In this "What We've Learned" video, Jeanne Bohannon, author of The Writer's Loop with 2020 APA Update, reflects on the challenges of engaging with students in the spaces they already occupy, the responsibility instructors have to embrace and support students, and on students' desire for adaptive and personal learning.  ... View more

In today's "What We've Learned" video, John O'Hara (@johnohara), author of Current Issues and Enduring Questions, Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing, and From Critical Thinking to Argument, discusses how to read student engagement in online (and potentially camera-less) instruction, and offers tips for re-engaging students who may be struggling. Some tips: dealing directly with current events that students are already engaging with outside the classroom, and getting students physically outside to change the learning environment.   ... View more

In today's "What We've Learned" video, the first of the new year, John O'Hara (@johnohara), author of Current Issues and Enduring Questions, Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing, and From Critical Thinking to Argument, breaks online instruction down into three core challenges: hardware, software, and pedagogy. Watch to see how he tackles each to engage students.   ... View more

Today’s guest blogger is Kim Haimes-Korn, a Professor of English and Digital Writing at Kennesaw State University. Kim’s teaching philosophy encourages dynamic learning and critical digital literacies and focuses on students’ powers to create their own knowledge through language and various “acts of composition.” She likes to have fun every day, return to nature when things get too crazy, and think deeply about way too many things. She loves teaching. It has helped her understand the value of amazing relationships and boundless creativity. You can reach Kim at khaimesk@kennesaw.edu or visit her website: Acts of Composition   Overview Ralph Waldo Emerson in his famous essay, Nature (1836), talks about becoming a “transparent eyeball,” a philosophic metaphor that he describes as a state of being that can only be achieved in nature.  It gives him peace and allows him to see beyond the structures that define him and see things in new ways. He says "I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing, I see all."  Emerson believes that in order to truly appreciate nature, one must go beyond merely looking at it and instead feel it and engage with it as both a sensory and intellectual experience.  The transparent eyeball is “absorbent rather than reflective” and therefore a path to symbolic meaning and unexpected connections.  I send students outside, to a place of their own choosing and ask them to spend time in nature and practice the intellectual exercise of moving between the micro and the macro.                       1 - The Micro                                                                                        2 - The Macro Steps to the Assignment Have students read and respond to Emerson’s Nature essay. It is important that students have a strong understanding of his philosophy and the metaphor of the transparent eyeball. Ask students to post 3 thought-provoking questions and 1 passage from the text.  Ask students to post the passages from the reading onto a collaborative Google document to guide discussion. Engage in full class discussions about the passages and questions and ask students to explain and interpret particular passages for a deep understanding of the text.  Next, I ask students to go physically into nature and see what they can learn when they focus on it. Encourage students to focus on both sensory and intellectual experiences of nature.  They can find a place in nature--a tree, a park, their back yard, a field, somewhere on campus, etc.  and choose a place that is relatively free of distraction.  I ask them to spend at least 15 minutes writing (no need to type this assignment) and try to record what they see, hear, notice, think.  I want them to shift their attention back and forth from micro to macro and engage their “transparent eyeball.”  I urge them to exercise the cognitive practices of moving back and forth between the whole picture and the parts--from the forest to the trees to the trunk to the bark to the ant to the blade of grass. It is important that they write freely and pay attention (and record) what they are seeing, feeling and thinking.  Let them know it is OK to let their minds and writing wander wherever the experience takes them. Have them record the waves of their thoughts and the ways new thoughts emerge the longer they sit there.   Using their phone cameras, have students take 10 total images – 5 micro and 5 macro. Choose one from each category (micro and macro) and post them to an individual slide to contribute to a collaborative Google slideshow.  Have students include their names, location they visited and a significant passage from their experience transcript. Show or post the slideshow and have students share with the class.      Reflections on the Activity Students experience a range of feelings and ideas from this assignment.  They are often surprised at their reactions and ideas that surface during their time in nature. The concept of the transparent eyeball and the intellectual act of moving between the micro and the macro acts as a new lens and emphasizes the value of this kind of meditative experience.     Here are some of the responses and ideas generated through the assignment:   “I am noticing I am having a hard time separating the humans from the environment during this exercise. Probably due to the human geography/GIS course I am taking, probably due to the kids who are currently here playing on the other side of the park. Either way, humans ultimately are part of the environment, arguably even more now than when Emerson wrote his essay.” Brody “How many others, like me, have let society overpower their sense of adventure and discovery?” Sydney “It’s just wonderful how the world falls together to create little pockets of peace, and how those pockets are different for everyone.” Kelsey “Nature is cool like that; it can give you what you need without you knowing exactly what that means. Nature is freeing. It's a place where when everything in the world doesn't make sense, nature is there to slow you down and zoom out- help you look at the bigger picture.” Hannah “Just by concentrating on nature, I can block out everything that I haven't been able to get out of my head for days. . . This experience has brought a significant surge of happiness.” Litzy   The assignment is both experiential and multimodal and reminds us of the importance and connectedness with nature.  Students are usually motivated to incorporate these ideas into their daily lives and find a deeper sense of gratitude and awareness of their surroundings. ... View more

This blog series is written by Julia Domenicucci, an editor at Macmillan Learning, in conjunction with Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl. If you’re teaching a literature or fiction course, use one of the ideas below to add Grammar Girl podcasts to your classwork! Podcasts are well-established, but their popularity seems to increase every day—and for good reason! They are engaging and creative, and they cover every topic imaginable. They are also great for the classroom: you can use them to maintain student engagement, accommodate different learning styles, and introduce multimodality.  LaunchPad and Achieve products include collections of assignable, ad-free Grammar Girl podcasts, which you can use to support your lessons. You can assign one (or all!) of these suggested podcasts for students to listen to before class. Each podcast also comes with a complete transcript, which is perfect for students who aren’t audio learners or otherwise prefer to read the content. To learn more about digital products and purchasing options, please visit Macmillan's English catalog or speak with your sales representative.  If you are using LaunchPad, refer to the unit “Grammar Girl Podcasts” for instructions on assigning podcasts. You can also find the same information on the support page "Assign Grammar Girl Podcasts." If you are using Achieve, you can find information on assigning Grammar Girl in Achieve on the support page "Add Grammar Girl and shared English content to your course." If your English Achieve product is copyright year 2021 or later, you are able to use a folder of suggested Grammar Girl podcasts in your course; please see “Using Suggested Grammar Girl Podcasts in Achieve for English Products” for more information.   Using Grammar Girl Podcasts with Literature Assignment: Assign students the following two podcasts and ask everyone to listen to them before class. Using Flashbacks in Fiction (9:06) Using Present Tense When Writing about the Past (7:10) In class, evaluate some of the literature you’ve read using these podcasts. Consider placing students into groups and assigning each group one book read in the course; alternately, student groups can select the title they would like to evaluate, or each student in the class can individually evaluate one selection. After the time allotted to discussion and/or note taking, discuss the findings as a class. Students might consider questions such as: What tenses are used in this work? Does the author use more than one tense? Why might this tense or these tenses have been chosen; how are they used in the work? Does this work and its use of tenses align or differ with what we learned in the Grammar Girl podcasts? How would a different tense impact this piece of literature?   Using Grammar Girl Podcasts to Write Fiction Choose one or more of the following exercises for your fiction writing class.  Assignment A - Figures of Speech: Assign students the following podcast, or listen to it as a class. Then, ask each student to choose 1-3 paragraphs from their most recent fiction piece & rewrite it using at least two of the figures of speech mentioned in the podcast. Five Uncommon Figures of Speech to Spice Up Your Writing (8:04) An alternate version of this assignment would be to ask students to include one example of each figure of speech (five total). In pairs or small groups, ask students to review the revisions. What figures of speech worked? Which did not? Why? Assignment B - Slang: Assign students the following podcast, or listen to it as a class. Then, ask each student to evaluate their most recent fiction piece for use of slang. Writing with Slang (4:51) In pairs or small groups, ask students to discuss their findings. In their own work, did they use slang? If so, how was it used? If not, where might it be used? If not, is there a reason it shouldn’t be used? For a fantastical work, is there space in the world-specific slang, or, if the author attempted this, how could it be improved?  Assignment C- Redundant Language: Assign students the following podcast, or listen to it as a class. Then, ask each student to evaluate their most recent fiction piece for redundant language. When Is It OK to Be Redundant? (6:40) Ask each student to write a short paragraph evaluating their use of redundant language. Do they have any instances of redundancy? Does it work, or should it be edited out of the piece?  As a bonus assignment, ask students to take one paragraph and purposefully add in redundant language, then evaluate its effectiveness.   More Grammar Girl Activities If you are looking for other activities, be sure to check out the other Grammar Girl posts, especially: Using Grammar Girl Podcasts to Reflect on Writing & Accomplishments Using Grammar Girl Podcasts in an Online Classroom Grammar Girl & Ideas for Teaching Online Using Grammar Girl Podcasts for Fun, Low-Stakes Activities Using Grammar Girl Podcasts to Improve Student Writing Using Grammar Girl Podcasts to Discuss Pronouns   Credit: Pixabay Image 984236 by Free-Photos, used under a Pixaby License ... View more

As a lover, and close observer, of words, I always look forward to seeing what major dictionaries will choose as their word of the year. They typically do so based on their own data of what word or words have been searched for most often in that year. For 2020, Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com both chose “pandemic,” with Merriam-Webster reporting that on the day the first patient in the U.S. was released from a hospital in Seattle (February 3), “pandemic” had been looked up 1,621 percent more times than in all of 2019 and that by March of this year the word had been searched for 4,000 percent more often. Dictionary.com, saying “pandemic” represented “life upended, language transformed,” reported a 13,575 percentage leap in searches of the word over 2019. Other dictionaries chose coronavirus-related terms. The British Collins Dictionary used its 4.5 billion word Collins Corpus (which gathers usage from websites, newspapers, and books as well as radio and television) to settle on “lockdown,” defined as “the imposition of stringent restrictions on travel, social interaction, and access to public spaces,” as its word of the year. Runners-up for Collins included “coronavirus,” “furlough,” “key worker,” “self-isolate,” and “social distancing,” which are all related to COVID, though they also listed “Tik Tokker,” “Black Lives Matter,” and several other very prominent 2020 words or phrases as well. The venerable Oxford English Dictionary, however, could not settle on one word of the year, even using its 11 billion words gathered from sources across the English-speaking world. The OED issued a report explaining their method and choices, including some newly-coined words such as “Blursday” or “doomscrolling” and ending up with a group of words they found characterized 2020, including “coronavirus,” “pandemic” “social distancing,” “lockdown,” “stay-at-home,” and “in-person,” along with “Black Lives Matter,” “Juneteenth,” and “allyship.” What the editors found startling in 2020 was the way that coronavirus-related words surged above all others as the year went on: “coronavirus,” for example, quickly became one of the most common words in the English language, even more so than a word like “time.” The OED’s editors say their choice of word or words of the year are intended “to reflect the ethos, mood, or preoccupations” of the year while also having “lasting potential as a term of cultural significance.” And the choices of all these dictionaries seem to do just that, to reflect the national and global obsession with a virus that is killing more than 3,000 Americans a day as this year draws to a close. And it seems important to notice what are NOT words of the year: “impeachment,” for example, or “MAGA” or any number of political terms or slogans. For all the chaos, disruption, and endless, frivolous lawsuits surrounding the 2020 election, national attention seems to have focused on what matters most: life itself. It’s worth asking our students to consider 2020 in light of these words of the year, and to spend some time choosing their own word or words of the year. I wonder what they will have to say and what words will speak most directly and forcefully to them. For my part, I’m left thinking hard not so much about what words were used most often in 2020 but about what word (or words) I would choose as my watchword of 2020, a word or words to live by.  At the very top of my list this year is “perseverance,” the ability to endure, to persist, to stay the course, and to hold on in the face of heart-stopping challenges. After that, in this time when we need to protect ourselves, yes, but also and especially all those around us, I’d fall back on the golden rule as not a watchword but a watchphrase to guide me in 2021. If we truly did unto others and said about others and acted toward others as we would have them do, say, and act toward us—well, 2021 would be a year to celebrate and to cherish. Image Credit: Pixabay Image 2563457 by StockSnap, used under the Pixabay License ... View more

In today's "What We've Learned" video, Matthew Parfitt, one of the authors of Pursuing Happiness, discusses building an online community among students by assigning a shared text and holding discussions across course sections. ... View more

One of the readings that Sonia and I have carried over into the 10th edition of Signs of Life in the USA is Massimo Pigliucci's "The One Paradigm to Rule Them All: Scientism and The Big Bang Theory." This amusing yet highly informative analysis of one of television's premier comedies focuses on the way that the series made fun of the belief that everything in the world can be reduced to one sort of scientific explanation or another. Called "scientism," this reductionist credo is constantly on display in The Big Bang Theory, running its protagonists (especially Sheldon) into absurdities whenever they try to push it too far.  The current belief in "big data" and "analytics"—the conviction that all of our problems can be solved if just enough numbers can be crunched and the right software can be developed (remember MOOCs?)—is an expression of scientism. So, The Big Bang Theory's entertaining reminders that there is more to being human than meets the algorithm can certainly be seen as a useful corrective. But as I contemplate the astonishing resistance in America to the most fundamental medical realities of the COVID-19 pandemic, I see something in far more need of correction than scientism: this is what I will call anti-science-ism, which is practically the exact opposite of scientism. From climate change denial to the anti-vaxxing movement and beyond, anti-science-ism is one of the most powerful forces in America today, and it can be found across the political spectrum. So, without singling out any particular example for close analysis in this blog, I'd like to offer a brief semiotic explanation for what is going on. Of course, entire books can be devoted to such an analysis, and all of them would do well to begin with the battle between religion and science that erupted during the Enlightenment and which has been reflected most prominently in America through a continuing resistance to the teaching of biological evolution. But the current virulence against science is something else again, raising the temperature beyond anything we have ever experienced before. The Scopes Trial almost seems quaintly provincial in comparison to what is going on now. I think the key to the matter lies in the Greek origins of the word "physics": phusis. Phusis is "nature," material reality, and that is what physics—or more generally, science as a whole—is concerned with. Now, reality has an obdurate way of getting in the way of human desire, so at a time when very large numbers of people have become dissatisfied with their reality (and the ongoing collapsing of the American dream has been contributing a great deal to this dissatisfaction), they are rejecting both reality and the scientists who study it—along with any other duly credentialed authority who tells them what they don't want to hear. Thus are born conspiracy "theories" (note the cooptation of the word here), which redefine reality according to what the spinners of such tales want to believe is true, rejecting as "hoaxes" anything that gets in the way of their beliefs. Given the fact that things only stand to get worse in the years to come, with more and more political polarization as the gap between the educated "haves" and the less-educated "have-nots" continues to widen, we can expect to see only more anti-science-ism in the land, more versions of "realities" that are completely ungrounded in reality, and more denial, even as the temperature, literal as well as figurative, continues to rise. Photo Credit: Pixabay Image 1044090 by geralt, used under Pixabay License ... View more

As the fall term of this dreadful year comes to a close, as exams and final essays and endless grading face students and teachers alike, I think it’s a good time to take a deep breath and a break from end-of-term tension—and declare that silly season is here. Over the decades, I’ve done this at the point when students were glassy-eyed, sleep deprived, and often very tired of the major projects they were trying to complete for our class. So just for a day or two, we would devote ourselves to having some fun, with language of course! One of my favorites was to do some playful imitation—writing the opening of a fairy tale in the style of a favorite author, actor, or singer: say Stephen King, Toni Morrison, Lin-Manuel Miranda, or Jay-Z presenting the opening of “The Three Little Pigs.” On other occasions, we would go for limericks: “There once was a sophomore from Stanford” or “There once was an upstart from Ujamaa” (a Black Culture theme house on Stanford’s campus—that was at tough one to rhyme!). Your students would surely come up with lots of clever ones based on your own campus. Or we might go for haikus, which can lead to all kinds of inventiveness and good fun. I’ll never forget the haiku a five-year-old in the writing club I started on a Semester at Sea around the world voyage wrote:              I love Tater Tots.           Tater Tots are potatoes           in a weird disguise. I still remember watching him count out the syllables on his fingers and learning that even five year olds know tater tots are weird! My first- and second-year students are even more inventive, often coining new words in order to make a rhyme work. And we perform these amusing, tongue-in-cheek works of art in fancy dress or costumes and using props of all kinds. In the pre-pandemic days, we did all this in person, and each student could invite one or two friends to attend so that we had a responsive and often participatory audience. But I’ve found that these performances can also work well on Zoom or other platforms: in fact, students often have resources they can call on wherever they are staying—and they can also perform outside as long as their laptops will cooperate. The point, of course, is to reduce levels of stress and tension, to loosen up, to be silly, and to be purposely playful with language. In my experience, doing so can add up not only to helpful practice in writing, speaking, listening, and performing but also to remembering that learning is often a whole lot of fun. Image Credit: Pixabay Image 4232776 by sweetlouise, used under the Pixabay License ... View more

In today's "What We've Learned" video, Lauren Springer, one of the authors of Science and Technology, discusses the need to shape students' expectations of what online learning entails and how it compares to in person classes.  ... View more

Dear Students, We have reached the last week of classes and this semester will soon be history.  As you are writing your final reflections this week, I would like to write a reflection for you as well. The purpose of this reflection is to create an archival record of teaching and learning in 2020. This record, I hope, will allow us to remember the difficult histories of this year, and to retain a living memory of the work we accomplished. Your class and the spring 2020 class had the same theme, Beloved Community, and the same first reading assignment, the James Baldwin 1963 lecture, “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity.” In this lecture, Baldwin connects questions of artistic integrity to ongoing Civil Rights struggles across the United States.  When I think of the spring semester before lockdown, I think of a specific poorly ventilated classroom that was either too hot or too cold. Although the room offered a large floor fan to help with ventilation, the fan did not work. I would urge students to dress in layers for our class. Here is a photo of the room.    A broken floor fan stands in a poorly ventilated classroom. Coats, sweatshirts, scarves, and other layers of clothing are piled on top of the fan. The word “Love” is embroidered on a black and white scarf on the right-hand side.    In this room, in the fourth week of the spring 2020 semester, we wondered together: “What would Baldwin do in a place like this?” In week four, we were still meeting face-to-face. I was still taking the train and writing field notes on the long ride home. Covid-19 loomed in the near future. Some of my fellow commuters were beginning to wear masks, but we were not yet socially distancing. Tony McDade, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery were still alive. The spring protests in rage and memory of their murders had not yet happened.  James Baldwin-- novelist, essayist, activist, Black, queer, Harlem born and raised-- an artist who engaged in a lifelong struggle for integrity-- how would he respond “in a country like ours, and at a time like this”?   “Baldwin would protest,” the students said.  An impromptu multimedia project followed. The students designed a composition from our removable layers of clothing, arranging each piece carefully on the broken floor fan. A photo of this project was posted on social media. Two weeks later, Covid-19 took hold of our city, the governor closed our college, and lockdown and remote learning began. For our all-Zoom Fall 2020 semester, as you know, we could not use the campus as a social space of sensory experiences, and often we could not see each others’ faces or hear each others’ voices. Instead of face-to-face multimedia installations, you had the option of creating a multimedia journal entry. You made drawings, collages, paintings, lyrics, as well as your own videos. In your work, you connected Baldwin and King’s activism for Beloved Community to the intersections of the Covid-19 pandemic and the movement for Black Lives. In making a video  (with your permission) to showcase the multimedia projects, I imagined the merging of the campus classroom and our Zoom room. This singular space of reading-writing-teaching-learning, for me, embodies the process of Beloved Community, “the journey and not just the destination.”   As we say our virtual good-bys and as I begin to prepare for another semester of remote learning in the new year, I will try to remember this process for the lessons yet to come.   Thank you for this semester and best regards, Prof. Susan  ... View more

Here are three brief scenes that capture my end-of-2020 teaching experience. I’d love to hear yours. Scene One: With two weeks left in our semester, I feel like I’ve done everything but reach through the Zoom screen with warm mugs of tea to reassure my students that they can DO this. Emotional support is difficult when we can’t just check in quietly with students about whether they are OK, as Erica Duran describes poignantly in this video.  So, I keep logging on to Zoom before class, so students can introduce me to family members or pets, and I stay on afterward, often chatting with students about their strange pandemic work experiences, their COVID tests, and their worries. Maybe it helps? But today there’s a message from a first-semester student: “College just isn’t for me. I want to drop all my classes. I’m sorry.” It may be that the timing really isn’t right, or that there are family pressures that make staying in school impossible. Still, I’m hoping that over a phone call or two I can at least help this student feel heard. Whatever they decide, I want to help them shape this semester’s story as one of growth rather than loss. Scene Two (speaking of loss): Just before Thanksgiving break, I plead with students through the Zoom screen to make good public health choices over the holiday. I surprise myself by telling them about a friend who died of COVID-19 the previous day. I surprise myself again by bursting into tears. Then, a student says gently, “Turn off your video; give yourself a minute. We’ll talk about something. Take the time you need.” I needed just that kindness, and that wisdom. Scene Three: I’m in my front yard, raking wildly to expel anxious energy, and a colleague who teaches at another campus in town walks by. I ask if she’s OK, and how her students are doing. She responds with a shrug and helpless laughter. Everyone has worked so hard in such diminished circumstances. Was that really OK? She worries that her university’s administrators consider the semester a success, when what it feels like to many instructors and students is unsustainable. Unrepeatable. And yet spring semester looms, with a promise of more of the same. Are we OK with this? At the very least, we can practice, with our students, putting words to this moment, as Andrea Lunsford encourages in this post. The “Assignment B” in this post about using a Grammar Girl podcast offers another model for helping students reflect on their growth over the semester. This challenging semester has renewed my commitment to student self-evaluation for their “participation grade” in our class, as I’ve described here. If you try this, your students will need guidelines to help them name, describe, and value their growth and persistence over the semester. Or, better yet, you could develop that rubric in conversation with your students. What metrics do they think matter at a moment like this? You’ll learn a lot from listening to them. Administrators need to hear what we’re learning from our students, and they need to hear from us about the experience of teaching right now—even, and perhaps especially—if it means explaining how we are not OK. ... View more

Benesemon Simmons (recommended by Khirsten L. Scott, on behalf of DBLAC) is pursuing a PhD in Composition and Cultural Rhetoric at Syracuse University. She teaches WRT 105 and WRT 205 and serves as a writing consultant. Her research interests include Black Feminist Pedagogy, Critical Race Theory, and Activist Rhetoric.   How do you hope higher education will change in the next ten years? I hope higher education will acknowledge its complicity in white supremacy and work towards dismantling these structures. I hope higher education will implement anti-racist practices that will allow access and opportunity for everyone. I hope that higher education will not just use inclusive rhetoric, but be intentional about incorporating equitable practices through admissions, employment, retention, curriculum, and housing and demonstrate accountability through surrounding communities (for example). Ultimately, I hope higher education uses its power to prioritize the marginalized identities it professes to stand by.  Is there an instructor or scholar that helped shape your career in rhet/comp? How? Dr. Aja Y. Martinez has helped shape my career in rhet/comp. Her scholarship, instruction, mentorship, and leadership have helped me grow personally and professionally, but her presence has facilitated my survival in the field. As her work interrogates race and power, she embodies the courage and commitment that her research requires and the action it commands. I am inspired by her activism and her dedication to education, and I strive to model her brilliance in and outside the classroom. A large part of my confidence is because of the foundation she has laid: she centers marginalized voices in practice and in principle and has taught me to value my voice, ideas, and lived experiences. Her influence and example is a major reason I have taken up Counterstory in my research because I understand the need for an intervention against discourse that minimizes or misrepresents racism and I am interested in contributing to this conversation. Counterstory is essential to academia and the field of rhet/comp, and Dr. Martinez helps emphasize this, and encourages others to recognize this as well, including myself. What is it like to be a part of the Bedford New Scholars program? Being a part of the Bedford New Scholars program gives me an opportunity to interact with other graduate student instructors from different universities, and to engage with creative projects and practices guided by the Bedford/St. Martin’s team. Ultimately, this program is an opportunity to learn and develop as a scholar, instructor, and student of composition. We’ve shared teaching resources and received feedback, reviewed and discussed college textbooks and other educational materials, explored innovative digital platforms for the classroom, and participated in relevant conversations surrounding student performance and academia. We focused on how we can support our students and each other. The Bedford New Scholars program creates a network of colleagues that help you navigate publishing in education but also pedagogical strategies in the classroom. How will the Bedford New Scholars program affect your professional development or your classroom practice? I learned a lot by participating in the Bedford New Scholars program, and I believe the summit especially provided many things to consider and carry back to the classroom. A shared assignments activity, where we all presented our own, gave me new ideas about how to approach different areas that our students might find difficult or confusing. Specifically, exercises that included genre and synthesis were helpful to think about different ways to explain major themes in a writing course. It was also useful to explore composition texts for the classroom within groups. This allowed me to rethink how and why I use specific texts as an instructor, and emphasized the importance of prioritizing effectiveness for students. Moreover, practicing with Achieve [Macmillan’s digital learning solution] together was valuable because, while navigating the platform as a teacher, it pushes me to consider methods of revision for students more and how they can better engage in the process. Finally, I found Dr. Kendra N. Bryant’s presentation on “The Courage to Teach” to be very engaging and energizing. She challenged us to interrogate and question our pedagogical style and choices, and to examine them in relation to our teaching philosophies and the backdrop of power systems that our individual institutions represent. Her presentation was powerful and was a great way to put our students and classrooms into perspective considering the violence and social justice issues that surrounds these spaces. Ultimately, Dr. Bryant reminded us to lead with love.   Benesemon’s Assignment that Works  During the Bedford New Scholars Summit, each member presented an assignment that had proven successful or innovative in their classroom. Below is a brief synopsis of Benesemon's assignment. For the full activity, see Analyzing Primary Sources. The purpose of my Assignment that Works is to help my students analyze secondary sources for research. The first part of the assignment asks students to complete an annotated bibliography, and the second part asks students to write an essay using two of the annotations and analyzing their rhetorical features, their relationship to each other, and their relevance to the research inquiry. This assignment helps students of composition become familiar with the annotated bibliography as a genre, locate sources for their research, and consider connections between sources specific to a research topic. ... View more

In today's "What We've Learned" video, Lauren Springer, one of the authors of Science and Technology, discusses the strategies she's learned for reaching out and ensuring all students receive the information they need to succeed during the pandemic.    ... View more

We have reached the arc in the pandemic when we are testing the waters of returning to “normal.” At the same time, we are holding conversations about why “normal” is the wrong destination. This recent Guardian article synthesizes perspectives about the crisis as an opportunity to re-envision the world. Similarly, Susan E. Rice argues in her piece for The New York Times that we should not miss this opportunity to ask how we might focus on justice and equity post-pandemic. The problem of final grades during this unprecedented semester may yet be one more crisis that leads to something much better than a return to “normal.”  Certainly, we have seen some hand-wringing about a potential loss of standards as students flee toward Pass/Fail options like Titanic passengers for lifeboats. But I’m heartened by the much louder chorus of instructors who approach final grades with the compassion and empathy that we ourselves would want, I suspect, if we were in our students’ shoes. In a recent article for Inside Higher Ed, the general spirit among the interviewed instructors is to support students during this extraordinary time and to focus on helping students reach the course learning outcomes. The coronavirus crisis gives us an opportunity to remind ourselves that student learning—not student-evaluation—should be our focus. That insight might be one to take into our post-pandemic teaching lives, too. In that same article, Jessica Calarco, associate professor of sociology at Indiana University, mentions a new interest in “ungrading,” an approach promoted by linguistic anthropologist Susan D. Bloom, whose provocative student-centered essays are featured in the forthcoming fifth edition of From Inquiry to Academic Writing. I have written before about including student self-evaluation as a crucial element in our writing classes. Certainly, this semester I am giving students an opportunity to assess their growth as writers over the semester. I have also offered some simple guidance so they could award their own grades for class participation, urging them to credit their ingenuity and persistence as we shifted unexpectedly to online learning. Their reflections—filled with humility, tips about home haircuts and dye jobs, and confessions about stumbling and having a hard time getting back up—have touched me deeply. Those reflections and records of self-knowledge are far more important than a letter grade. While we may want to forget plenty about our time in quarantine, which pandemic teaching practices do you hope to remember and retain for less traumatic times? Photo Credit: Pixabay Image 308509 by Clker-Free-Vector-Images, used under Pixabay License ... View more