In today's "What We've Learned" video, Elizabeth Kleinfeld, one of the authors of The Bedford Book of Genres, discusses taking advantage of the chat feature during online synchronous classes. With so much focus on adapting teaching techniques from in-person to online, she additionally reflects on how to bring this online feature into in-person instruction.   ... View more

Today’s guest blogger is Kim Haimes-Korn, a Professor of English and Digital Writing at Kennesaw State University. Kim’s teaching philosophy encourages dynamic learning and critical digital literacies and focuses on students’ powers to create their own knowledge through language and various “acts of composition.” She likes to have fun every day, return to nature when things get too crazy, and think deeply about way too many things. She loves teaching. It has helped her understand the value of amazing relationships and boundless creativity. You can reach Kim at khaimesk@kennesaw.edu or visit her website: Acts of Composition   Overview We have learned much from the pandemic, including flexibility, resiliency, and adaptation. Like many teachers out there, I had to look back on previously successful assignments and rethink them for this new context. I have learned that it is important that we see these modifications as value added rather than simply revisions made based on situational limitations.  Terence Thomas' virtual review of Yellowstone One of these assignments is the Experiential Reviews and Immersive Experiences assignment which I wrote in 2019. been working for years now with the ideas of experiential reviews and immersive experiences—I am fascinated with the ways we can translate real, live experiences into virtual experiences that give readers a sense of being there. Digital and multimodal composition allow students to create these types of non-linear texts that represent reality and allow for interaction and broad exploration for readers. In this assignment, students immerse themselves into a physical environment and try to recreate that for their readers through embedded links, exploratory paths, visual images, and other microcontent. I ask students to go beyond description and provide a triangulated picture while also reviewing the location from their own perspectives. The review is a common digital genre and gives students opportunities to create engaging, non-linear content for public audiences.   Our current “shelter-in-place” status had me return to this assignment and revise it to fit this new reality as a virtual review. At first, I was disappointed that I couldn’t do the assignment as it was originally designed as a physical experience, but I decided to modify it by adding virtual options for students to review. And in fact, our current at-home status created a stronger need and desire for these kinds of experiences in ways we have never before considered. I noticed in my media feeds that so many places and organizations were meeting this need through new virtual tours of their museums, parks, events, and other public spaces. With so many emerging options, it made sense for students to review these virtual tours, compare them and provide feedback on the quality of the experience, and recommend them to others. Again, something that started out as a compromise from the original assignment now felt more meaningful due to our current situation.     Background Resources The St. Martin’s Handbook - Ch. 24, Communicating in Other Media; Ch. 32, Writing to Make Something Happen in the World The Everyday Writer (also available with Exercises) - Ch. 20, Communicating in Other Media; Ch. 21, Writing to Make Something Happen in the World EasyWriter (also available with Exercises) - Ch. 19, Writing across Cultures and Communities   Some Resources for Virtual Tours: Take a Virtual Visit to a National Park 12 Famous Museums Offer Virtual Tours You Can Take From Your Couch How to Virtually Explore the Smithsonian From Your Living Room Google Arts & Culture Virtual Experiences   Steps of the Assignment: First, research – Students can search out their own locations for virtual visits, but I had fun researching options to give them ideas. There are many aggregate articles that list virtual experiences and can give ideas about categories for exploration. I included a couple in the resources section above but I like to have students brainstorm on their own and consider the range of possibilities before choosing their site. Once they have reviewed many options (and perhaps shared ideas with others), students choose a virtual experience to review. I encourage them to choose something that fits with their interests. Sometimes students choose something they have always wanted to see (“I was in Paris but didn’t get a chance to see the Louvre” or “I am curious about Yellowstone National Park” or “I wanted to see Washington, DC, and my grandfather’s grave in Arlington Cemetery”) or sometimes they choose a location that they never heard of before and discovered through their brainstorming. It is important that they choose a location that is immersive and allows for a true virtual experience rather than a static website brochure.  Meghan Cobler's screenshot from the New England Aquarium’s livestream Students then go to the virtual location, “walk” around, and note specific perspectives and artifacts they see on their journeys. They should take notes and screenshots along the way to gather evidence that will help them represent this virtual space. I also encourage them to try out Google Street View, which enables them to explore the surrounding area of their locations to get a better sense of context.  Once students collect “field” data, they pull it together as a written review. I have students add these reviews to their course blogs, but they can also create them as documents that allow for links and images and some interactivity. We share resources on how to write a review, emphasizing that it is both a description of their location and recommendation, based on their individual perspectives. We look at samples of different kinds of professional and student reviews to get a sense of the genre. I require that they include purposeful embedded links, images with captions, an embedded Google Map, and references and related resources. We then share them with class members for peer review and live feedback aimed towards revision.   James Daniel’s virtual review of The LouvreReflections on the Activity Students took on the challenge and visited a variety of places both locally and all around the world. They analyzed and produced interesting multimodal texts that speak to the quality of the experience and provide authentic reviews to an audience with a real need. I had students visit world class museums (The Louvre in Paris, The Smithsonian), zoos and wildlife spaces (the San Diego Zoo and Boston Aquarium), historic buildings, town squares, National parks, concerts, music venues, and other local and national events and spaces. Also, of particular interest, I worked with a visually impaired student who chose to visit several of these sites and review them for issues of accessibility and enjoyment for others with visual impairment. It is fun for students to share these experiences with others and realize the potential impact of this kind of writing that represents a live experience and helps us step out without leaving our homes. I have included some links below if you want to see live versions of some sample virtual reviews: The New England Aquarium – Meghan Cobler Yellowstone National Park – Terence Thomas The Louvre – James Daniel Patterson Great Falls – T.J. Wetmore Note: These links may expire, so please refer to the images throughout the post if you encounter a broken link. ... View more

In today's "What We've Learned" video, Nancy Sommers (@nancy_sommers), author of Writer's Reference, Rules for Writers with 2020 APA Update, Pocket Style Manual, and Bedford Handbook with 2020 APA Update, discusses how handbooks provide a shared language for instructors and students to discuss student writing and writing concepts.  ... View more

    Today’s guest blogger is Tanya Rodrigue‌, an associate professor in English and coordinator of the Writing Intensive Curriculum Program at Salem State University in Massachusetts.   In my last post, I provided instructors with a step-by-step approach on how to conduct peer review in an online environment. I suggested the following steps:   Step #1: Teach students what peer review is, what it does, how to do it, and why it’s valuable. Step #2: Teach students what constitutes “good” writing for any given assignment. Step #3: Choose an online platform to facilitate peer review based on the advantages and drawbacks of the platform. Step #4: Choose a peer review activity that best suits the needs of the assignment and your students. Step #5: Make students accountable for providing and using peer feedback for revisions.   In the fourth step of the process, instructors can choose from a myriad of peer review activities. Below I offer six kinds of peer review activities with brief examples, all of which can be used in face-to-face courses and adapted for an online environment. They are organized into different categories according to the extent to which they are structured and the level of direct engagement students may have with each other.   Structured silent peer review This peer review activity is the most commonly used in face-to-face courses and in online environments. The instructor first creates a detailed list of peer review questions. Students then access the questions, exchange their papers, and respond to the instructor’s questions. In an online environment, students can exchange their papers and response in a number of ways. For example, students could upload their papers to an LMS or a third-party platform. Peers can download the papers and write question responses in a comment box. Click here for an example of this kind of peer review activity.   Student-directed silent peer review This kind of peer review activity is student-centered and student driven. Each student is responsible for eliciting the kind of feedback they think would be most helpful at this stage of the writing process. One common structure for such an activity is to ask each student to identify 2-3 strengths of their paper; 2-3 parts of their paper they believe needs strengthening; and a list of specific questions in which they want their peers to respond. In an online environment, for example, students exchange papers, including their peer review guidelines at the top of the paper, in their LMS or on a third-party platform. The student peer reviewer downloads the paper and provides comments in a document or in a comment box. This peer review activity is most effective when the instructor models how to respond to questions and take up the author’s self-identified strengths and weaknesses.    Combination of structured/student-directed silent peer review This kind of peer review combines the structured silent peer review approach with the student-directed peer review. An instructor invites students to ask for specific feedback from their peers and provides peer reviewers with a list of questions in which to respond. Click here for an example of this kind of peer review.   Structured oral peer review A structured oral peer review is a synchronous activity that is carefully facilitated by the instructor, with either direct instruction on how students should engage and comment on each other’s work or loose guidelines for how they might talk about their work. In an online environment, Zoom break-out rooms can be utilized for this kind of peer review. Please note the instructor must ensure each student has access to other’s papers before and/or during the review conversation. One example of this kind of peer review is The Gossipy Peer Review, my all-time favorite activity described in this Bedford Bits blog post.   Student-directed oral peer review Like the structured oral peer review approach, the student-directed oral peer review is a synchronous activity. The student-directed oral peer review is simply an online conversation, perhaps in Zoom break-out rooms, wherein students speak to one another about their papers. I find this approach most effective when instructors provide a basic framework for how to approach a conversation. Students may stray away from the task at hand without such support. Click here for one example of guidelines I designed for my students in an audio storytelling class.    Semi-structured student-directed oral or written peer review This peer review approach is student-directed with some structure and can either be used in a synchronous environment or for a written assignment. Instructors provide students with a set of flexible guidelines and ask them to use these guidelines to give their peers feedback. My favorite peer activity in this category is the use of Bill Harts-Davison’s “Describe, Evaluate Suggest” heuristic. Students engage with this video to understand the method, then use the method to provide feedback on their peer’s work. This feedback approach is most successful when it is modeled by the instructor. Click here to see what this activity could look like in an LMS. ... View more

In today's "What We've Learned" video, Nancy Sommers (@nancy_sommers), author of  Writer's Reference, Rules for Writers with 2020 APA Update, Pocket Style Manual, and Bedford Handbook with 2020 APA Update, discusses engaging students in social, cultural, and public health issues that go beyond the classroom.    ... View more

Bruce Springsteen's notorious collaboration with Jeep-Stellantis is now a part of Super Bowl ad history, and with good reason. For in this rather heavy-handed attempt to promote harmony at a time of severe political crisis, the Boss, it appears, has pleased no one. Commentary from both the left and the right excoriates his sentimental quest for "common ground" in a country that is bursting apart at the seams. Such is the stuff of which cultural-semiotic analyses are made, and I will accordingly pursue a brief one here. The first thing is to set aside the question of whether or not Springsteen has "sold out" by abandoning his long policy of refusing to lend his superstar status to commercial appeals. While this has been a concern voiced by his fans, it is not really relevant to an analysis of the Jeep ad itself. And for what it's worth, I think that his motives were quite sincere in all this, with personal enrichment having nothing to do with his agreeing to take on the assignment. So this is hardly corporate caving by the Boss. Nor do I want to get involved in the argument over the religious imagery that is so prominent in the ad (relevant as it would be to a more extended analysis). It's an "issue" (as they say) all right, as is the question of whether an American common ground can be found that could include the kind of people who think that the Holocaust is funny, or that breaking into the halls of Congress while brandishing Confederate battle flags is somehow a "patriotic" act. To do so would land me in a bog of political partisanship that would lie outside of a dispassionate semiotic analysis. Rather, what I want to focus on is the extraordinarily outdated semiotics of the ad itself, which seeks to present a vision of an America united by the imagery of a pre-industrial, rural land. This is signified by everything from breathtakingly beautiful shots of snow covered prairies and empty wide-open spaces to even Springsteen's cowboy hat and scuffed boots. Brief shots of urban scenes interspersed between the longer, more lovingly presented panoramas of unspoiled nature—along with barns and silos—do little to obviate the message that the geographical center of America is also its moral center: the Heartland at the core of American being that has been so much a part of the Farm Aid benefit concerts. Except that this is two economic transformations behind the times. America's industrial revolution began the shift from a rural to an urban society in the nineteenth century.  The late twentieth century saw the abandonment of the industrial economy for a post-industrial restructuring that transformed much of the American heartland into a financially stagnant Rust Belt now overwhelmed by opioid abuse. The result has been one of geographical socio-economic dispersion, with America's wealth concentrated in urban centers from Seattle to Silicon Valley (and Beach), Boston to Atlanta, and every city with a strong hi-tech and/or financial services economic foundation, while the rest of the country has been left behind. Just look at an election map: blue-voting America constitutes only a small fraction of the actual land area of the nation; the rest is red, and increasingly impoverished. So by seeking to make a metaphor of national harmony out of the cartological placement of a small chapel in Kansas, the Jeep ad simply misses the point. The American dream itself has been so decentered that it can no longer be found in most of the country. (And lest the rich urban centers start feeling smug about their situation, they too have been fractured into an ever-wealthier upper-middle to upper-class caste, squeezing out a middle-class that can no longer afford the rent and gentrifying the ever-shrinking enclaves of the poor.) Basically, an America that has prided itself on building the largest middle class in history now finds that there is no longer any "middle" there. No amount of sentimental advertising harking back to an America that no longer exists is going to change such a situation. Thus, the most significant part of Jeep's Super Bowl sermon is that, apart from some fleeting glimpses of a few people scattered here and there in the ad, Springsteen is all alone, interacting with no one. The American dream has become just that: a private dream, which the ad so much resembles in its cinematography and overall esthetic presentation. Epilogue: Or perhaps a private nightmare, for after I completed this blog the word went out that Jeep has pulled the ad due to an embarrassing Springsteen DUI bust that has suddenly broken cover. Somehow, I think that this is simply a pretext to erase yet another corporate attempt to commodify sweetness and light that backfired.  Maybe the Boss should have consulted with Kylie Jenner before signing on to this thing.   "Jeep" by Eduardo Pelosi is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0 ... View more

In Everything’s an Argument (soon to be in its 9th edition!), John Ruszkiewicz and I devote an entire chapter to defining terms and arguing that definitions matter, legally, socially, personally—and providing lots of examples to back up that claim, from the way the word “marriage” is defined in the now infamous Defense of Marriage Act to how "racism” is defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary (a definition the dictionary revised after recent college grad Kennedy Mitchum wrote to them pointing out the inadequacy of their current definition). And we point out how definitions can shape or control or oppress us personally, as when a label (“developmentally disabled,” for example) puts us in a category that limits our potential. During the second Trump impeachment trial, I paid close attention to the words and phrases the two sides used most often, remembering an analysis from the first impeachment of the former president that compared the frequency of words and phrases used by the two sides and found that they seldom overlapped. I’m hoping one of the news organizations will undertake similar research for this second impeachment. But in the meantime, this event provides a fine opportunity for our students to investigate, explore, and perhaps challenge frequently used words and their definitions. Here are just a few we might start with: impeach/impeachment oath of office managers desecration mob incite/inciting insurrection fight/fight like hell patriot traitor acquit/acquittal convict/convicted These are words I heard over and over, with numbing regularity, as I listened to speeches and statements and watched video clips. But how were these words being defined by those who used them? How should they be defined? Where do these words come from—what’s their history? (I learned for the first time, for example, why the representatives bringing the charge of impeachment from the House are called “managers.”) So perhaps we can give students a chance to process some of what has happened during the impeachment trial through the analysis of terms. Ask them to work in pairs or small groups to research the history and derivation of a term on the list above—or choose another one they heard mentioned often—and then try to deduce how it is being defined by those using it during the trial. Then ask them to offer a definition of their own, with their reasoning fully explained. I think doing so may lead to some good critical thinking and also to an engaging class discussion based on substantive reasoning rather than often uninformed opinions. And on a completely separate note, the big news here in my little part of the world is that I got my second vaccination on February 14: Happy Valentine’s Day! Image Credit: "Dictionary" by greeblie, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

In this "What We've Learned" video, Ellen Carillo, one of the authors of Reading Critically, Writing Well, reflects on the process of translating an in-person class to an online class, and how the challenge of changing course types mid-semester allowed her to learn about different features of technology and online instruction.   ... View more

Quarantine Sketchbook Journal: Drawing of my teaching journal  Drawing and photo by Susan Bernstein  May 6, 2020 * On the first day of Zoom remote teaching and learning for spring semester 2021, I introduced my students to the significance of journals. Left out of the introduction was that my 90-year-old father died in January from Covid-19. He was a first-generation American and a first-generation college student. My father was also translingual. His immigrant parents and grandparents, other relatives and people in his community spoke Russian and Yiddish, and my father communicated in those languages and in English when he was young. Like many of my own students, my father lived at home while he attended school. He loved history and he loved to read. I have inherited both of these loves from him. This blog post is written in memory of my father and all those lost this past year. Although Zoom teaching and learning is some of the most challenging work that many of us have ever faced, I am not in favor of in-person classrooms at this historical moment. Medically vulnerable people catch the virus from people who are asymptomatic. I will never know how my father caught Covid-19, but I will always know that he died from it and how, at 90 years old, he was continuing to learn and grow as a human being. My father became part of the historic loss of life in this pandemic. As of this writing in mid-February, in the United States alone, more than 471,000 people have died from Covid-19, and BiPOC coping with historic and ongoing systemic racism suffer disproportionate impacts.  In these circumstances, writing remains a significant challenge not only for me but also for my students. Words have not always worked to make sense of quarantine experiences, and with this in mind, I have turned to journaling in journals that have taken multiple forms. During lockdown, last spring, Montreal artist Sarah Mangle offered a daily (now weekly) email list with open-ended art prompts. Through these prompts, I practiced journaling in multiple forms. In addition to my long-standing handwritten teaching and learning journal, I now keep a sketchbook journal, and photo and video journals. While these forms of making are not new, in this last year engaging in multimedia practices has taken on a new significance. For remote learning, this new significance means foregrounding journals from the very beginning of the semester. The following suggestions are adapted from my first-day teaching journal.   Journals provide a significant means for active, hands-on learning on your side of the Zoom screen. Speaking in practical terms for remote learning, the journals allow you to work at your own pace through the materials and will guide you through the major writing projects. Then, on Zoom, we can clarify confusion and work out ideas together as an online community. As a teacher, I could add that journals play a significant role in your final course grade. At the same time, in my own work as a teacher and a writer, I continue to observe the larger role that journals play, beyond grades and general education requirements. Journals can take shape as words on a screen or on paper; journals also can also be photographs, collages, drawings, or any media that help us learn to see many sides of a story, and to find empathy with others. In other words, journals open space for creating and thinking outside the box.  I’m writing this introduction the night before class begins, listening to music you sent me for the course playlist, and rereading students’ end-of-semester writing from Spring 2020. That semester, students wrote a lot in their journals. They wrote from lockdown at 2:30 or 2:45 am, they wrote from loss, and they wrote from remembrance. I will never forget those journals and the essays that grew out of the journals. As quarantine unfolded, history was unfolding as well. The students’ work has become part of that history. Please use your journals wisely. You’ll be glad you did.   ... View more

This is part two of a two-part interview with Mia Young-Adeyeba and Michelle Touceda on the topic of online education during the pandemic. Mia Young-Adeyeba is a veteran English teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District. She has a passion for helping students develop into lifelong learners and for cultivating collaborative partnerships. In addition to being a high school English teacher for Los Angeles Unified School District, Michelle Touceda is also an Instructional Faculty Lead Mentor for new teachers and a past LAUSD Teacher of the Year.  * David Starkey: In the first part of our interview, you both focused on a few of the many ways online education can make learning more robust, and even fun. To be honest, I love hearing that there are, in fact, positive elements of online teaching, especially when it seems that the great preponderance of news coverage has focused on the negatives of distance education. That said, it would be wrong to ignore the many difficulties the pandemic has thrown in the way of students. What would you identify as the most pressing challenges for our students, and how can we overcome them? Mia Young-Adeyeba: The most pressing challenges I have learned about have to do with students feeling isolated, missing their teachers, friends, and their independence. The Los Angeles Unified School District and our union, United Teacher Los Angeles, emphasizes social-emotional check-ins and connecting families who may be struggling. Through these efforts, we have been able to establish strong support networks between school and home to offer support to those in need.  Michelle Touceda: I agree with Mia, the hardest part for students has been the loss of social interactions. Something that has worked for my students, and something I learned from our Facebook group, is allowing students to self-select their breakout rooms based on a selection chart. (Small aside here, most students still pick #2, the Quiet Work Room.) They are able to choose to work independently, but they are also given the choice to work with groups or their friends. It is those little moments of autonomy that helps students feel like not everything in their life is out of control. Since I’ve made the switch to allowing students to choose their preferred work style my classroom engagement and submitted work has gone up which is definitely a positive. DS: I would agree that it’s the little things that make a difference between face-to-face and distance learning. To provide just one instance: after I’ve explained a concept in a physical classroom, when I look around, I can often tell by a shy student’s facial expression that my explanation didn’t quite click, so I can come at it from a different angle. These days, most of my classes are asynchronous, so I obviously miss out on those cues from shy students who might need a bit more help. I suppose, in that example, there’s a problem for both student and teacher. I’m curious about what challenges the two of you have found most difficult to overcome in your own online teaching? If you’ve managed to surmount those obstacles, how have you accomplished that? MY: Distance learning has definitely shone a light on the inequities in the education system. Most students want to learn and succeed, but there are often factors that hinder their ability to access the curriculum. Educators are working hard to provide resources and referrals for those students and families who need it the most. We reach out to parents, adapt lessons and deadlines, and try to view distance learning through a lens of empathy and understanding. Narrowing down lesson objectives to what is absolutely essential and pivoting when necessary seems to be a strategy that’s been working.  MT: I miss being on campus and building relationships with my students. It has taken longer than in the past, but I feel like I’m finally making those connections. A real challenge has been technology. Not necessarily who has access, although that has been problematic as Mia mentioned, but especially in the beginning of the semester I spent a lot of time troubleshooting tech issues and teaching students how to maneuver through Schoology, Google Education Suite, and any outside digital platforms I wanted to use such as Flipgrid or Adobe Spark. What might take a minute or two in class could take much longer online and the frustration the kids were feeling sometimes caused them to want to shut down. I decided early on to allow turn-in windows instead of due dates to take some of the pressure off of everyone. That was a turning point. I think it also gave some ownership back to the students when they maybe didn’t feel like they had ownership over much. ... View more

In today's "What We've Learned" video, Ellen Carillo, one of the authors of Reading Critically, Writing Well, details an activity she uses to build community in asynchronous online classes: the story exchange. ... View more

For me, Black History Month begins in January with my annual celebration of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, when I always re-read several of his works (this year, I revisited “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and, as always, learned something new), join in the national day of service, and then spend some time deciding what special book I will read for Black History Month. For me, this year, that book is Louis M. Maraj’s Black or Right: Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics (Utah State UP, 2020). I have known of Maraj’s work since he was a graduate student at Ohio State and have followed his career as he and colleague Khirsten Echols founded, nurtured, and led DBLAC, an organization dedicated to the support of Black graduate students and whose mission is to provide “spaces for members to testify to, discuss with, and share support for each other in response to the continued marginalization of Black bodies in academia. DBLAC also acts as a learning community for professional development, networking, and resource-pooling aimed at the academic retention and success of its members.” Their virtual writing groups, on-site writing retreats, and reading series have drawn a large and productive membership; check their website for more information about how to join and learn from their work. You will also find them presenting at most major rhetoric and composition conferences. So I was especially interested to hear of Maraj’s forthcoming book and pre-ordered my copy, waited impatiently for it to arrive, and then finally settled down to read. I was drawn in immediately by Maraj’s voice and by the personal narratives that punctuate the volume: you will want to read the book for yourself to fully see what I mean. And then I was doubly drawn in by Maraj’s commitment to the principles of Black feminist mothers and foremothers’ philosophy of literacy as the practice of freedom and his focus throughout on how Black relational feminist methodologies and ecologies work to establish Black rhetorical agency as one means of disrupting (what he calls “mashin’ up de place,” p. xiii) in order to counter white (institutional and individual) defensiveness—and a whole lot more. Maraj’s book mixes and bends genres, languages, disciplines, and methods to participate in what Christina Sharpe calls “wake work” in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016)—undisciplined, disruptive, fracturing, paradoxical resistances that rupture the “immanence and imminence” of Black death both aesthetically and materially “to move toward Black rhetorical agency” (8). Black or Right embodies Maraj’s personal journey to such agency, opening with the “story of arrival” from his home in Trinidad to the “American dream” at a small northeastern liberal arts college, where he learns that a joint newspaper assignment seems to require a white male to accompany his white female partner and him (“It’s strange. Is this what Americans call a ‘date’?”) to cover the story—and that his freshman English teacher would not recognize, much less value, “the lavish prose I was brought up on in the British Caribbean education system. . . Americans want a thesis” (4). Maraj quickly moves to provide a thesis as well as the other accoutrements of white academic discourse—but as this book so richly demonstrates, he learned not just to resist but to unlearn such structures as he “grapples with notions of Blackness in white institutional spaces to theorize how Black identity operates with/against neoliberal ideas of difference” (9) and as he leads the way to proactive antiracist practices. And it’s these antiracist practices that he focuses on in most of the rest of the book: first, taking an autoethnographical approach to research and teaching, defined as “an application of African indigenous methodological ‘self-knowledge.’” A second Black-centering rhetorical practice/strategy he explores is hashtagging, which he argues offer a space for Black students to practice resistance at primarily white institutions while at the same time reshaping what we think of as writing and reading—and even thinking. This discussion concludes with a thorough description of Maraj’s “Tumblr as Commonplace Book” assignment—brilliantly illustrated—as well as a provocative discussion of #blacklivesmatter and #BlackLivesStillMatter, highlighting the dialogic potential of hashtagging, which draws on the historical importance of African-based oral, dialogic traditions. A third potentially anti-racist strategy appears in what Maraj calls inter(con)textual reading, a practice he illustrates with an analysis of the dense web of associations among three particular literacy events: Alicia Garza’s 2014 “A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement,” rapper Kendrick Lamar’s 2016 performance of “Alright,” and a Black Lives Matter Syllabus created by NYU’s Frank Leon Roberts in 2016. This inter(con)textual reading of these literacy events helps us to not only see connections but also gaps, offering possibilities for meaning to create, fill, and exceed them, or compelling us to seek other texts, subjects, or rhetorical bodies as related foci for analysis. In these ways, Black inter(con)textualality reads/writes Blackness dynamically. (99-100) Black inter(con)textual reading provides a method for carrying out a fourth anti-racist rhetorical practice—reclamation, defined as the act of “turning stigmatizing racialized attention mapped onto Black identities back onto the gaze of historically white institutions to publicly question/critique their power in moment of fracture.” Such reclamations illuminate Black agency at work in white spaces to counter white defensiveness. Maraj demonstrates such reclamations in an analysis of three other literacy events that took place on the campus of “Midwestern State U,’ an analysis that is at once deeply depressing in its revelations of institutional racism and uplifting in its presentation of Black student agency at work.   There is so much more I could say about this book: in it, Maraj brilliantly talks the talk and walks the walk of anti-racist practices informed by Black feminist theory, methods, and principles. But what makes this book so exciting to me during this Black History Month is its stellar contributions to Black rhetoric. Building on the work of Jackie Royster, Shirley Logan, Geneva Smitherman, Carmen Kynard, Keith Gilyard, Adam Banks, John Rickford, Vershawn Young, and other griot/scholars, Maraj’s book brought me closer than ever to perceiving and understanding the contours of a complete and robust Black rhetoric, one that is thoroughly theorized as well as practiced. In short, my Black History Month book has kept me riveted: I have learned so much from reading and engaging with this text and have gotten so many ideas for how I could use the strategies he recommends in my own writing classrooms. Along the way, I’ve tried hard to read this book rhetorically, inter(con)textually whenever possible, and to not just hear what Maraj is saying but to listen to his rich voices and the voices of all the Black feminists who echo through these pages—and to listen to their messages with purposeful, striving intention. For an old(er!) white woman, it has not been easy to listen in this way, and I know I have failed on many occasions. But oh has it been worth the effort. May February be Black History Month—and may 2021 be Black Rhetoric Year! Image Credit: "Books" by shutterhacks, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

In today's "What We've Learned" video, Richard Miller (@richard_miller), author of Habits of the Creative Mind, discusses loneliness of online teaching: the loss of chance encounters with students and colleagues, the difficulty of connecting with students through a screen, and the toll that this isolation can have on both instructor and student. ... View more

It’s always affirming to learn that two writers we admire also admire one another. After I heard essayist Rebecca Solnit recommend Jia Tolentino’s work on The Maris Review podcast, I discovered their writerly conversation reaches back many years. Solnit has praised the work of younger feminists like Tolentino here. Tolentino is on record celebrating Solnit, too, as in this examination of Solnit’s response to a sexist question about Virginia Woolf. These warm exchanges between Solnit and Tolentino exemplify writing as a conversation, a key concept in the 5th edition of From Inquiry to Academic Writing: A Text and Reader. We are happy to introduce Tolentino’s lively and learned writing to students in our newest edition, so that they, too, can enter this conversation. Tolentino’s essay, “The I in the Internet,” from her 2019 essay collection, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, may be more timely than ever, as we round the corner of a full pandemic year lived mostly online. As digital natives, students are often far more fluent in the nuances of internet self-representation than their instructors, of course. A skilled writer like Tolentino can invite students into a topic that seems comfortable, even obvious, and then demonstrate — with verve, sparkle, and the occasional swear word — the academic moves that deepen the conversation. For example, Tolentino draws on insights about performative identities from sociologist Erving Goffman in order to investigate our hunches — such as the shallow, guilty feeling many of us have that reposting a social justice meme is not doing much at all: “It’s because of the hashtag, the retweet, and the profile that solidarity on the internet gets inextricably tangled up with visibility, identity, and self-promotion.” Tolentino weaves in political philosopher Sally Scholz’s concepts of social solidarity, civic solitary, and political solidarity, offering readers tools to name and interpret the ways we shape and are shaped by online group identities. Tolentino also includes arguments about the profit-driven motives of “socials” from media scholar Tim Wu, who explains why it is that the hits we get online are designed to be unsatisfying: To keep us coming back for more, more, more. Tolentino illustrates these concepts in prose that is fun for readers to analyze rhetorically, and perhaps even to imitate as a style-stretcher: Like many among us, I have become acutely conscious of the way my brain degrades when I strap it in to receive the full barrage of the internet — these unlimited channels, all constantly reloading with new information: births, deaths, boasts, bombings, jokes, job announcements, ads, warnings, complaints, confessions, and political disasters blitzing our frayed neurons in huge waves of information that pummel us and then are instantly replaced. This is an awful way to live, and it is wearing us down quickly. (FIAW 664) Tolentino’s final, poignant question in this essay resonates painfully in the context of the January insurrection at the U.S. Capitol: “What could put an end to the worst of the internet?” In her closing moves, Tolentino shifts from theory to practice (putting her feminist training to work), and reveals her own imperfect attempts to log off and stay off. Students will have their own insights and practices to share, and you, likely, do, too. Like Rebecca Solnit, who champions the value of reading younger writers, our own answers to Tolentino’s question will be richer, and likely more actionable, if we develop them in conversation with our students. What texts do you use to invite students into scholarly conversations about the effects of the internet? Have you drawn on films like The Social Dilemma, or different genres? I’d love to hear what’s catching your students’ writerly interests.   "Automotive Social Media Marketing" by socialautomotive is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

In today's "What We've Learned" video, Richard Miller (@richard_miller), author of Habits of the Creative Mind, highlights one of the top challenges of teaching remotely: the loss of body language cues, and the miscommunications and consequences that can arise that challenge. The fragility of remote communication requires a greater amount of patience, trust, and empathy from the instructor. ... View more