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

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

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

Today’s guest blogger is Jeanne Bohannon (see end of post for bio). Since Traci Gardner’s insightful post in the Community about Bringing Up Accessibility, I have been thinking about ways to integrate discussions of writing for user-friendliness into my Functional Grammar course.  Most students in this course are technical communication majors, so they need to not only be aware of accessibility issues in multimodal composition but also be able to produce digital content that meets the 1973 Rehabilitation Act’s Section 508 requirements. For many of us, myself included, Section 508 is new territory in our teaching praxis.  What this means is that I am learning along with my students how and why digital writers apply the conventions of accessible texts across multiple platforms.  After participating in interactive lectures about accessible textual production, our class community decided that we would compose public blog posts that describe and apply Section 508 content for student and faculty audiences leveraging the opportunity to learn and teach in the same moments.  I have posted our process and products, which I hope you and your students will find useful. Multimodal Writing Context Students design blog posts that describe and embody foundational Section 508 requirements for digital texts.  I recommend either Edublogs or WordPress as easy introduction spaces for blogging; students majoring in technical communication at my university design content in their own web domains, which gives them greater creative and analytics control.  Either way, students compose public, digital texts with multimodal elements that serve to make informational writing both clear and interesting to read.   Measurable Learning Objectives Create digital documents that embody and explain Section 508 Criteria Synthesize content-meaning through public writing Summarize key elements of Section 508 relevant to technical writers Background Reading for Students and Instructors The St. Martin's Handbook​: Ch. 16, Design for Print and Digital Writing, including Considering Disabilities box: "Color for Contrast" Writer's Help 2.0 for Lunsford Handbooks: “Considering Disabilities” The Everyday Writer: Section 3a: Plan online assignments, including At a Glance box: “Guidelines for Creating an Online Text” Writing in Action: Section 6a: Plan online assignments, including Checklist box: “Guidelines for Creating an Online Text” EasyWriter: Section 4a: Planning online assignments, including Checklist box: “Guidelines for Creating an Online Text” Writing and Designing In our course communities, students and I crowdsource our writing assignments to make sure we meet the specific academic and professional needs of the group.  Here is what we came up with for the Section 508 blogging assignment: Process through and write a 500+ word blog post that includes at least one of each multimodal element (image, audio, video) based on your research into 508 requirements and our class discussions about alt-text, live captioning, and color considerations. Use at least three tags per post.  Read the posts of at least three coursemates.  Comment on their blogs in approximately 100 words, using the rhetorical analysis tools you have gained so far this semester. Submit the following in our Discussion Forum for the week, folding your critique into the week's topic.  If you get to a blog that already has at least two comments, go the next blog. Finally, reflect on your and others’ work for both our digital and in-class talks. Be ready to provide dialogic feedback to your peers. Our writing goal for this assignment is to provide well-researched, compelling blog posts that inform an audience of students, faculty, and professional content creators about key components of Section 508.  Our design goal is to construct digital pages that comply with Section 508 accessibility. Student Exemplars: Celia Fisher: "How Accessibility Benefits Your Site" ​ Eddie Khiara: Considering Disability (First Choice Tutors) ​ Jason Figueroa: 508 Access ​ Reflections on the Assignment – Students: The assignment got me thinking about how Section 508 compliance could become more commonplace; with so many 'rules', it seems unlikely that the average content creator would bother adhering to them all. In my blog post, I wrote about how making a site accessible has the potential to lead to more views through search engines' metadata crawls, because people want to know how this is a best practice impacts their web traffic. – Celia While learning about section 508 I was amazed at the amount of thought that went into the requirements and regulations. I see how having this requirement will open up your work to a wider audience. I personally use closed captions not because I have trouble hearing however, I use it more so I can have a lower volume so I won’t wake my two kids. Going through the different regulations I can see how enforcing them will actually affect other groups then the intended audience. - Jason My Reflection My goal as a writing teacher is to work with students to determine their academic and professional needs and then work alongside them as they construct texts that are relevant to them. The 508 blogging opportunity “counts” for me, in terms of multimodal composition, because it allows students to create interesting and informative digital content for a specific audience that appeals to a diversity of readers while also teaching student writers necessary requirements as they grow into professional writers. Jeanne Law Bohannon is an Assistant Professor in the Digital Writing and Media Arts (DWMA) department at Kennesaw State University. She believes in creating democratic learning spaces, where students become stakeholders in their own rhetorical growth though authentic engagement in class communities. Her research interests include evaluating digital literacies and critical pedagogies; performing feminist rhetorical recoveries; and growing informed and empowered student scholars. Reach Jeanne at: jeanne_bohannon@kennesaw.edu and www.rhetoricmatters.org Want to collaborate with Andrea on a Multimodal Monday assignment or be a guest blogger? Send ideas to leah.rang@macmillan.com for possible inclusion in a future post. ... View more

Guest blogger is a faculty member at Craven Community College in New Bern, North Carolina, and she teaches composition and literature courses. A former WAC coordinator at Craven, her primary interests are WAC/WID programs and creating partnerships with other community colleges and universities. She is also pursuing a PhD in narrative theory and nineteenth-century British literature at Old Dominion University. This is my first semester teaching ENG 112: Writing/Research in the Disciplines, a writing-in-the-disciplines (WID) class in the North Carolina community college system (NCCCS). This is the first of a series of blog contributions will be reflections on my initial experiences tackling ENG 112 this semester. Even with well over a decade of teaching experience in the NCCCS, learning to teach a WID course has been daunting—but it has also helped to reinvigorate my pedagogy. My approach to ENG 112 this semester was to start the class with what I know (humanities writing and research skills) in order to have time to pick the brains of my colleagues and create units on areas I have less experience with (natural science and social science writing and researching skills). This first blog explores the humanities unit and its literary analysis paper—a unit that turned out to be harder than I had expected. The Assignment and Schedule Students were asked to write a three-page researched analysis of “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” “Hills Like White Elephants,” “The Lottery,” “Everyday Use,” or “What You Pawn I Will Redeem.” In addition to citing the literature, they had to find and use 2-3 scholarly sources in their essays; they also had to use MLA style. They had the entire month of September to work on this project; the assignment was given on September 1 and due on September 29. The class is a scaffolded class with several informal journals and workshops to help students move through the writing process:  9.1 Writer’s Journal #5: Literary Studies Introduction to Humanities Writing and Literary Analysis Paper 9.3 Writer’s Journal #6: “The Yellow Wall-Paper” Analysis 1 “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (handout) Creating Analysis and Research Questions 9.8 Writer’s Journal #7: “The Yellow Wall-Paper” Analysis 2 Process Assignment #1: Literary Analysis Questions Literary Analysis Questions Workshop 9.10 Writer’s Journal #8: MLA Style Introduction to MLA Style research and Documentation 9.15 Writer’s Journal #9: Research Hunt Process Assignment #2: Literary Analysis Thesis and Works Cited 1 Literary Analysis Thesis and Works Cited Workshop 1 Research and Documentation Workshop 9.17 Process Assignment #3: Literary Analysis Thesis and Works Cited 2 Literary Analysis Thesis and Works Cited Workshop 2                                                                                            9.22 Process Assignment #4: Literary Analysis Draft 1 Literary Analysis Draft Workshop 1 9.24 Process Assignment #5: Literary Analysis Draft 2 Literary Analysis Draft 2 Workshop 9.29 In-Class Work on Literary Analysis Paper and Literary Analysis Self-Reflection  Literary Analysis Paper (Due by the End of Class) Process Assignment #6: Literary Analysis Self-Reflection (Due by the End of Class) Reflections My personal comfort level with the content of the unit may have worked against me in this unit. Perhaps my anxiety over the later units on natural and social sciences (What kinds of assignments would I give them? What research sources might work well? Why, oh why, are APA running headers so hard to make in Word?) lulled me into a false sense of security over my humanities unit. Whatever the reason, I forgot to include two key elements the humanities unit: modeling and conferencing. The next time I teach this course, I will be reserving two days for one-on-one conferences with my students about their drafts. By sandwiching the instructor conference between a peer workshop on the thesis and works cited and one on a revised draft of the essay, I hope to capture my students at that critical moment when they have a (nearly fully?) draft of the paper and a firm topic but when there is also still time to pull a quick turn on drafts that have gone off the rails. I will also be including a sample student literary analysis for class discussion—perhaps even two sample papers (one from the textbook and one from a previous semester of my own class). The students need to be able to see examples of finished literary analyses in order to help them better understand the work of their own essays. Moreover, the students need to have one-on-one time with me early in the semester; these individual conferences can especially help those who do not wish to ask for help in public spaces like the classroom. But overall, the unit went rather smoothly, especially as I began to correct for my early errors in modeling and for the lack of conferences. In order to work in some last minute modeling and conferencing, I cut my draft workshops in half; the class spent 30 minutes in the two peer drafts workshops (rather than the full 75 minutes), and the last 45 minutes of class those days was spent with volunteers putting their draft up on the projector. In these projector conference workshops, the volunteers would ask questions about their drafts and talk through the problems they had been encountering, and the class and I would help the volunteers work through their questions and problems. While students are sometimes reluctant to volunteer, once the class sees the quality of feedback being produced by the group (and starts to see how their problems with the paper are similar to the ones being discussed in a volunteer’s paper), I wind up with more volunteers than I have time to work with (which in turn gets these students into my office…of their own free will!). What did you do in your first WID course? What was your approach to the schedule and assignments? How did the successes and shortcomings of that first semester shape your WID course into a more effective and engaging course in later semesters? Share your answers, comments, and advice in the comments below. Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Or share it with others and start a conversation? Join the Macmillan Community to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! ... View more

A week or so ago, I got an email message from a former student who had been in one of my classes at Ohio State some 25 years ago. That was enough of a treat in and of itself. But the message went on to describe how much this former student now writes in his position as a city planner, and also to remark on what he most remembered about our class. He wrote: “I remember what I think was our second day of class. You came in and went straight to the white board and drew a thick black line from one end of it to the other. On one end you wrote, in big capital letters, WRITE. On the other end you wrote WRITTEN. Then you talked to us about the choices we were going to have to make to figure out whether we were going to WRITE, that is take action on our own and with some authority, or whether we were going to be WRITTEN by people outside of us. I remember writing those two words down in my notebook and looking at them every so often during the rest of that year. I wanted to WRITE. Looking back, I can see that I have often been able to WRITE but that I’ve also been WRITTEN, especially by my job and by some groups I belong to. I guess I’ve ended up somewhere in the middle of that line, but I hope just a little more toward WRITE.” I’ve started many of my classes over the years with this same strategy and I’ve always found that students are very interested in this binary and how it applies to their lives. They don’t need to read Foucault (though that wouldn’t be a bad thing) to know they occupy various subject positions, nor do they need a lot of postructuralist theory to alert them to the fact that key elements in their lives—their families, their religious institutions, their schools, and more—are powerful shapers of their lives. In fact, these institutions are often set on writing them—making them into the ideal child, the ideal worshipper, the ideal student, and so on. They feel these pressures keenly. And while they may at first blush and claim that they have a lot of agency, not too far into our discussion they begin to see that what they thought were their own decisions were ones that had been made at least partially for them by others. We often spend some time making similes or metaphors for what it feels like to write or be written. Usually we draw pictures as well, then use these materials to write what amount to brief essays on rhetorical agency and how available it is to us. This is of course a huge question today, when many feel at the mercy of huge economic and political forces it’s hard to understand, much less control. But for that very reason, it seems more important than ever to engage students in grappling with the subject agency and of looking for ways to enhance it in their everyday lives. We often put ourselves somewhere along the continuum and then chart how we feel about that placement during the course of the term. Like all binaries, this one is over-simple, which students come to see. But it is a useful concept for them as they begin their college journeys. And for some—like my former student—it’s germane even 25 years later! ​ Andrea Lunsford and student Jelani Lynch talk about the power of writing in Video Link : 1233a video in the Macmillan Community. Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Or share it with others and start a conversation? Join the Macmillan Community to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! ... View more

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

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

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

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

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

A blog is a public writing space where you share information, thoughts, and ideas that you want to be read by an audience.  Similar to online journals, blogs are only rhetorically successful if their authors are able to draw web traffic to them.  A blog is part of your (or your client's) electronic Identity (e-dentity). Blogs are trending right now as composition spaces that are both dialogic and multimodal in their design and a means of disseminating mass information, corporate training, and innovative ideas for schools and companies alike. I want you to create a simple blog and write SIX blog posts in two spurts that incorporate multimodal elements.  You may use your choice of platform, but if you haven't blogged before, I suggest WordPress( general) or Edublogs (educational).  If your school or company already has a website, you may want to write your posts for those spaces. NOTE:  This assignment has TWO PARTS.  For the first part, submit and provide a link to THREE 800-Word Posts.  For the second part, you will produce and submit a link to THREE 800-word posts, but on different topics.  For Part I, write your posts about your worldview, different research methods, and source selection for a literature review. For Part II, write more about your research design and methods (surveys, interviews, observation, etc). Resources: What is a Blog?   Educational Blogging   Audiences for Educational Blogs   Business Blog  Royalty-Free Music  Dr. Bohannon's Example Assessment:  Grading Criteria Content Item located in Course Content Tab For this assignment: Objective (Purpose): writing about (your choice of topic) for a specific purpose (marketing; promotion; educational communication for parents, students, teachers); or your own defined purpose. Requirements: a. Minimum Word Count: 800 words per post. b. How Many: Minimum of SIX posts. c. Multimodal Elements: visual (video, images), audio (podcast), links AT LEAST ONE IN ADDITION TO TEXT PER POST. Please make sure that your multimodal elements are copyright-free or that you have permission from your company or school to use them. d. Tags at the bottom of each post.  Think about your purpose and audience for each post, then tag each post with at least three keywords.  These keywords will help readers find your post when they search for these keywords on the Internet. e. Reflection:  Post your textual script and link to your blog in the D2L Dropbox for this assignment.  I also want you to write a brief reflection on your experiences with this assignment.  Let me know what you think about the guidelines, the purpose of the assignment, and how I might improve it for future students. ... View more

This blog was originally posted on June 5, 2015. In a blog post titled, “We Need More Crappy Plays,” theatre scholar Scott Walters makes a claim that should be obvious:  healthy theatre requires a healthy dose of new plays.  Walters lauds the Goodman Theatre in Chicago for declaring that it will produce four world premieres as part of its 2015-16 season.  As he wistfully states:  “Imagine if every regional theatre in the country devoted half of its mainstage productions to new works . . . .  What would be the result?  An American Renaissance in the theatre as our stages became [sic] once again to be relevant and vibrant.”  Unfortunately, the field of theatre—especially professional theatre, which often makes conservative choices in the name of increased ticket sales—is not always eager to support new work. As teachers of playwriting, we must realize that we and our students are part of a community of artists.  Whereas writers in other forms—poetry, for example—can imagine that they operate exclusively in a world of writers, playwrights have no such luxury.  Their work depends on a vast network of artists – actors, designers, stage hands, etc. – who are not primarily literary.  Whereas the decision makers for the printed genres (for example, editors of creative writing journals) can be presumed to have a literary background, decision makers for theatre (for example, artistic directors of professional theatres) may have found their way to the profession through any number of fields unrelated to writing.  For this reason, they do not always see playwriting as important.  It is up to us, then, to insist that it is. Scott Walters points out that popular music does not rely on covers of past hits, nor does the motion picture industry confine itself to remakes.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that our most vibrant contemporary art forms—popular music, stand-up comedy, video, and, to a lesser degree, movies—are predicated on originality.  Of the arts, only classical music shares theatre’s obsession with re-creating works of the past.  In contrast, visual artists must create afresh, and poetry and fiction become mere book-making without original contributions from today’s writers.  Puzzlingly, theatre is an unwitting oddball in its preference for works of the past. What we have today is a karaoke theatre, where contemporary artists recreate yesterday’s hits.  While karaoke is entertaining, no one thinks of it as high art because it lacks the ability to further the field.  No one looks to karaoke singers to define what art and culture will become.    Regrettably, theatre today is largely karaoke theatre and satisfied to remain that way.  It excludes the contributions of today’s writers; paradoxically, amending this exclusion could be the solution to many of contemporary theatre’s problems. Playwriting teachers must be aware of the issues facing the theatre community and must be prepared to make cases like I have made.  If teachers do not advocate for playwriting, there will be no need for the playwrights that we train. ... View more

This post originally appeared on July 9, 2015. I’ve taught courses online during summer sessions for the past several years.  I find it a challenge, and I’m constantly retooling the courses to make sure that students are getting the most out of the experience — and particularly to make sure that I’m providing enough resources for the students who are in the course, beyond my responses to their exams and their written work. So over the past few years, I’ve been slowly adding features to my online courses.  When I first began to do this, I simply used discussion boards, my personal blog (as opposed to lecturing), and exams with essay questions.  Last year, I began adding short video lectures to my courses — I simply use pre-loaded software on my MacBook to record, and then upload everything to my YouTube channel.  This year, along with those video lectures I added narrated PowerPoints about important literary terms, which were uploaded to my Google Drive and linked to through our Moodle page.  I also had students write daily journal responses (informal), weekly blog posts (a bit more formal), and interpretive papers (most formal of all).  And this summer I finally figured out how to create a timed exam in Moodle. In previous summers, I’ve taught 200-level courses designed for and taken by English majors.  This summer was the first where I’ve taught the introduction to literature course as an online course.  In thinking about how it went, I’ve recognized a few things about the problems of online education, but I’ve also begun to think about how I can incorporate some of these features into my traditional classroom in the coming academic year. First: the downside.  Having all the material online — and having students do the work asynchronously — means that students must be extremely motivated to get everything done, and that includes watching the videos.  While I tried to keep most of the videos brief (fewer than 10 minutes), I admit that some of them went longer than that.  Because I use YouTube to store all the videos, I can also see how often they were viewed, and in some cases, it was rarely or not at all.  This definitely constitutes a problem, particularly for students who are unused to textual analysis of literature.  I realized in reading the journals and blog posts that students were simply not getting some things.  Even though I make it a point to avoid complaining about my students publically (only praising them for their awesome work), I actually reached a point where I complained on Twitter something to the effect of  “Anyone who thinks online education is the way to go has never taught Yeats online.” So, teaching introduction to literature, when the students don’t make use of all the materials available, has the possibility of being disappointing.  Nevertheless the experience of teaching online — and trying out the different tools at my disposal — does give me some ideas about how to more effectively use our Learning Management System during the regular academic year. One thing that I’m considering is moving the exams online, rather than taking up time in the classroom for them.  This would be particularly useful in my survey course (British Literature before 1798), because I typically run an exam after every major time period — and we lose two class days to those.  I could reclaim those days for more readings, or those could be days of workshopping student papers.  It’s a matter of mashing those 1,000 years of literature into 15 weeks. Another thing that might be useful is to create short (5 minute) videos about some of the literature, highlighting the most essential ideas that we’ve covered in class, or talking about things that are essential for students to understand.  For example, when talking about Chaucer, I talk to the students about what Middle English sounds like — but what if I were to have a short video (or audio) linked to the Moodle page so that students could go back to it?  Or what if I were to have narrated PowerPoints talking about important literary or historical terms for that survey course?  While I certainly want students to continue to develop their note taking skills, I’m probably most concerned with making sure they know the material and can use it in the classroom. While I don’t know which of these things I’m going to incorporate into my courses — particularly that survey course — in the fall, I think it’s important to be open to better ways to connect the students with the ideas.  I certainly don’t want the tech to obscure the teaching — but rather I want to let it be a tool towards a better educational experience for my students. ... View more

This post first appeared on January 28, 2015. One of the great challenges for many of us is getting students to really engage with the readings. Students may read before class, but don’t annotate. Student may not read at all. And many students don’t necessarily think on their feet about the readings at hand. One of my challenges in the classroom is getting students to go back to the text itself, rather than simply talking in abstract terms about what happened in a story or a play. As a member of my university’s faculty development committee, I’ve found myself in charge of a workshop on this very topic: getting students to engage with the reading. Given that’s it’s time for a new semester, I thought it might be useful to share a list of activities to use in the classroom to help foster thoughtful engagement with the text itself. Some of these are things I’ve written about before, some are ideas from other people that I’ve found helpful. In-class discussion questions Everyone approaches classroom discussion differently, and every class dynamic requires some different approaches to the way we present the questions to the students. I’m a frequent user of small groups in my classrooms, and I’ve developed a number of ways to get the groups working on ideas. This particular exercise is one that encourages students to consider their own answers — but then to also evaluate the quality of other people’s answers. This semester I tried something new with students who were reluctant to jump into full-class discussions. I projected 4-5 discussion questions (usually culled from the instructor’s manual to the textbook) and gave students the first 5-10 minutes of class to find information that would help answer those questions. I wish I could tell you where I ran across this idea, but it worked wonders with a class that was reluctant to join in discussions. I’ve long used student-generated discussion questions in my upper division classes. This guest post by Ben Bunting has some nice ideas about literature and contexts as discussion openers. Writing as Discussion Many of my courses are writing intensive courses, so I try to integrate written analysis of the literature into classroom participation. I’ve found success with having students write analytical paragraphs as part of their approach to the texts, which can work in any classroom where analyzing information is central. Barclay Barrios suggests having students write argument haikus about complex informational texts, which could certainly be translated into discussion-openers in a literature classroom. I will be doing this next semester, most assuredly. (Barrios has also suggested a way to do this with Vine. In class reading Actually having students read in the classroom can be useful, particularly early in the semester when they’re just figuring out how to do the work of the literature classroom. Critical Reading , as exemplified here, is a technique I picked up from the Foundation for Critical Thinking. It can be useful when students are approaching a really challenging work. It helps students recognize the need to slow down as they read, and can build confidence in the idea that they can actually do the difficult reading. I also like to have students make use of contexts sections in anthologies. Having students view characters through the eyes of other characters in the text can be a useful way to understand character motivation. Multi-modal approaches Encouraging students to have fun with the literature, while still looking carefully into the text itself can be a useful way to engage students who are not English majors. I recently had students create comics about Charles Dickens. In teaching “The Things They Carried,” I’ve had students create categories of the items in the book — and I think this is something that could be adapted for a wide variety of stories and poems. Barclay Barrios has written both about drawing the argument (which I’ve adapted as drawing the poem) Joanne Diaz also has her students use the Woodberry Poetry Room to teach students about active listening. I think that all of these are adaptable for different levels and for different texts, which is generally how most of my teaching goes: I see what others are doing, and I adapt it to what works with my particular groups of students. I’m looking forward to another semester of teaching — and I certainly plan to adapt some of these activities in new ways for my classrooms. ... View more