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

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

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

Today's guest blogger is ​ (see end of post for bio). When I teach the second semester course of the first-year composition sequence, an unofficial course goal of mine is to help students gain an understanding of their discourse community and what academic writing and research in their areas is like. I give each student the opportunity to focus the entire class on their individual academic discipline. Each student has great flexibility in terms of what direction the course takes. Throughout the course, students gain experience learning about genres of writing that are used within their discipline, how writing is used within the discipline, and what topics academics/professionals in their discipline have recently been writing about. In addition to the larger, more involved multimodal composition projects I include within my composition courses, I also find smaller, lower-stakes multimodal assignments to be valuable for students. Smaller assignments, such as this example, provide opportunities for students to experiment with multimodal composing. This way, students can take risks that they otherwise might not take with a larger project, but these attempts at different compositional techniques can offer students an increased range of approaches and tools to use when composing future multimodal projects. The following  in-class activity helps students to learn about writing in their discipline and discourse community through learning about academic articles and genre conventions. Objective For students to develop an understanding of how academics in their fields work as writers, helping to familiarize students with expectations for writing in their academic areas. Background Reading The Everyday Writer provides a useful collection of readings in the “Academic, Professional, and Public Writing” section, spanning chapters 17-25. Specifically, in my class, I encourage students to read the one chapter that connects best with their academic field in addition to chapter 17, Academic Work in Any Discipline. Each student then reads two chapters. Most academic majors fit nicely into one of the following chapters: Chapter 18, Writing for the Humanities Chapter 19, Writing for the Social Sciences Chapter 20, Writing for the Natural and Applied Sciences Chapter 21, Writing for Business Class Activity This activity can take a variety of shapes and last multiple class periods, depending on how an instructor chooses to integrate it into the curriculum. The outcome of the project is for students to create a multimodal ‘How To’ guide for future students in their majors regarding writing in their academic major. In my class, I limit the scope of this to focus on the genre of the academic article, and accordingly, students’ work on this project focuses on that one type of writing as well. I prefer to have students work in groups for this project, as it provides greater opportunity to converse about writing in a specific field, and also allows students to pool resources to complete the task. Once groups have formed according to related academic areas, students are tasked with determining the conventions associated with academic articles in their field and deciding how to collect that information and how to present it as a multimedia guide. I encourage students to conduct and capture interviews with professors from their discipline and to study multiple examples of the academic article genre and to connect their findings from both to specific concepts explained within The Everyday Writer chapter related to their field. Through their chapter reading and study of their academic articles, ensuing class discussions, and outside interviews, students identify key conventions and qualities of academic articles in their discipline. From there, the real work of creating the guide begins, with students considering how to demonstrate the conventions and how to convey the importance of those discussions. While the focus for every group’s guide will be about the same type of writing, the decisions of what matters most and explanations of why will differ, as will students’ plans for how to present that information as a guide for future students to refer to as they begin their work in this major. They’ll collaborate on a specific organization of the content, on what media to employ, of how to capture their determinations about the genre conventions, and ultimately on how to develop their respective guides. For instance, a group of nursing majors may develop a project that incorporates a presentation software, such as Prezi, Google Slides, or PowerPoint. Their focus would be on academic articles in healthcare, and they might choose to interview nurses, doctors, professors, or other healthcare professionals to get a general sense of how they use academic articles within their profession and what they value about this genre. Their presentation could be arranged by covering the general purposes for this genre and who uses the genre (both writers and readers). Some key points could be identified and then supported through clips captured (audio or visual) during their interviews. Other valued conventions could be identified through images taken of sample academic articles. For instance, the way an author uses outside research could be demonstrated through an image, or collection of images, of portions of an article to document the moves this writer made in blending research into her article. Students might also decide to illustrate a point through visual metaphor - perhaps a nursing student might include a diagram of a circulatory system to infer to readers the importance of connectivity throughout a text.  Altogether, these students might identify five key concepts and demonstrate them through various media and modes collected and presented through a presentation. While we can easily discuss this genre of writing and agree upon important conventions, discussion alone limits the potential for students to firmly grasp the importance of these conventions. By having students create these multimedia ‘how to’ guides, not only do they get experience analyzing the sorts of work they’ll do later in this class, but they also get an opportunity to practice rhetorical thinking for how best to convey their message to future students in their majors. Jason Dockter teaches first-year composition at Lincoln Land Community College. He completed his Ph.D. in English Studies at Illinois State University. His research focus is primarily on rhetoric/composition, with specific interests in online writing instruction and multimodal composition. 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

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

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

Today's guest blogger is Amanda Gaddam (see end of post for bio). Social media represents a large percentage of the reading and writing that first-year students do outside of the classroom, so it makes sense to acknowledge and even take advantage of it inside of the classroom. In my DePaul WRD 102 Basic Writing course, we use Instagram throughout the quarter to document various stages of their writing processes in unique and interesting ways, to provide a centerpiece of an in-depth rhetorical analysis project in the middle of the term, to facilitate conversations about audience, context, and purpose, and to create a multimodal final reflective essay with their course ePortfolios.  For basic writers in particular, using Instagram to create a gallery of their writing successes and challenges throughout the quarter has proved especially beneficial in boosting the amount of evidence and analysis final reflections. Background reading The following handbook sections provide useful questions for not only writing a final reflection for an online platform such as Digication, but also for selecting content and captions for photos taken throughout the quarter: Writer's Help 2.0 for Lunsford Handbooks: Ch.3a: Plan online assignments The Everyday Writer: Ch.24: Communicating in Other Media The St. Martin’s Handbook: Ch. 18: Communicating in Other Media Writing in Action: Ch. 4: A Writer’s Choices EasyWriter: Ch. 1c-1g in A Writer's Choices The Assignment: We Did It for the ‘Gram 1. I ask students to create an Instagram account (if they don’t already have one) and post at least five pictures with a hashtag unique to our class.  Most students have an Instagram account prior to my class, and those who don’t are able to sign up in less than two minutes.  Some students choose to create second Instagram accounts rather than post school-centered images to their personal or private accounts. I try not to give too many instructions about the content of their pictures; rather, I encourage students to think about their own writing processes—their challenges, habits, strategies, and resources—in order to take photos that reveal new or tacit knowledge about how they approach writing tasks. And, in the interest of fairness, I post photos to Instagram using the hashtag, too. 2. I engage the class in informal reflections and discussions in class about their rhetorical choices for composition, content, and editing.  By midterm week, students are required to have at least two photos posted to their Instagram accounts so that we have something to reflect on and talk about in class (weekly reminders to take pictures help students remember and meet this deadline). I ask students to bring in their photos, either in print or digitally, for a free write about rhetorical choices—why they chose to capture that particular moment, as well as the intended rhetorical effects of chosen filters, compositions, editing, and captions.  The results of the free writing jumpstart a discussion about cultivating personas, audience, and exigence.  3. I introduce the final reflection assignment about two weeks before the end of the quarter. As far as final reflection assignments go, my reflective essay prompt is fairly standard—I ask students to think about new strategies that they tried throughout the quarter, the challenges they faced as writers, and progress toward personal goals or course learning outcomes. I encourage them to use the Instagram photos they have taken over the quarter as evidence of the activities or processes they discuss in their essays because as we’ve no doubt discussed by this point in the term, evidence is crucial to support their claims.  4. I use a reflection worksheet to help students connect the actions or strategies depicted in the pictures to the course learning outcomes and their ongoing development as writers and students. Effective reflective writing is challenging; asking students to talk about the past often elicits simple reports of tasks they’ve accomplished rather than in-depth discussions on how they accomplished those tasks and what they’ll take away from the experiences.  To help students think about past, present, and future in their reflections, I ask them to complete the following worksheet in class: What you did How you did it Learning outcome Future applications I have students fill out the two columns on their own and talk to a partner to discover learning outcomes that the experiences can map onto and future applications for the knowledge or skills they have acquired.  5. Students write and present final reflections and their Instagram galleries to showcase the writing strategies they employed throughout the quarter. Digication ePortfolios are required of all students in every first-year writing course at DePaul, so students have the means and opportunity to create a multimodal reflective essay that informs the rest of their showcased work.  Most students choose to use the photo gallery function available on Digication, which allows viewers to scroll through the photos and read accompanying captions. Students' Images Below are some examples of photos taken by my students (and me). View more images on Instagram with #depaulwrd102. Reflection This assignment is an easy way to start talking about multimodality in the classroom because the platform is free and most students are experts walking into the classroom, which means they have a lot to say from the very beginning! Analyses of Instagram photos come naturally to most students, and they have very little trouble understanding how images can be read as texts. Finally, as a result of this assignment and the associated class activities, I have received some truly introspective and evidence-based reflections that were mostly free of report-like language and superficial appeals to my vanity as a teacher. Asking students to use their own images to reflect on their writing gets them thinking about how writing and media can complement, inform, and even complicate each other. 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. ... View more

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

Recently I had an opportunity to speak to a group of two-year college writing teachers in Texas. The topic very much on their minds: guns in their classrooms.  As I learned, the Texas legislature has passed a new law, which takes effect this coming August.  Here’s what it says: (You can read more at http://www.armedcampuses.org/texas/.  This site also has a petition to keep guns off campuses.) The teachers I talked with are enormously concerned about this new law and what it will mean for their teaching and for their students’ learning.  More than a few of them described “training” they are taking to help them prepare for and deal with the new law:  they are warned to “be very careful” not to introduce topics that might upset students.  And if a shooter appears in their classes, they are to face the shooter and shield their students.  Of course we talked about other things—primarily about how to help all of our students develop into confident and competent writers. But these conversations about guns in classrooms are what have stuck in my mind.  Every. Single. Day.  Many teachers I spoke with seemed fearful but resigned:  “This is Texas,” they said.  Maybe so, but I came away thinking about the havoc this new law can have:  we all know that college students are at a vulnerable time in their lives, that many of them are suffering from anxiety and depression. Research also shows that college-age students’ brains have not fully developed, especially in the area controlling split-second decisions.  These facts make having guns in classrooms seem counterproductive, at the very best. In addition, this law is almost certainly going to have a chilling effect on freedom of speech and on one of the foundations of higher education:  the opportunity to encounter ideas across the spectrum, including those that may be difficult to understand or accept.  I am fortunate to have taught at a university without guns, and I hope that will continue to be the case.  What I would like to do, though, is join a national movement of teachers, especially those who teach on campuses where guns are allowed in class, to declare that we will not teach in an atmosphere of grave danger. Arriving at the Bush International Airport in Houston on my journey home, I was met by a large red sign on the outside door:  Would I meet a person carrying a concealed licensed firearm?  In fact, I did not—at least not that I know of—but I was more cautious than usual.  It was a long day, and I hated concentrating on people with guns rather than thinking about students and their learning. ... View more

I wanted to take a quick break from our tour of the third edition of Emerging to discuss how to teach the current controversy between Apple and the FBI.  As I write this post, the standoff between the two continues, with the FBI attempting to force Apple into helping them to gain access to the iPhone belonging to Syed Rizwan Farook, whose shooting spree killed over a dozen people in San Benardino, and Apple resolutely refusing to cooperate. To provide students some background on the issues involved, you might ask them to read the letter from Apple CEO Tim Cook, which stakes out Apple’s position and its perception of what’s at stake, as well as the statement from FBI Director James Comey, which presents the FBI’s position on the matter.  These two documents are useful texts for analysis in and of themselves, played out as they are on national media stages.  And it’s also useful for students to consider the ways in which the specific positions of each side have been managed, marketed, repackaged, and flattened into simplistic questions of privacy and security. Emerging does offer a fantastic reading to help students explore this issue: Peter Singer’s “Visible Man; Ethics in a World without Secrets.” Singer’s essay has a bit of theoretical weight to it, opening with Bentham’s notion of the Panopticon and invoking the concept of “sousveillance” as well.  At the heart of Singer’s essay, though, is the question of privacy in relation to changing technology and questions of security—the very questions at the heart of the Apple v. FBI debate.  For Singer, the solution to some of these issues is for the watched to watch the watchers.  WikiLeaks is his example in that case.  And while that probably isn’t a solution in this current case, Singer’s thinking nevertheless foregrounds these vital issues and offers students tools to think through the complexities. Give it a try.  I think you’ll find it works great. 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

Last week, I heard from a colleague in South Carolina who had visited one of my technical writing course websites and wanted more information on the discussion forum activities that I ask students to complete. As I replied to her email message, I realized that there was a lot that I do with online forum discussions that I haven’t ever written down. I didn’t have any links to point her to! Today I plan to fix that problem by sharing the details on how I set up online discussions as a participation activity, how I manage students, and how I assess their work in these discussions. Next week, I’ll share the three kinds of discussion that I ask students to participate in. Setting Up the Discussions I require participation in the discussion forums as a part of my course, mentioning the requirement on the syllabus and on the course’s assignment overview page. Since the course I am teaching is 100% online, there is no classroom discussion. I use the Discussions tool in Canvas, our CMS, as a substitute for the interaction and conversations that would typically take place in a face-to-face class. I don’t bother with much discussion of netiquette. All work and participation in the course is already governed by the Undergraduate Honor System and the Virginia Tech Principles of Community, so troubling behavior is already covered. Along with those two documents, I use relevant information from Chapter 3 of the textbook I use, Practical Strategies for Technical Communication by Mike Markel. This chapter discusses how social media and other electronic tools such as messaging technologies, wikis, and shared document workspaces can be useful for collaboration in the workplace. I ask students to read that chapter in the first week of the course to address other issues of appropriateness and professionalism in online communication. Further, this overview of digital collaboration gives the class’s online discussion additional relevance as preparation for the workplace. Arranging Students into Groups In the face-to-face classroom, many of the discussion questions I use work well in a full-class discussion. Online, however, students have a harder time engaging with 21 other students in a full-class discussion. The long, scrolling list of replies creates a giant screen of text, with 22 students repeating one another’s points either because they haven’t read what has already been posted or because posts have been added while they are writing. The best solution I have found is to arrange students into small groups of five to six students each. Canvas allows me to limit students to discussing with the members of their group only. It’s much easier for a student to have an engaged discussion of ideas with four other people than it is with 21 others. There are ways to set up a similar situation with other CMS or discussion forum tools. Before I used Canvas, I set up copies of the same prompt with the group name in the subject line (e.g., Group One Biography Discussion, Group Two Biography Discussion). I assigned students to groups in a post on the course website, and then students were able to discuss the ideas by simply choosing the right subject line. Assessing Online Discussions Admittedly, all the discussion questions I use require a lot of reading and grading on my part. I typically grade discussion participation based on whether the student did the work and the amount of effort that went into the task. I consider the forum posts as first draft writing, so I do not mark errors in spelling or grammar. I do ask students to focus on a professional presentation of ideas, and I contact anyone who is being too informal privately to correct the situation. At the end of the term, I ask students to write a Completion Report that reviews their participation in the forums by looking at the frequency of posts, reviewing the best posts, and providing an overall assessment of their work during the term. Their self-assessment in this final project gives me all the details I need to determine their participation grades for the course. Suggestions? If you use online forums in your class, whether it’s face-to-face, hybrid, or online, please tell me about the strategies that you use in the comments below. How do you manage the discussion? What assessment strategies do you use? I want to hear from you! And be sure to come back next week for my post on the prompts I use for online discussions. [Photo: Detail from University Life 143 by Francisco Osorio, on Flickr] ... View more

This post was originally published on April 15, 2014. At CCCC last month, I found myself in my room one night, reflecting on all the wonderful sessions I’d attended and ideas I’d heard. In one session, Elisabeth Kramer-Simpson from New Mexico Tech and Elizabeth Tomlinson from West Virginia University inspired me with their discussion of internships and open writing assignments in the technical writing classroom.            As I thought about their presentations, I realized that I wasn’t content with the project I was planning to introduce the Monday after I returned from the convention. I had an odd desire to go into the classroom and say, “Let’s scrap the plan for the rest of the term. What do you want to know about technical writing this term?”            I knew it wouldn’t be the most responsible plan, but I was tempted. If students would engage, it could lead to a great series of activities. I wasn’t sure that they would engage though, and I feared that the more structured activities we had completed before I went off to CCCC would clash with such a completely open plan.            I found myself searching for a middle ground. The next project was to be job-application materials. The assignment I had always used was to ask students to find a job posting and write a cover letter and resume to apply for the job. I wondered, though, what would happen if I asked them all to write their own assignment for the project.            I began wondering how opening the assignment to more choice would customize it to what the student truly needed or wanted. If the student was trying to get a summer job, she could write the application materials the job asked for. If she wanted to establish an online portfolio, she could write the texts for that. If she was trying to network with people interested in the same discipline, she could write the documents that would help her do that.            I imagined that the deliverables for the assignment could include all of the following:            a traditional resume and cover letter an application essay a personal website a cleaned up public Facebook profile a  Linked In profile a GitHub repository and profile an Academia.edu profile            The more that I thought about the options, the more I found myself wondering why I should be the one to define what they need as job application materials. Why not let them tell me what they needed?            So I scrapped my original plans and created a new, open assignment that let students choose the project they would work on. The result? Students actually smiled when I explained that they could do whatever job application materials were appropriate for what they wanted to do in the near future. I had students who excitedly told me they never had time to work on GitHub, and that they were so glad that they could do so as homework now.  Other students told me that their academic advisors had been urging them to set up a LinkedIn profile but they hadn't gotten to it. Now they could.            We wrapped up the project last week, and it has been one of the best activities I’ve taught. There was enough overlap in what the different tasks they chose called for that we had plenty to talk about and work on in class. At the same time, they have all had the chance to work on documents they needed and wanted to work on. Why didn’t I  choose this option before?                       [Photo: Jobs Help Wanted by photologue_np, on Flickr] ... View more

I just returned from a visit with grandnieces Audrey (11) and Lila (8) and, as always, I loved observing what they were up to regarding literacy/ies. They had a two-day holiday from school, so in all, we had three days for fun. We started by seeing the new Star Wars film, which they judged to be “way too long” but engaging; they were outraged by the death of a favorite character, and they loved Finn. They also deftly pointed out several product placements, showing that their critical antennae are up at least part of the time. The next day we had rain and even some snow, so that meant—reading! We have our own book clubs when I’m not there: each girl chooses a book, and we read two chapters and then have a text or FaceTime talk about it. I am constantly impressed with their reflections and with how they anticipate what may happen next (and why). This day, though, we could read together. Lila chose one of Frances O’Roark Dowell’s Phineas L. MacGuire books, and over the course of the day she read the entire volume to me out loud. She has a wicked sense of humor and a very soft heart, so we had to pause and laugh or commiserate often as the adventures piled up. Once she misread, saying “He rode his book” rather than “He rode his bike” and got so tickled that she lost her breath laughing—and then rode around the room on her book. She also took to correcting Phineas (known as Mac), who is prone to refer to “Me and Marcus.” Lila silently changed this to “Marcus and I,” nodding disapprovingly as she did so. This book’s lessons are pretty obvious—compassion and kindness win out over obnoxiousness and selfishness every time—so we talked about that and about experiences she had had with both in her second grade class. Eight-year-olds have a lot on their minds, as this reading experience reminded me. And so do eleven-year-olds.  Audrey and I took turns reading the third book in Lois Lowry’s Giver series. Since we’d already read the first two books in our typical book club way, we spent some time talking about what had happened in The Giver and Gathering Blue, including a meditation on “utopian” and “dystopian” and the role these words played in the series. Then we plunged in to The Messenger, which Audrey soon said “cut to the chase” better and more quickly than the first two. She picked up right away on the word “trade,” saying “there’s something going on with this word!” And she was right, as the plot turns on an ominous Trade Mart that comes to threaten the village. We stopped often to reflect on events and talk about our expectations and hopes for the characters, our assessment of the story (“really gripping!”), and words (“Wow, ‘subtle’ has a ‘b’ in it. How cool!”). We didn’t finish the book in one day, but did so in the car on the way to the airport. Now we are embarking on the fourth and last book in the series, Son, and I look forward to many text messages and emails and phone calls about it. After a day of reading and with the weather still bad they turned to building. They each had a Roominate kit (started by girls and meant for girls—and boys—who want to build things). The kits come with four pieces of plastic (about 10” by 8” ) meant to serve as three walls and a floor—and then a bunch of other smaller plastic parts that can be fit together in different ways, colored paper and felt, and a few other things. There are some pictures but only bare-bones instruction:  “just build whatever you imagine!” they say. Lila quickly announced she was going to build a restaurant called Avery’s. She papered the walls, built four tables for two, fit them out with napkins, menus, and candles, and set up a serving station. She made a big menu board (ice cream sundaes for $4; chicken tenders for $3; grilled cheese sandwiches “on the house”) as well as a “daily specials” board, a welcome sign, and a tipping policy (“give a lot”).  Audrey took more time to think but then decided to build her ideal cabin for Camp Kanata, where she and Lila will spend two weeks this summer. If you can enlarge the photo below, you’ll see how intricate the work is: the stack of tiny felt t-shirts on the top shelf of a cupboard, next to a dress hanging on a paper hanger; the two bunk beds with quilts and pillows and signs for the girls assigned to them (Eva, Audrey, etc.); the windows, broom (made with a cut-off pencil) and paper dustpan; the bedside table with its candle (“really, really hard to make”) and The Giver on it; a bookshelf (Smile is there, along with Moby Dick); and what she called “signage”—Cabin Clean Up Score Card, Camp Rules, Chore Chart, even a fan (top right) that she rigged up with batteries (it works!). Audrey and Lila worked all day on these construction projects, chatting away, often to themselves, about challenges and problems they had to solve and the effects they were trying to create. Since they were working with very small items like candles, a lot of hand-eye-brain coordination was called for, along with concentration and focus. I had a hard time getting them to take a break for lunch! They graciously let me join the team and I was sometimes allowed to help out (“Aunt A, would you cut another circle just like this one?”). So the maker movement—and reading—are alive and well in Chapel Hill. And on these two days, while both girls used the Internet to look up things they needed (definitions of terms, how to do this or that), they were not as tied to the iPads as they are sometimes wont to be. For now, I’m starting our next “book club” books and watching for additions and improvements to the Roominates! ... View more

Recently, Jerry Nelms posted a very interesting comment on procrastination to the WPA listserv. In it, he reviewed some research on procrastination and recommended Eric Jaffe's "Why Wait? The Science Behind Procrastination," published in Observer 26.4 (April 2013). I expect as many teachers procrastinate as do students. I am certainly not a procrastinator (described in the literature as people who chronically put things off even though they know doing so is harmful). But I have had my moments: I vividly remember having an assignment to review Mina Shaughnessy’s Errors and Expectations shortly after it came out. I was still in graduate school and awed at the opportunity to review a work I greatly admired. In fact, I felt intimidated, and these feelings led me to put off and put off and put off. Eventually, I recall giving myself a stern talking-to and deciding that I would not allow myself to do a single thing until I had written five pages of the review. It took me more than eight hours and I was sweating it all the way through, but I sat at the typewriter until I had those pages. In his WPA listserv post, Jerry points out that he sees students procrastinate out of such intimidation, or out of fear that they won’t do a good enough job. These students may not be “official” procrastinators—the twenty-some percent of us who are chronic procrastinators—but even occasional procrastination in high-stakes circumstances can be a serious challenge. In J. R. Ferrari’s Still Procrastinating? The No Regrets Guide to Getting It Done (2010), he recommends several ways to combat procrastination, including offering rewards for those who get things done early rather than punishments for those who are late. He uses the tax deadline as an example, saying that even procrastinators might get their taxes in early if they had a financial incentive. This strikes me as a sensible idea that could easily be adapted to the classroom: for major assignments, students could get a bonus of some kind for early submission. Better yet, individuals could offer themselves an incentive: a special treat if they get the assignment done ahead of time. Source: Post Memes on Flikr​ In his post, Jerry Nelms recommends putting the topic of procrastination front and center in the classroom, talking through some of the research on it, pointing out that chronic procrastinators often don’t do nearly as well on assignments as their non-procrastinating peers, and asking students to join in conversation about their own putting-it-off habits, and how to overcome them. When my students are working on a major project, we almost always break it into smaller parts or tasks, so that the deadlines are less intimidating and hence easier to meet. In addition, I ask students to make a term calendar, working backwards from the due dates of all their assignments (we try for all classes) and then figuring out when the assignment needs to be started in order to get it in on time (or earlier). Many students keep electronic calendars, though I still see a good number who like to hold onto a paper copy—or who keep both an electronic and a paper calendar. I first started keeping such a calendar in my first year of college: my week-at-a-glance book was always with me, and it served me very well. The transition from high school to college, where students must take charge of their own time, is a difficult one for many, as it was for me. An assignment calendar can help! Research shows that for chronic procrastinators counseling can be valuable, and such help is usually available on college campuses. But most conclude that in the long run, dealing with procrastination is a matter of failing to self-regulate. That’s something most people can do a little work on, and it’s worth discussing with our students. ... View more

The gap between the study of comics and the study of serious literature within academia has been shrinking in recent years, as campuses include more graphic novels in their first-year composition courses and in “one book” programs.  The “highbrow”/”lowbrow” divide has also been diminishing as works in comics format win prestigious literary prizes and rave reviews.  This year at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association a dozen sessions were devoted to panels on comics and graphic novels, including a panel held in a guarded room about the controversial Charlie Hebdo cartoons satirically depicting the prophet Mohammed. For those teaching writing courses, the session I participated in on Developments in Comics Pedagogy drew a particularly lively crowd, despite its early morning slot on the first day of the conference.  The panel had been organized by Derek McGrath of Stony Brook University, who has been championing comics in his regional MLA NEMLA for many years.  You can read the way he frames the session here: Primer for “Developments in Comics Pedagogy.” McGrath opened the session with a discussion of two-way communication with fans that seems to be central to the cultural conversation about manga, comics produced in Japan or in the style of Japanese comics. He noted that the process of “scanlation” encourages rich forms of engagement in which readers of comics may develop or enhance story lines as they participate in the scanning, translation, and editing of comics from one language into another language, as in the case of an issue from Soul Eater. He also talked about the way that comics functioned as “tangible objects,” even as the rise of e-books might dematerialize the text. Co-organizer Keith McCleary of the University of California, San Diego, showed several impressive examples of comics developed by his students, and he emphasized how instructors needed to manage the “high anxiety” that students have about performing as artists and how digital retracing and other computational tools might assist students worried about reproducing unrealistically dexterous production.  Those interested in McCleary’s comics pedagogy can check out his online teaching portfolio, which is packed with prompts and examples. He also chortled about his own naiveté in underestimating “the very strong political feelings that they had” and the frankness of opinions that students might express, even about superhero comics like Batwoman: Elegy and Marvel’s Civil War:   “I thought we would be on the same page.” But he acknowledged that comics helped them engage in more substantive political debate and grapple with real disagreements more than they might otherwise.  McCleary warned that too often college courses assigned the same “politically correct” memoirs in graphic novel formats, which might enforce uniformity in classroom discussion. Nick Sousanis of the University of Calgary continued the theme of ameliorating student fears, particularly among undergraduates who might identify as “non-drawers.”  Sousanis has been getting a lot of attention of late for his innovative graphic dissertation, Unflattening, which is now available from Harvard University Press.  He has been praised by luminaries such as Cathy Davidson for producing a document pointing toward avenues for completely reinventing the deliverables of a Ph.D., and by Andrea Lunsford for advancing multimodal composition.  Like McCleary, Sousanis showed the prolific work of his own students, particularly as a venue for health graphics, including a publication-worthy comic on depression.   He noted that emphasizing a full range of narrative techniques could be important and praised Matt Madden’s 99 Ways to Tell a Story as a useful pedagogical graphic text.  In talking about the value of sketch notes and visual analysis and annotation, he also showed the results of assigned exercises for using tracing paper atop a comics layout as a way to demonstrate graphically “how much they can notice.”  As an instructor, he characterized his task as helping students to “figure out what they don’t know that they know.” Susan E. Kirtley of Portland State University described some of the unique challenges that she faced as an administrator developing the PSU post-baccalaureate Certificate in Comic Studies and her successes recruiting faculty from multiple disciplines to teach elective courses such as Jewish comics or manga that rounded out a curriculum requiring rigorous preparation in theory and history.  She observed that participation from the local comics community had also enriched the program.  Kirtley also laughed about a student initially querying if “you want to get fired?” She credited the program’s continued good health to “speaking the administrative language” and navigating “the sheer amount of red tape,” as well as benefiting from wise counsel from peers in similar positions championing the academic value of comics, such as Ben Saunders of the University of Oregon. Maria Elsy Cardona of Saint Louis University talked about teaching Spanish literature with comics and the benefits of advertising courses with disarming cartoons.  In addition to using comics as a means to introduce students to Spanish Literature, she uses comics to address difficult issues of social justice such as gender discrimination.  In her course "Between Laughter and Tears, Gender Stereotypes in Spanish Comics"—a cross-listed course with the Department of Women and Gender Studies at SLU—she uses Spanish comics to talk about issues of gender discrimination. The course, thus, looks at gender inequality both at the local and the global level. As an expert in children’s literature, Joe Sutliff Saunders talked about the value of a comparative exercise with comics and picture books in a graduate course. He noted the value of teaching a comics course not firmly within the established body of knowledge, but at the edge of disciplinary exploration.  Eventually he dedicated a whole course to examining comics and picture books alongside each other and asking how the theory of each illuminated the other.  Elizabeth “Biz” Nijdam of the University of Michigan, who has taught writing with Understanding Rhetoric, described a variety of uses for comic books in the college classroom.  She argued that teaching history with comics could be an extremely effective way to use them pedagogically, particularly in the case of covering photographic and visual representations of the Holocaust.  Like Cardona, she has used comics for teaching a foreign language, and like Sousanis and McCleary she has found herself attending to lowering classroom anxiety about artistic competence.  She plugged the online software package Pixton as a helpful tool and distributed one of her own comics to attendees. In the question and answer portion of the panel there was a wide-ranging discussion that covered everything from questions about assessment (and a possible answer in contract grading) to questions about containing textbook costs.  Of course, given the intensive review and production processes of traditional textbooks, there can be plenty of sticker shock to go around. Given this lively panel, I am pleased to have McCleary on board for the instructors’ manual of the forthcoming edition of Understanding Rhetoric. ... View more