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

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

I’ve taken to asking my students to recommend best teaching practices from their experiences to date, Zooming their way to the B.A. So far, I haven’t heard anything that will work for me. A colleague starts class with a 10-minute focused breathing exercise. Another with everyone taking turns sharing what they feel grateful for that day. I am happy that these opening moves help them feel more grounded and present. I just can’t seem to add them to the proverbial toolbelt.   Instead, I started with the approach I used when my students and I were in the same room and modified it for our current situation. Back in the Before Times, my students would spend the first 10 minutes in class responding to five short-answer questions about that day’s reading and an extra-credit question inviting them to share whatever independent research they’d done for that day’s reading. Not exactly stress-free writing, but maybe stress-lite: I never ask trick questions or focus in on obscure details, so the students who’ve done the reading do well and those who haven’t don’t. Once the quizzes are handed in, the students have spent 10 minutes thinking about that day’s reading and we’re all in the same headspace and discussion takes off.   Now, I’m beginning my classes with a writing prompt about the day’s reading. I make the prompt available 10 minutes *before* class starts and have the assignment due 11 minutes *after* class begins. This allows students who have unreliable internet or test anxiety or are composing on a phone extra time; but I let all the students start whenever they choose. I assure them that I’m only assessing their responses on the assumption that they’ve had 10 minutes. So, super long responses aren’t more likely to get better scores than briefer responses.   My LMS has a toggle for a rubric, which I duly completed, but then I discovered that the grading rubrics are not shared with the students! It’s not even an option. The mystification of standards mandated by the digital platform.   I want my students to know how I’m scoring them and I want my scoring system to reflect the kind of thinking I’m looking for in their writing. Here’s the rubric I shared with my 1st year class:   *   A Mind at Work on a Problem   My prompts are meant to invite you to share your steady engagement with the texts we’re reading. What has the assignment caused you to think about? What independent research has it led you to pursue? What connections have you made--to other parts in the text; to our class discussions; to your other classes; to your own interests? So, what does that translate to in terms of assessment? I start at 7 and grade up. When I hit repeated significant grammatical errors, I start to grade down. 7: Did the reading. Tends towards summary and description. Might also have one or two significant grammatical errors. 8: Analytical. Considers what a passage means or might mean. Engages with the text. This can take many forms: evidences meaningful research into a term or phrase; works through a moment of difficulty; makes a connection to class discussion or earlier passages or the student's own earlier writing. 9: Interpretive. Takes on a significant challenge. This can take many forms: unpacks an unfamiliar term or works through a particularly thorny stretch of prose; offers contextual information for the purposes of clarifying or complicating an interpretation; contends with a multiplicity of meanings. 10: Like 9, but the work is more ambitious and/or more consequential. This can mean drawing insights that stretch back to earlier moments in the text or it can mean drilling down into the local complexities of the term or passage or event chosen. Includes evidence of self-initiated research. Serious grammatical errors will bring down scores, as will failures to spellcheck. As results come in, I will share responses with you so that we can discuss what writing that demonstrates a mind at work on a problem looks like and does.   *   I’m happier with this change than I expected to be. So far, the students’ responses to the prompts have been longer, more detailed, and more nuanced than I anticipated them to be at this point in the semester. And the class discussions are, in some ways, even better than they were when we were all meeting in the same space. It’s early days, of course, but it’s clear to me that many of the students feel much more confident speaking via camera in familiar surroundings than they do in class speaking into the back of the heads of the students in front of them. ... View more

*As you may have noticed from the title of this post, the name of one of the characters has been altered throughout this blog. This is due to the profanity filter on the Macmillan Learning Community Site, which flagged and filtered his name. To avoid this issue, I've taken some creative license. Well, we managed to have an election after all, so in the spirit of a little decompression I thought I'd tackle something a little lighter for this blog—which isn't easy in the face of an ongoing pandemic amidst a society that appears to be unraveling. So when, while searching for something else I happened upon a book called Growing Up with D-ck and Jane (1996) and, glancing through it, found something semiotically interesting that I didn't expect to find there, I thought that here was an opportunity for a simple and rather upbeat analysis. But upon further exploration, I find that the thing isn't quite so simple after all—which makes it at once more interesting but less upbeat. Let me explain. For those unaware or too young to remember them, D-ck and Jane are the two main characters (along with younger sister Sally) of a series of basal readers used to teach children to read, whose popularity peaked in the 1950s. I wish to make it clear that I am fully aware of the naivete inherent in D-ck and Jane's notoriously sanitized promotion of suburban middle-class mores. Indeed, by the mid-sixties D-ck, Jane, and the whole happy crew had become such a laughing stock to my generation that now that I am in my mid-sixties I am hardly about to get nostalgic about them. No, that isn't what this blog is about. Rather, the thing that struck me as I paged through the text was the reproduction of an old D-ck-and-Jane narrative set in a toy store, wherein Sally, then Jane, then D-ck, all express a desire for a certain toy, only to be reminded by the others that they already have something like it at home. Each time this happens (and then one last time for good measure in chorus) the children renounce their desire for the new toy and pledge themselves to being content with the toys they have. Corny? Yes, of course it's corny: D-ck and Jane are the epitome of corniness. But that isn't the semiotic point. The corniness is something I expected; what I didn't expect was a homily against what Laurence Shames calls "the hunger for more"—certainly not from an era when America was being aggressively transformed by the mass media into a consumer society. After all, this was the time when television began its ongoing campaign to train children to become lifelong, brand-loyal consumers (collect the whole set!). So I was pleasantly surprised to find in this little morality play a promotion of contentment with the things one already has. Think of it! D-ck and Jane going against the grain! But alas, here is where things get complicated—indeed, self-deconstructing. For when I plopped down Growing Up with D-ck and Jane next to my computer in order to write this blog, I found in a flap attached to the book's cover a little booklet entitled Fun with D-ck and Jane: A Commemorative Collection of Stories, which just happens to contain a counter-story of how Jane once came to be given three talking baby dolls for her birthday, and happily embraces all of them. But wait, in the homily I've briefly described above Jane is persuaded not to covet a talking baby doll when she already has two dolls at home! Surely then, when three dolls show up as she opens her presents, the story might have resolved itself otherwise than with Jane's ending up a whole "family" of them. Well, perhaps I'm not being fair. After all, Jane doesn't ask for the dolls herself in the story: D-ck and Sally tip the wink to Father and Mother for her (it isn't clear how a third doll comes into the picture, however). So Jane isn't herself being greedy, and perhaps the message here is that Jane's birthday "triplets" foreshadow (and condition) her future role as a wife and mother—which is a whole different analysis. Still, my discovery of this second story did change the trajectory of my essay, prompting me to note, first, that it always pays to research one's subject carefully before committing to a semiotic interpretation of it, and second, that in a consumer society you can never really get away from consumption. After all, Jane’s happiness with her inadvertent windfall of talking dolls in the second story suggests that more is better. This sort of well-nigh inevitable contradiction is something to keep your students on the lookout for as they conduct their semiotic analyses of American popular culture. For even The Simpsons (which could be seen as a parody of the whole D-ck-and-Jane universe), can contradict its own anti-consumerist ethos. I'm reminded here of the famous collaboration with Banksy, which, while sending up the exploitation of Third World workers who produce Simpsons paraphernalia, effectively commodifies the dissent (in Thomas Frank's words) of viewers whose attraction to the show draws in the commercial sponsors whose advertising dollars reproduce the very conditions that The Simpsons satirizes. You can't escape. Look, Lisa, see Bart! See Bart cash in!   "Fun With D-ck And Jane" by Roadtrip-'62 is used under a CC0 1.0 license. ... View more

  Over the last few years, I’ve written and spoken often about the power of stories, about why we “need” stories, and about how the stories we create can lead to narrative justice. In short, the stories we tell shape realities, and so stories that continually represent a group of people in negative ways create injustice for the people in that group. It’s our obligation to resist and replace such stories. (This is the major point of a talk I gave at the 50th anniversary of the RSA, which you can read here.) As I was doing research on stories and storytelling, I was thinking a lot about the speaker, the teller of the stories, and about how to create just stories. But it takes (at least) two for stories to work, and so lately I’ve been thinking about the hearers of stories, the listeners, and about listening in general. Krista Ratcliffe has been teaching us about the importance of listening for over twenty years now, and her lessons have never been more germane than they are today in an age of echo chambers and of stories that can reach millions in seconds and reiterate them endlessly. So it was with particular interest that I read about the work of Professor Uri Hasson and his colleagues at Princeton who have been studying stories and the connection between speakers and listeners. During experiments using brain scans, these researchers noted that in certain narrative circumstances the sound waves of a story “couple” the brain responses of the speaker and the listener. As TED Conferences puts it, “a great storyteller literally causes the neurons of an audience to closely sync with the storyteller’s brain.” That’s an oversimplification, of course, but it gets at Hasson’s finding that our brains have evolved to develop a “neural protocol that allows us to use such brain coupling to share information.” In a series of fascinating experiments, Hasson and his colleagues had speakers narrate text to listeners in various ways: read backwards or out of order, and so on. While these experiments led to some surface-level coupling, only the story, its narrative elements intact, led to coupling deep inside the brain. Furthermore, Hasson found that “the better the listener’s understanding of the speaker’s story, the stronger the similarity” between the two brains. In rhetorical or compositional terms, Hasson’s findings demonstrate that effective, meaningful communication depends on establishing common ground. The current climate of distrust and division, of viral misinformation repeated endlessly, makes finding common ground increasingly difficult if not impossible. When listeners hear the same thing over and over again, day in and day out, they will have trouble “synching” with anyone telling a different story. The message for us as teachers of writing seems clear: we must work harder than ever to engage students in listening to and understanding stories and perspectives they are not familiar with or that differ significantly from their own. When novelist Richard Powers points out that the only thing in the world that can change a person’s mind is “a good story,” he now has neuroscientific evidence to back him up! Stay tuned for more on listening in the coming weeks. Image Credit: "Orange and Blue Brain Anatomy Hoop Art. Hand Embroidered." by Hey Paul Studios, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... 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, identifies the need to hone in on the best online teaching tools to deliver knowledge and streamline teaching. With so many possibilities (Zoom, breakout rooms, chats, polls, message and discussion boards, Google docs, Canvas, and more), how do you streamline your toolkit to find and deliver the most important essence of your lesson plan? ... View more