre analysis activity using the complaint letter as an example genre. Students consider four sample complaint letters using questions adapted from Bawarshi and Reiff’s Genre: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy (all handouts available here).  As a follow-up discussion, students use what they have learned about the contextual factors and features of the genre to theorize their own approach to writing a complaint letter. Step Three I divide students into groups of four or five and assign each group a sub-genre of blogs.  Here are some examples of blogs I’ve assigned in the past: Students then use the questions from the in-class genre analysis activity to research the given example blogs and find one additional blog example from the Internet that fits within their assigned sub-genre.  One of their homework assignments is to bring their notes on these blogs to class in preparation for group work. Step Four Students share their findings from this inquiry with their group in order to come to a consensus about the common features, content, audiences, and contexts of their assigned sub-genre.  They use this information to plan a concept for a blog of their own. Step Five In cooperation with their groups, students create their blog and each compose individual blog posts that purposefully incorporate multimedia elements, like images, video, audio, and links to other content.  All rhetorical choices about content, arrangement, and style belong to the students. Because first-year writing students at DePaul use Digication for their final ePortfolios, I require that the groups use Digication for this blog project and that they purposefully incorporate multimedia elements like images, video, audio, and links to other web content.  The opportunity to learn the various features of Digication without fear of compromising their grade and the chance to practice the skills of multimodal composing on this platform make for thoughtful and well integrated multimodal final assignments. However, this project could easily be completed using free platforms such as Wordpress or Wix. Step Six Students showcase their group blogs and individual blog posts and justify their rhetorical choices to the class in informal presentations.  Neither the blogs nor the presentations are graded at this time; the presentations serve as an opportunity for peer feedback and review before revising the project, and, if they choose, submitting it for a grade in their final ePortfolio. I ask students to write a short analysis reflecting on the rhetorical choices they made for both the blog as a whole and their individual posts, and if they choose to submit the project for a grade, they present these analyses in their final ePortfolio.  I also find that they like to discuss this project in their end-of-term reflection letters, and they note that the collaboration, experimentation, and creativity of the assignment make it their favorite project of the quarter. REFLECTION Fortunately, I have found that students’ engagement with this assignment does not necessarily correspond to their technological acumen; rather, they use both the low-stakes occasion for experimentation and the collaboration with their peers as opportunities to learn something new about the more technical aspects of multimodal composing.  The fact that this assignment is low-pressure doesn’t mean that they don’t try.  In fact, without the stress of a grade, students are more likely to try new rhetorical strategies—and sometimes fail to use these strategies effectively—but their trials and errors show that they’re genuinely working through the best ways to approximate the genre. STUDENT WORK Check out some examples of what some of my students have created for their blogs in the past: The students assigned to tech blogs used the information they collected about the most common features and content to create this title, concept, and header image for their blog.  Their analyses indicate that they put a great deal of thought and conversation into selecting the colors, typeface, and imagery they deemed rhetorically appropriate. The students assigned to create a political blog noted that one of the most important features of blogs is the interactivity between readers and bloggers.  They approximated this element in their own blog by providing comments on each other's individual blog posts. This student recreated a common rhetorical choice in blog arrangement: the use of a lede accompanied by a hyperlink from the blog's homepage, which redirects readers to the full-length blog post.  In his analysis and in the informal presentation, the student and his group theorized that this choice forced readers to click further into the blog, exposing them to more content, and, in the case of for-profit blogs, more advertisements.   Click here for more examples, handouts, and descriptions of the assignment and associated activities.  Want to collaborate with Andrea on a Multimodal Monday assignment or be a guest blogger? Send ideas to leah.rang@macmillan.com for possible inclusion in a future post. ... View more

Now that I am at least semi-retired, I am taking advantage of every chance to visit new places and to reacquaint myself with places I’ve been before. Recently, I had a chance to spend ten days in London with three friends: we rented a place on Horsemongers Mews Lane and set about visiting old haunts like the British Museum and British Library, the National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery, the Tate Modern and Tate Britain, and the Globe. We took in two plays, walked some 90 miles all told, and rode endless other miles on the Tube. One highlight of this visit, however, was completely new to me. Under the tutelage of claymaker and artist Julia and archaeologist Mike, we took a walk along the Thames foreshore, at a very low tide. What a wonder awaited us! Mike and Julia sent us off in different directions, telling us simply to gather up anything that “looked interesting” to us. So we fanned out, with our plastic bags, and some 30 or 40 minutes later came together again with our treasures. Mike explained that the Thames is indeed a treasure trove of history, offering up fragments from 2000+ years ago on one shore and from Roman times forward on the other (well, that’s an oversimplification, but we were on the “Roman” side, where so much has been excavated over the centuries). Between the two of them, Mike and Julia identified everything we found, from a tiny Japanese kewpie doll that was “probably made last week” to pipe stems and bowls from the 18 th century, lots of glazed pottery from the medieval period, and tiles used in Roman buildings. Here are a few of the pieces I collected: I couldn’t help wishing that I had a group of my writing students with me to join in the fun, and I wondered what local sites might hold historical artifacts, ones I could engage students in gathering and studying and writing about. There was something magical and powerful about holding a tile that had once decorated a Roman home, or part of a teacup used in Chaucer’s time, something that pulled me back through history and connected me to it in a very visceral way. And it occurred to me that students might even be able to do archaeological “digs” in their own homes, writing about artifacts from their childhoods, or from their parents’ or grandparents’ time. Such connections with the past seem especially important in our throw-away, dash-from-one-thing-to-the-next world. Our students can benefit from making these connections, writing about them, and speculating on what artifacts our civilization will leave behind for someone a thousand years from now to happen upon. ... View more

Our Bedford/St.Martin's composition team has been eagerly awaiting the release of data from the first-ever National Census of Writing.  This ambitious effort surveyed writing centers and writing programs at two and four-year colleges and universities across the country in order to provide open-access information about the way writing is taught.  While the Inside Higher Ed article discusses some of the findings, there's a lot of interesting and surprising data to be gleaned from reading the results (surprising to me, at least).  Here are a couple of data points that stood out to me: 9% of four-year institutions who responded report an independent department is the home of their  first-year writing program, while a further 13% report that the writing program is independent.  Although most two-year institutions report that the writing program is still housed in the English department (96%), the numbers are striking and confirm the growth of independent writing programs that I've been hearing about. I found it shocking (and depressing) that 306 respondents from four -year institutions reported receiving no additional compensation or release time for "directing a site of writing."  435 reported that they do receive compensation or release time.  The numbers are even worse among reporting two-year institutions: 111 reported no additional compensation or release time, while 75 reported receiving such benefits.  Only 8 of those 75 individuals received both. I've barely started sifting through the data, but I'm looking forward to spending more time with it.  I"m also looking forward to the follow-up studies this baseline data will surely inspire.  Kudos to the writing studies community and the lead researchers for taking on this important work! ... View more

Guest blogger is a faculty member at Craven Community College in New Bern, North Carolina, and she teaches composition and literature courses. A former WAC coordinator at Craven, her primary interests are WAC/WID programs and creating partnerships with other community colleges and universities. She is also pursuing a PhD in narrative theory and nineteenth-century British literature at Old Dominion University. This is my first semester teaching ENG 112: Writing/Research in the Disciplines, a writing-in-the-disciplines (WID) class in the North Carolina community college system (NCCCS). This is the first of a series of blog contributions will be reflections on my initial experiences tackling ENG 112 this semester. Even with well over a decade of teaching experience in the NCCCS, learning to teach a WID course has been daunting—but it has also helped to reinvigorate my pedagogy. My approach to ENG 112 this semester was to start the class with what I know (humanities writing and research skills) in order to have time to pick the brains of my colleagues and create units on areas I have less experience with (natural science and social science writing and researching skills). This first blog explores the humanities unit and its literary analysis paper—a unit that turned out to be harder than I had expected. The Assignment and Schedule Students were asked to write a three-page researched analysis of “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” “Hills Like White Elephants,” “The Lottery,” “Everyday Use,” or “What You Pawn I Will Redeem.” In addition to citing the literature, they had to find and use 2-3 scholarly sources in their essays; they also had to use MLA style. They had the entire month of September to work on this project; the assignment was given on September 1 and due on September 29. The class is a scaffolded class with several informal journals and workshops to help students move through the writing process:  9.1 Writer’s Journal #5: Literary Studies Introduction to Humanities Writing and Literary Analysis Paper 9.3 Writer’s Journal #6: “The Yellow Wall-Paper” Analysis 1 “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (handout) Creating Analysis and Research Questions 9.8 Writer’s Journal #7: “The Yellow Wall-Paper” Analysis 2 Process Assignment #1: Literary Analysis Questions Literary Analysis Questions Workshop 9.10 Writer’s Journal #8: MLA Style Introduction to MLA Style research and Documentation 9.15 Writer’s Journal #9: Research Hunt Process Assignment #2: Literary Analysis Thesis and Works Cited 1 Literary Analysis Thesis and Works Cited Workshop 1 Research and Documentation Workshop 9.17 Process Assignment #3: Literary Analysis Thesis and Works Cited 2 Literary Analysis Thesis and Works Cited Workshop 2                                                                                            9.22 Process Assignment #4: Literary Analysis Draft 1 Literary Analysis Draft Workshop 1 9.24 Process Assignment #5: Literary Analysis Draft 2 Literary Analysis Draft 2 Workshop 9.29 In-Class Work on Literary Analysis Paper and Literary Analysis Self-Reflection  Literary Analysis Paper (Due by the End of Class) Process Assignment #6: Literary Analysis Self-Reflection (Due by the End of Class) Reflections My personal comfort level with the content of the unit may have worked against me in this unit. Perhaps my anxiety over the later units on natural and social sciences (What kinds of assignments would I give them? What research sources might work well? Why, oh why, are APA running headers so hard to make in Word?) lulled me into a false sense of security over my humanities unit. Whatever the reason, I forgot to include two key elements the humanities unit: modeling and conferencing. The next time I teach this course, I will be reserving two days for one-on-one conferences with my students about their drafts. By sandwiching the instructor conference between a peer workshop on the thesis and works cited and one on a revised draft of the essay, I hope to capture my students at that critical moment when they have a (nearly fully?) draft of the paper and a firm topic but when there is also still time to pull a quick turn on drafts that have gone off the rails. I will also be including a sample student literary analysis for class discussion—perhaps even two sample papers (one from the textbook and one from a previous semester of my own class). The students need to be able to see examples of finished literary analyses in order to help them better understand the work of their own essays. Moreover, the students need to have one-on-one time with me early in the semester; these individual conferences can especially help those who do not wish to ask for help in public spaces like the classroom. But overall, the unit went rather smoothly, especially as I began to correct for my early errors in modeling and for the lack of conferences. In order to work in some last minute modeling and conferencing, I cut my draft workshops in half; the class spent 30 minutes in the two peer drafts workshops (rather than the full 75 minutes), and the last 45 minutes of class those days was spent with volunteers putting their draft up on the projector. In these projector conference workshops, the volunteers would ask questions about their drafts and talk through the problems they had been encountering, and the class and I would help the volunteers work through their questions and problems. While students are sometimes reluctant to volunteer, once the class sees the quality of feedback being produced by the group (and starts to see how their problems with the paper are similar to the ones being discussed in a volunteer’s paper), I wind up with more volunteers than I have time to work with (which in turn gets these students into my office…of their own free will!). What did you do in your first WID course? What was your approach to the schedule and assignments? How did the successes and shortcomings of that first semester shape your WID course into a more effective and engaging course in later semesters? Share your answers, comments, and advice in the comments below. Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? 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A week or so ago, I got an email message from a former student who had been in one of my classes at Ohio State some 25 years ago. That was enough of a treat in and of itself. But the message went on to describe how much this former student now writes in his position as a city planner, and also to remark on what he most remembered about our class. He wrote: “I remember what I think was our second day of class. You came in and went straight to the white board and drew a thick black line from one end of it to the other. On one end you wrote, in big capital letters, WRITE. On the other end you wrote WRITTEN. Then you talked to us about the choices we were going to have to make to figure out whether we were going to WRITE, that is take action on our own and with some authority, or whether we were going to be WRITTEN by people outside of us. I remember writing those two words down in my notebook and looking at them every so often during the rest of that year. I wanted to WRITE. Looking back, I can see that I have often been able to WRITE but that I’ve also been WRITTEN, especially by my job and by some groups I belong to. I guess I’ve ended up somewhere in the middle of that line, but I hope just a little more toward WRITE.” I’ve started many of my classes over the years with this same strategy and I’ve always found that students are very interested in this binary and how it applies to their lives. They don’t need to read Foucault (though that wouldn’t be a bad thing) to know they occupy various subject positions, nor do they need a lot of postructuralist theory to alert them to the fact that key elements in their lives—their families, their religious institutions, their schools, and more—are powerful shapers of their lives. In fact, these institutions are often set on writing them—making them into the ideal child, the ideal worshipper, the ideal student, and so on. They feel these pressures keenly. And while they may at first blush and claim that they have a lot of agency, not too far into our discussion they begin to see that what they thought were their own decisions were ones that had been made at least partially for them by others. We often spend some time making similes or metaphors for what it feels like to write or be written. Usually we draw pictures as well, then use these materials to write what amount to brief essays on rhetorical agency and how available it is to us. This is of course a huge question today, when many feel at the mercy of huge economic and political forces it’s hard to understand, much less control. But for that very reason, it seems more important than ever to engage students in grappling with the subject agency and of looking for ways to enhance it in their everyday lives. We often put ourselves somewhere along the continuum and then chart how we feel about that placement during the course of the term. Like all binaries, this one is over-simple, which students come to see. But it is a useful concept for them as they begin their college journeys. And for some—like my former student—it’s germane even 25 years later! ​ Andrea Lunsford and student Jelani Lynch talk about the power of writing in Video Link : 1233a video in the Macmillan Community. Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Or share it with others and start a conversation? Join the Macmillan Community to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! ... View more

I’ve titled the new course I’m running this fall boldly: The Art and Craft of Teaching Creative Writing. I’ve been preparing the course over the past year. I’ve read pedagogical theory. I’ve spoken with a wonderful professor in the Education Department about how to best structure such a class.  I’ve talked with my colleagues who teach the course in our department and I’ve pored over their syllabi.  I’ve gone back to the classes I took in the education department myself, and I’ve wondered, a lot, what do I know about teaching creative writing and how did I learn what I know? Some of the material is familiar ground for me. I’ve written a textbook on the topic, The Practice of Creative Writing, and an instructor’s manual that goes with the book, and certainly I’m using that material in my course, to some extent. But teaching teachers is to stand in a different place from writing instruction for students. And standing in this new place, thinking about how to teach a class just for teachers of writing, all of whom are in our MFA program, I keep noticing a singular feature of the landscape; I keep coming back to one idea. Teaching well is the same as writing well. A good writing class session is so very like a good story or well formed poem. There’s a purpose. Things are clear. Mysterious, perhaps, frustrating, perhaps, but the work to figure it all out is possible, and rewarding. It’s pleasurable to experience more than one time. Humor is good, but not required.  What’s required is depth and truth and a kind of vulnerability and strong yearning to say yes, this matters.  This is important.  There are some surprises in the session/story and there’s heart, dialogue, drama, and a satisfying close that makes you want to come back in again. Designing a semester-long course is, for me, like designing a novel. There’s a main story line and my work is to get all the characters and plot points (or, in the case of class, lessons and readings) formed into satisfying, interesting chapters (Tuesdays and Thursdays). There’s almost nothing I’d rather do than design these experiences. So, unsurprisingly, the two things that have most improved my teaching have been the very same two things that have most improved my writing.  Devotion to clarity.  When I first started writing, I wanted to try to express something of my inner life in language. The things that worried me came out in a tumble. There was a lot of energy on my early pages, but not a lot of clarity. Where are we? Why are we here? Similarly, my early syllabi meant well.  But I was prone to getting off track, off topic, revising mid semester, even mid class period because I could see something so much better once I was in the midst of teaching it.  Students, like readers, want things to be clear and to be fair.                                      Attempting to be honest, authentic, vulnerable and sincere in my speech and action in real life has translated to the page for me as a writer. When I stopped trying to be artful and clever, when I let go of thought-experiments and intensive language play, I was able to work more on the very hard good work of creating a meaningful experience for the reader.  The work became less about me and my life and more an attempt to be in conversation with my fellow humans.  In the classroom, instead of trying to be Miss PhD Professor Really Does Know or, as I got older, Your Fun Young Professory Friend, instead of trying to be anything in the classroom other than myself—a person who studies the art and craft of writing—I tried to be more myself. The two endeavors—a devotion to clarity and a moment-by-moment attempt to be honest and thoughtful—are extremely challenging pursuits, at least for me.  Some practices off the page have supported me: cultivating friendships and mentorships with master craftsman, a meditation practice, and reading. This semester, I want to support my students in becoming the kinds of teachers they most want to be. I want to help them write about teaching in ways that are clear and meaningful. I want everything we do this semester to help us in the classroom, but also on the page. I think the art and craft of teaching and the art and craft of creating literature are twins. I would love to hear what you think. I’m at sellersh@usf.edu. ... View more

This post first appeared on March 21, 2013. Early on in my introductory poetry workshop, we discuss the difference between sentiment (emotion) and sentimentality (mawkishness, Hallmark cards, Lifetime holiday movies). First we talk about the ways in which sentimentality undercuts our ability to imbue our poems with real sentiment—it leads us toward cliché, it looks for the easy or more palatable way into an experience, it doesn’t require the level of intellectual and creative engagement we expect from good poems. Then we start making fun of poets. Okay, I say, imagine that you’re writing a parody of a poem and you want to make it wonderfully bad—full of clichés and cringe-worthy sentimentality. What are some key words you might use? “Heart,” someone always offers. We look for a little more specificity. “What should a heart not do in a poem?” I ask. “Skip a beat,” says one student. “Break,” says another. “End up in your throat,” offers someone else. Once we exhaust the heart possibilities, we move on, looking for the big offenders. What are some other words or tropes that might lead to sentimentality? I can usually get someone to come up with “soul,” which affords me an opportunity to write the word “soul” on the board, then draw a giant X through it—something I always like leaving on the board for the next class to see and fret over what sorts of things are being taught in creative writing classrooms. Usually someone mentions roses. Someone mentions the single tear. All of these go on the board (and I always offer the disclaimer that none of these rules is absolute—certainly, fantastic poems can be written using any number of potentially problematic words or images, provided the poet is savvy about how he or she uses them). Finally we move on to animals—butterflies as symbols of innocence, a bird as a vision of freedom. And, of course, there’s cuteness to be reckoned with—puppies, kittens, any three-legged quadruped. Sometimes I tell my students that they can only use a kitten in a poem if the kitten is dead. I’ve found that letting students poke fun at hypothetical poems before writing their own helps them to a) stay attuned to the siren song of schlock so that they can better resist it and b) maintain a sense of humor about the whole thing so that when someone does write a poem featuring that single tear or an alarmingly mobile heart, we can talk about it without the writer feeling defensive. After all, the battle against sentimentality is one we’re all fighting. Oh—and the dead kitten thing? A grad student took on that challenge, and wrote a beautiful, spare, weird poem that opened with a dead kitten in a shoebox. The poem surprised at every turn and was just accepted for publication. Of course a dead kitten could be even more sentimental than a live one, depending on how it’s rendered—the moral here, I think, is that if we as poets choose our words and our images with an eye toward circumventing the expected, we stand a much better chance of writing poems that are resonant, moving, and completely inappropriate for Hallmark. ... View more

How many words do you hear your students say that are new to you? For me, they are usually acronyms: OMG I know, but OMGD? (Oh my god, dude). LOL I know, but LYLAS? (Love you like a sister.) Recently I’ve heard “BAE” a lot, meaning “before anyone else” and hence “baby” or “sweetheart.” Anyway, I am always aware that youthspeak is two or three hundred steps ahead of me, so I keep an ear out for what they are saying. I also look forward to learning what new words dictionaries will include: this year Merriam Webster lists “anchor baby” and “vext” (to vent via text or text by voice) as well as “photoshopographer.” The OED says it has added roughly 500 new words already this year, including “twerk” (to move with a twitching motion), “crowdfund,” and “yarn-bombing” (covering public things like telephone poles with colorful knitted materials). Yarn Bombing By Joanbanjo (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons I wonder if “on fleek”—as in being perfect or “on point” —will make it. Having “eyebrows on fleek” has evidently become popular, at least for some. I like to engage students in discussions of new words and terms and find that they love talking about the latest slang as well as words that may or may not make it into dictionaries. So I usually have a “word of the year” contest sometime near the end of fall term: we can build our vocabularies while debating what word has been so prominent in the last year that it should win the prize. The OED chose “GIF” (as a verb) as the Oxford Dictionaries USA Word of the Year for 2012, “selfie” for 2013, and “vape” for 2014. The American Dialect Society (ADS) chose “hashtag” for its 2012 Word of the Year, “because” (introducing a noun, adjective, or adverb, as in “because Monday” or “because gorgeous”) for 2013, and “#blacklivesmatter” for 2014. ADS accepts nominations for Word of the Year all year long; nominations are ordinarily announced in early January (for the year that just ended) and voting begins, with every member of the Society casting one vote. I encourage my students to submit words of the year, along with a rationale for why they should be chosen. Then when the winner and runners up are announced, we can see how our nominees fared—and learn some new words! ... View more

In this series of posts, I’m thinking about ways to teach the Syrian refugee crisis using readings from Emerging.  Infographics offer a unique way for students to think about the crisis while also engaging metaissues of visual design and data presentation.  I would start by searching the web for these infographics, which are fairly easy to find using the search terms “infographic Syrian refugee.” (The example on the right comes from Visually.)   You might even ask students to locate these sources, allowing them to select infographics they find particularly useful or compelling. The introduction to Emerging has material on reading visual texts that can be useful in approaching infographics but there are some readings from the text you might bring into play as well. There’s a full portfolio of infographics contained in Emerging’s online content: Drake Martinet’s “Stacy Green, Will You Marry Me?,” Buckfire & Buckfire’s “Student Bullying,” and carinsurancecomparison.org’s “The Real Effects of Drunken Driving.” These online  selections (e-Pages) are useful for introducing students to the genre of the infographic and giving them a sense of the range of work it can do in terms of both rhetoric and composition.  Elizabeth Dickinson’s “The Future of Food”—contained in Emerging—is a fuller use of this genre. Dickinson’s work could be described as an infographic essay about world hunger.  Dickinson offers students additional tools for considering the rhetorical decisions involved in crafting a compelling infographic, particularly when thinking about what text to use, how to use statistics, and how to design the graphic. I think it would also be useful to have students read the selections from PostSecret in Emerging.  Though also a visual genre, PostSecret looks and acts differently than an inforgraphic. Having that contextual contrast might be a useful way into talking more about rhetoric and design. Using all of these readings together, I think it would be interesting to have students compose their own infographics about either the refugee crisis or some other compelling issue.  Such an assignment would broaden students’ understanding of composition and argument while offering them a chance for advocacy. If you have any assignments or suggestions for creating infographics, feel free link to and share in the comments below. 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

We sometimes display an encouraging if not particularly forceful approach to handbooks. We might require one, or recommend one, or recommend any of several, either at our individual course level or as a writing program policy. We tell students that “It’s there if you need it.” We might reinforce the “as you need it” model with our marginal comments on student papers, sometimes encouraging students to “Look it up in your handbook.” We then go about teaching our courses, with little structured use of the handbook either in classroom or out. Some students figure out it’s not really all that important, and what they need to know is on the Web anyway. Others buy it and wonder why, selling it back if they can at the end of the term and taking a loss. I saw a very different approach when I visited the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign a few weeks ago and met with directors of the international writing program, a large program that delivers courses for an increasingly important population, international students, for whom English is a second language. Directors Jin Kim and Cassandra Rosado are faculty in the linguistics department. Linguistics divides teaching responsibilities with the English Department, which offers writing courses to native speakers. These program directors take the handbook seriously. As the author, I am thrilled they have chosen to use Writer’s Help, Version 1.0 and now, this fall, Version 2.0. But I am also impressed with their very methodical and intentional uses of a required handbook. What’s different? They require students to buy the text, meaning, in this case, access to the online site, good for four years. They train their instructors in their pre-term workshops to use the chosen books effectively (and show them how easy it is to determine if students have purchased access). They’ve created an in-house Web site to support the use of Writer’s Help, with technical documentation and useful information about how to use the resource. They provide model assignments to their instructors and TAs, showing how to weave the handbook content into the syllabus and into specific assignments. They require several common assignments over the first few weeks that take students into the handbook, help them learn to search productively, and demonstrate the value of the resource. Cassandra and Jin also take advantage of Bedford’s technical and instructional support staff to get the most out of the required text, customizing it for their specific program and their own students. They show instructors how the work of one semester and the creation of a syllabus and assignments can be carried over to the next term, and how they can use a source file for a course to build multiple sections. They have figured out ways as program administrators to create a standard syllabus, which can then be inherited by all the sections and customized at the section level by individual instructors. They seek analytics from Bedford, so they know what students are searching on, what is being emphasized in courses, and how to continue to create rich interaction among instructors, students, and the text. I used the terms methodical and intentional above. I think that captures their approach. If we require students to pay for books and instructional resources, to my mind we have an obligation to show students the value of the resources. Toward that end, we should be methodical and intentional in our uses of course resources. Bedford provides strong support for instructors who want to create the best value for students from Bedford products. You will find links throughout the Macmillan English Community to instructor resources. My Bits coauthors and I always try to share best practices. Sure, we authors all love to sell books, but even more, we love to see our books used to good advantage. Check out these links if you want to keep thinking about “using the book.” From me: On Using the Handbook Campus-Wide Handbook Adoption Making Use of Review Comments From Nancy Sommers: Use a Handbook, Start a Habit From Andrea Lunsford: So, Where's the Index? ... View more