This post originally appeared on May 18, 2015. This was the year that I embraced creative projects in my literature courses.  My department chair has been doing them for ages, and he’s been very encouraging.  His only stipulation is that English majors must write a long seminar-style paper at some point in an upper-division course- but we leave the choice of when to write that paper to the students.  Additionally we’ve got lots of non-majors taking our courses, and we want them to see connections across disciplines, so working on something other than pure literary criticism is useful to them. So this year in addition to the traditional term paper, I’ve given students the option to put together creative projects or write papers based on their own majors, using the literature. For example, several psychology majors have described the pathology of characters. In the fall, I had the students put together an exhibition of their work. This spring, I coordinated with my department chair, who taught the other upper-division literature course, to have the students put on a mini conference where students gave brief presentations about their work. Students who take the creative option must still write a researched introduction, but they’re otherwise given free rein to do what they want.  Letting them explore literature in this way not only gives them the opportunity to make connections between the material and their own interests, but also gives them the opportunity to really shine. And shine they did. One student used social media to explore Katherine Mansfield’s stories, another created a board game based on Northanger Abbey; someone created a commonplace book of tips for how to get by in Bath (also based on research about Jane Austen), while another wrote and performed songs based on Wide Sargasso Sea.  Students in both semesters developed thoughtful lesson plans using the works that we read; both semesters, students reworked pieces of literature as film scripts. And the students who opted for traditional papers wrote some incredibly thoughtful and thorough scholarship. Sometimes I bemoan the fact that I don’t know how to teach students to be creative.  This semester in particular, I was reminded that they already are — and that I just need to give them room to be so. ... View more

This blog was originally posted on December 9, 2014. With two weeks left in the semester, my students are busy revising creative nonfiction essays for inclusion in their final portfolios.  I admit, this is a very relaxing time for me.  While many of my colleagues are frantically grading papers and writing exams, I’m showing up to school to listen to students give presentations on their favorite authors and to answer questions during office hours.  I’m thinking about getting a hammock for the office, actually. Of course, portfolios will come in and the days leading up to Christmas will be filled with frantic grading.  But I’m enjoying the peace right now, and am reflecting on all of the good work I have read from my students this semester. Back in August, the students entered the classroom for the first time unsure of what to expect.  Everyone knows what fiction and poetry is, but the idea of a “creative nonfiction” workshop is foreign to most of them.  Some of these students are in my class because someone recommended me to them.  Others are majors who need the course in order to move on to more advanced classes.  Others just need to get an arts elective out of the way.  Most, though, aren’t taking the class because they already have a deep and abiding love for the essay or literary journalism. I hope that, over the course of the year, they have grown to love these forms.  Not just because I love these forms myself, but because I have seen this group of students come together and understand each other better as a result of sharing their own personal narratives.  These 18 and 19 year olds began the semester a little nervous, sometimes reluctant to allow themselves to be too exposed in their writing.  But at this point, I think that we have all become friends—or, if not friends, then very supportive colleagues.  We have shared family secrets, discussed our private anxieties, and revealed truths that we usually keep hidden when we’re in the dorms, at the bar, or in a department meeting.  We’ve established a sense of trust with each other, even though—or, perhaps, because?—we didn’t know each other 14 weeks ago. Some of these students will go on to study English and creative writing.  Some will go on to publish their work.  Most will not.  But I hope that these students will look back on the experience of taking this class fondly, and I hope they feel like they learned useful things during our time together.  Of course, if they find that they’re able to express themselves through writing more effectively, that’s great.  But more importantly, I hope that, through reading and writing creative nonfiction, they’ve come to understand that they’re not alone in the universe.  I hope they realize that their friends, their classmates, and even their professors struggle with private stresses and anxieties.  I hope they have learned that, sometimes, we all feel isolated, or freakish, or terrified.  And I hope that they’re able to take this knowledge with them after they leave my classroom, better equipped to try to understand someone else’s point-of-view.  This, I think, is the most important reason to study creative nonfiction. ... View more

Next month, the book I co-authored with Roy Stamper and Stacey Cochran, An Insider’s Guide to Academic Writing, will be released. The three of us will be blogging in our new Bits blog “Teaching Writing in the Disciplines” about how to teach with a writing in the disciplines (WID) approach in foundational writing courses, which is the approach of the text. We hope this blog can be a space where we explore methods of teaching and practical classroom activities and approaches. When I first arrived at North Carolina State University nine years ago, I joined a First-Year Writing program that was launching a relatively new curriculum that focused on writing in academic disciplines. I had never taught first-year writing as writing in the disciplines (WID), and I was skeptical: how could a teacher with a background in English teach writing in other disciplines? I was no expert in writing in biology or nursing or math or psychology or any other field other than rhetoric and composition. What in the world would I teach my students? We talk about imposter syndrome a lot in academia. I experienced a pretty severe case of it at that moment. Not only did I feel unqualified to teach the first-year writing course, but I was supposed to start directing the program the following year. I began thinking of all of the reasons why a WID approach seemed challenging: Faculty comfort level: Wouldn’t many of the writing faculty feel uncomfortable about teaching writing in other disciplines, just like I did? Challenges of transfer: How would students transfer knowledge into their other classes? Would they be transferring inaccurate knowledge about genres in other disciplines? Stigma as a service course: Would teaching a WID approach make first-year writing even more of a service course with no real rhetorical, disciplinary content of its own? What I didn’t realize at that moment was that the most effective ways of teaching a WID approach in a first-year writing course do not solely emphasize mastery of various disciplinary genres. Rather, they draw on the disciplinary expertise of the writing faculty teaching the courses, focusing on rhetorical principles and understanding the context for writing. The rhetorical context in a WID-focused course just happens to be writing in different academic disciplines. Students are engaged in close, rhetorical reading of writing in different disciplinary areas. They aren’t memorizing formulae for writing across the college or university. They’re learning to ask smart, rhetorically-focused questions about what writing conventions are followed in a specific field, how arguments are shaped, what evidence is used, what questions are asked, and what methods of inquiry are most common. Students would leave my first-year writing class better prepared to write in contexts outside of my class because they would know what to pay attention to—even as they encountered contexts we never discussed in my class. And as the icing on the cake, if I could help them understand what they were learning in my class and how it would help them in the future, I could imagine an increased potential for student motivation. Once I realized that I could take what I knew about writing and rhetorical context and apply it to a WID context, my list of reasons not to teach a WID approach were immediately countered by arguments for why it was a great idea: Why not? Why WID? Faculty comfort level > Rich, meaningful application of rhetorical principles Challenges of transfer > Potential for transfer when taught from a rhetorical approach Stigma as a service course > Student buy-in and motivation What I can claim after directing a program for eight years that used this approach is that students understood the potential for transfer of what they were learning. When they saw the curriculum, they understood that they would be learning something different from (but hopefully building on) what they learned in high school. Faculty invented a range of ways to approach teaching WID that emphasized some of their passions and interests. And best of all, our program assessment demonstrated that students were mastering the rhetorically-based student learning outcomes for our first-year writing course. A program director can’t ask for much more than that. What are the biggest questions and concerns that you have about trying a WID approach? If you’ve tried it already, what are some of the strategies you have found to be most effective? 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

This post first appeared on December 2, 2014. I’ve been a slow adopter of using Google Drive, despite many years of having Google-supported email at the different universities where I’ve worked. But in my late adoption of it, I’ve come to realize how useful it can be in the classroom, particularly when it comes to facilitating a lot of the work that I do to create a student-centered discussion. I realized over the summer that I could use Google Drive for a couple of things. The first was to create journal templates for my students in my 100- and 200-level courses.  In those courses, my students keep daily reading journals — and by having students write in a journal that I can see, I can immediately tell who is doing the work. More importantly, I can draw ideas into the classroom that students write about in their journals. It took some work to set everything up (I created a template, then made copies for all of the students), but it’s been a useful way to keep an eye on what interests the students in what they read. My other major use of Google Drive is to create what are essentially collaborative documents of discussion questions.  I did this initially because I’ve got an assignment that’s always been a bit clunky for me in terms of organization. In my 300- and 400-level courses, I’ve always taught students how to write open-ended discussion questions, and then I’ve had them submit questions daily (in lieu of a quiz).  We use those questions in class to guide our conversation. Previously, I’ve tried having the students just hand the questions to me in class (which really made me work on the fly) or email me either the night before or the hour before class.  With the email, I wound up spend a lot of time collating the work, which also meant the potential for missing some of the questions in the overflowing email inbox.  As I was preparing for my courses over the summer, I remembered an admonition from my student teaching days — if you can let the students do the work for you, have them do the work for you.  Thus, for this, I’ve got the students in my upper division courses writing and collating their discussion questions in Google docs. Here, I simply created forms for each day of class — titled with the name of the text we’re reading and the assigned chapters of acts — and shared an entire folder with the class.  Students submit questions until 30 minutes before class — then I print the entire thing off and use it as we work through the literature. I’ve found that students’ questions are less repetitive when they see what’s been asked before — and I’m even noticing that students will sometimes reference other students’ questions in their own (in which case, I know we have to discuss a certain topic). I went into the semester thinking that this would be all we use shared documents for. Then I decided that the students in my novels course really needed to take a careful look at the chronology of events in Dracula.  I realized that this was not something we could really just do on the blackboard. We’ve been doing chapter-by-chapter breakdowns of plots at the beginning of class, but there are simply too many days and too many different narrators in Dracula for that to be effective. So I created a shared document that simply lists all of the dates in Dracula when a character writes in a diary, sends a letter, or receives a message from a solicitor’s office. On the first day of class, I shared it with all of the students in the class, projected it from the overhead, and set students to the task of sorting things out.  Students worked in groups of two or three, huddled (admittedly) around their phones, laptops, tablets, and the classroom computer, adding to the chronology together. Once we spend the first chunk of class doing that, we take a look at the story in order — and it’s really helped the students find the details of Dracula’s movements (“Oh, wait! That’s what the dog on the ship was!” “Oh, that’s why there was the detail about the escaped wolf!”).  I also color code the document, according to the different characters narrating (i.e. John Seward’s diary is in green, Mina Murray/Harker’s journal is in purple), which allows us to see how the narrative bounces from one character to another, and how the characters themselves have to piece information together over time. In doing this we’ve been able to have an effective discussion of the structure of the novel, which has shown the students that they can, indeed, break down the narrative into its parts and look inside the inner workings of the novel. ... View more

PRESENTED BY Amy Braziller Elizabeth Kleinfeld ABOUT THE SYMPOSIUM Amy Braziller (Red Rocks Community College) and Liz Kleinfeld (Metropolitan State University of Denver) are the authors of The Bedford Book of Genres. In this webinar, Amy and Liz will debunk the assumptions surrounding teaching with genres and share examples of writing from their own students. Learn more about how teaching with multigenre and multimodalties increases student engagement, helps students compose in real life/rhetorical situations, gives students flexibility in their writing choices, and encourages students to complete more in-depth research. Learn how Amy and Liz’s own interests in rhetorical theory, 21st century literacies, and teaching genres helped shape The Bedford Book of Genres. Receive teaching tips on how to incorporate the strategies suggested in the text into your classroom. ABOUT THE PRESENTERS Amy Braziller is an English faculty member and former department chair at Red Rocks Community College. She received her B.A. from Empire State College and her M.A. from New York University. Amy has presented on teaching writing and new media at numerous national and regional conferences. Her research focuses on the intersections between classroom and personal writing. Amy, who is at work on a series of personal essays related to her punk rock days in NYC, blogs about food, film, music, GLBT issues, and social media distractions at amybraziller.com.  She is co-author (with Elizabeth Kleinfeld) of The Bedford Book of Genres. Elizabeth Kleinfeld is the Writing Center Director and an Associate Professor of English at Metropolitan State College of Denver. She received her B.S. from Bradley University, and her M.S. in English and Ph.D. in Composition and Rhetoric from Illinois State University. Liz is a contributing researcher on The Citation Project and has published essays on new media, writing centers, and student source use in various journals and collections, including Computers & Composition Online. She is co-PI on a grant to develop a program on academic literacy for at-risk students, particularly migrants. Her current research focuses on how writing centers can intervene in students’ research processes. Liz is co-author (with Amy Braziller) of The Bedford Book of Genres. ... View more

PRESENTED BY Kristin Arola Jennifer Sheppard Cheryl E. Ball ABOUT THE SYMPOSIUM Teachers of writing are conscientious evaluators of their students' written work, and the strategies for creating those grades vary widely, from providing formative or summative feedback and using heuristics or rubrics, among other methods. These assessment strategies can happen in many media, such as handwritten comments, typed summative and in-line comments, oral feedback (including audio recordings), and even screencast talk-throughs of student papers. But we are often asked, how does grading change when teachers are evaluating more than just the written content? With the spreading use of multimodal assignments in writing classes, this webinar will offer participants multiple perspectives and strategies for responding to multimodal student work, based in current writing studies research and combined-decades of experience teaching multimodal texts. ABOUT THE PRESENTERS Kristin L. Arola is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Composition, and Technology at Washington State University, where she directs the Digital Technology and Culture program. Her work　brings together composition theory, digital rhetoric, and American Indian rhetorics so as to understand digital composing practices within larger social and cultural contexts. Her most recent book,　Composing (Media) = Composing (Embodiment) [with Anne Frances Wysocki, Utah State UP, 2012] is an edited collection that explores how the media we produce and consume embody us in a two-way process. She is also the co-editor of the third edition of CrossTalk in Comp Theory: A Reader [with Victor Villanueva, NCTE, 2011]. Her work has appeared in Computers and Composition, Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion, and the Journal of Literacy and Technology. She resides in Pullman, WA, with her amazing husband and charming dog. Jennifer Sheppard is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Professional Communication at New Mexico State University, where she directs the Design Center, a space supporting students’ hands-on development of communication projects for clients. She regularly teaches courses in document design, multimedia theory and production, technical and professional communication, and online pedagogy. Her research interests include new media, information design, professional communication and pedagogy for face-to-face and online instruction. She has published on these issues in Computers and Composition, the Journal of Literacy and Technology, and several edited collections, including Designing Texts: Teaching Visual Communication and RAW: Reading and Writing New Media. She lives in Las Cruces, NM with her partner and their very busy toddler, Eli. Cheryl E Ball is an Associate Professor of Digital Publishing Studies in the English Department at West Virginia University. Her areas of specialization include multimodal composition and editing practices, digital media scholarship, and digital publishing. Since 2006, Ball has been editor of the online, peer-reviewed, open-access journal Kairos: Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, which exclusively publishes digital media scholarship and is read in 180 countries. She has published articles in a range of rhetoric/composition, technical communication, and media studies journals including Computers and Composition, C&C Online, Fibreculture, Convergence, Programmatic Perspectives, and Technical Communication Quarterly. Her recent books include a scholarly multimedia collection The New Work of Composing　(co-edited with Debra Journet and Ryan Trauman, C&C Digital Press) and the print-based　RAW: Reading and Writing New Media　(co-edited with Jim Kalmbach, Hampton Press). ... View more

PRESENTED BY John J. Ruszkiewicz ABOUT THE SYMPOSIUM What makes teaching writing through genres so appealing is that it encourages students to work the way productive writers do. Because students encounter genres everywhere—in music, movies, games, reading—they quickly grasp the concept and see how it applies to the kinds of writing they produce. Taught right, genres offer writers the formulas they crave (at least initially) and the freedom they need to adapt to constantly changing rhetorical situations, audiences, and media. So the strategies students take away from a genre approach apply well beyond the composition classroom. ABOUT THE PRESENTER John J. Ruszkiewicz is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin where he has taught literature, rhetoric, and writing for more than thirty-five years. A winner of the President’s Associates Teaching Excellence Award, he was instrumental in creating the Department of Rhetoric and Writing in 1993 and directed the unit from 2001-05. He has also served as president of the Conference of College Teachers of English (CCTE) of Texas, which gave him its Frances Hernández Teacher—Scholar Award in 2012. For Bedford/St. Martin's, he is coauthor, with Andrea Lunsford, of Everything’s An Argument; coauthor, with Jay T. Dolmage, of How to Write Anything with Readings; and the author of How To Write Anything and A Reader's Guide to College Writing. ... View more

PRESENTED BY Nancy Sommers ABOUT THE SYMPOSIUM For students to succeed as academic writers, they must become comfortable with arguing positions and anticipating counterarguments. Academic writing asks students to enter debates, respond to the words and ideas of other writers, and construct arguments supported with evidence. If students are reluctant to take a stance on an issue, confuse opinions with positions, believe that introducing counterarguments will weaken their claims, or come from culture that value different modes of argumentation, they will have difficulty grasping the expectations of academic argument. Nothing is more vital for students’ success as academic writers than becoming comfortable analyzing and constructing arguments. In this Webinar we will explore specific ideas for teaching argument and offer practical classroom activities for helping students succeed as academic writers. ABOUT THE PRESENTER Nancy Sommers, who has taught composition and directed composition programs for thirty years, now teaches writing and mentors new writing teachers at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.  She led Harvard’s Expository Writing Program for twenty years, directing the first-year writing program and establishing Harvard’s WAC program. A two-time Braddock Award winner, Sommers is well known for her research and publications on student writing. Her articles "Revision Strategies of Student and Experienced Writers" and "Responding to Student Writing" are two of the most widely read and anthologized articles in the field of composition.  Her recent work involves a longitudinal study of college writing to understand the role writing plays in undergraduate education. Sommers is the lead author on Hacker handbooks, all published by Bedford/St. Martin’s, and is coauthor of Fields of Reading, Tenth Edition (2013). ... View more

Driving to work this morning I spotted the following billboard, promoting a new television series, which is set to debut on September 27.  Now, whether or not Blood & Oil is a commercial success or not, this billboard contains a great deal of information, not so much about the show itself (which, of course, has not yet been aired) but about American attitudes towards wealth, social class, and feminine beauty.   A semiotic analysis of the billboard begins with a description of its fundamental denotation: what it shows or contains.  We see four human figures, two men and two women, standing next to each other, all but one appearing as young-adult-youthful, the fourth as well preserved middle-aged.  All are dressed in black evening wear, and they are surrounded by black, some of it displayed in a drip pattern from the top of the image, and some displayed at the bottom, looking like a kind of sea in which the figures are standing.  The image is also set up in a kind of chiaroscuro effect by which the models’ faces, hair, and, most strikingly, the backs of women (strategically placed at the center of the image) stand out. Also standing out, just below the center, are the words “Blood & Oil,” in gold lettering. Our semiotic analysis seeks to move from the denotation of the image to its connotation—that is, to what it suggests or signifies—but this is not a simple direct step.  Our goal is a cultural interpretation, but to get to that we first need to look at the visual codes employed by the image.  Black evening dress, for example, tends to be codified as a signifier of high status in America, and so the image suggests that these figures belong to the upper class.  Their facial expressions support this connotative impression: the man on the left (some of you may recognize Don Johnson here) wears an angry, domineering expression, suggesting someone used to power.  The man on the right wears an aloof expression, with an eyebrow slightly raised, hinting at total self-assurance.  The women look over their shoulders (in a classic eroticized posture) with expressions that are at once daring and self-satisfied, and the way that they are placed in relation to the men suggests that each is the “trophy wife” of the man next to her.  All the figures, though one can detect subtle age gradations, are physically attractive according to America’s dominant beauty values. This first level of interpretation is supported by the gold lettered words, which suggest both family (blood) and wealth (oil). (It is also an allusive pun, alluding to the Nazi credo of “blood and soil,” thus hinting at a story about human evil.)  Indeed, my first reaction when I saw the billboard, at forty miles an hour, was “Oh my goodness, they’re bringing back some sort of Dallas clone!”  (Turns out I was right.) The words “Blood & Oil” on the image also clarifies what all that black is: it’s oil, dripping down to fill a sea of goo.  And while oil connotes wealth (if you own the source), it also connotes pollution, filth, and the fact that the models are standing in it helps lead to the next level of interpretation. Because what this billboard is indicating is a story about oil barons and their women, and the barons aren’t going to be heroes.  Situating the image into a system that includes Dallas, but also the film There Will be Blood, reinforces this connotative impression of a new series about a glamorous but evil oil clan. I knew all this before I could get to my office and look the new show up.  And indeed, “Blood & Oil” is a kind of Dallas reprise, but with a sympathetic working-class couple (not included in this billboard image) standing as foils to the rich oil barons this time around. Now, what does all this tell us at the cultural level?  First, we see here the fundamental middle-class perspective on social class in America as reflected in popular culture.  This view could be called a love/hate relationship with wealth, one that is at once fascinated by the rich, and yet also in need of feeling morally superior to them.  Consider such programs as My Super Sweet Sixteen, which lavishly displays the privileges of the very rich while also making them look ridiculous.  Viewed by a mass audience of middle and working-class viewers, such shows satisfy the desire to see what the rich have while reassuring viewers of their moral superiority to such people.  Dallas, Falcon Crest, Knott’s Landing, most “Real Housewives of .  .   .” programs, and innumerable other TV shows and movies do the same thing. We also see a display here of what counts as feminine beauty in America, worthy of being possessed by wealthy men: slim, slinky bodies, blonde hair, high cheekbones, delicate facial features.  Male beauty (though less precisely codified than female beauty) is also represented in the image.  But the physical attractiveness of the men and women in the image is compromised by their facial expressions.  The women are smug; the men are either domineering or too cool by half, reflecting the middle-class view that the rich are physically beautiful (men as well as women), but their beauty is of an inhuman sort, enviable but ultimately repugnant. The fact that this show features working-class protagonists (again, not indicated in the billboard) is a very interesting addition to the Dallas narrative, however, reflecting the blossoming of class consciousness in America in the wake of the Great Recession.  Described (from my online sources) as a soap opera, Blood & Oil will clearly pit the working-class couple against these evil but glamorous oil barons and their wives in a soapy dramatization of what is happening today as the 1% (really the top tenth of a percent) increasingly swallow up most of the wealth in the world. I wonder if the show will survive the pilot. ... View more

This post originally appeared on September 11, 2014. The world these days is full of competing stories. I can’t turn on my computer without being inundated by them (unless I don’t look at any social media, but then what’s a computer for? Writing?). Everything that is happening, it seems, is represented by not one but at least two differing narratives. The recent retraction of a hiring offer at a major Midwestern university over a controversial Twitter feed is either an affront to faculty governance and intellectual freedom or it is a reasonable decision based on the evidence. Relatedly, (since this is what the tweets were about), recent events in Gaza are reason to condemn the Israeli government for war crimes or are reason to support it in defending itself. Unrelatedly, publicly airing a video of a football player assaulting his then-girlfriend, now-wife, in an elevator was the right move as it led to his suspension from professional football or it was a violation of the couple’s privacy. I bring these examples up not to talk about them in themselves but to make the point that the controversies over these events can be seen not as made up entirely of logical argument (or, for that matter, unreflecting passion), but as consisting largely of competing narratives. That is, the positions people hold on these things may come from aspects of their identities—national origin, gender, some kind of identification with a relevant group—but even if they do, they are informed and supported by a story. The stories may be about the past that led to the current state of affairs or about assumptions regarding human nature or the nature of the relationship between states and citizens or employers and employees. I’m thinking today about the importance of stories to the way we see the world (not a new insight, I know) in part because the anniversary of 9/11 is two days from the moment I am writing this. In this morning’s online reading I saw an article about still-classified portions of documents pertaining to the events of that day, documents that might or might not change our understanding of what happened. One congressman is quoted as saying these pages “tell a story that has been completely removed from the 9/11 Report.” The 9/11 Report is the official account of what happened, but it is one story among many, and it is a story informed by other stories about American history, global history, and the nature of armed conflict, just as competing accounts are informed by other, larger stories and smaller personal ones. This got me thinking about other stories we tell ourselves about those events, stories that are as much about ourselves as anything else. A scheduled event on my campus, an email from my chancellor informs me, will celebrate “Patriot Day,” the term some are using for the anniversary of the events of September 11, 2001. There is a wealth of narrative behind that labeling choice. I am also thinking about stories now because I am always thinking about stories. It is one of the chief job hazards of teaching and studying fiction. This job has taught me to see narrative everywhere. As Hayden White has argued even history, which at first glance seems about the facts of past events, is shaped by the same tropes and story-forms that shape novels.  It has taught me that the arguments we have about the world around us are at bottom just stories, and that, as Billy Bragg sings in “It Says Here,” “…there are two sides to every story.” Maybe most importantly, it has taught me that there actually more than two sides—that is, that we too often fall into the trap of thinking there are only two choices, two ways to understand a particular event or phenomenon, while the best fiction can show us that the options are never-ending.  It can do this, as Bakhtin argued in his reading of Dostoevsky when a writer embodies opposing viewpoints in different characters and doesn’t pick a winner. It can also do this when it shows how difficult it is to understand the world at all, when it presents characters or narrators with points of view that do not seem to be endorsed by the author but to which the author seems to oppose no “correct” view (which Lukacs claimed is the definition of the modern novel). My ultimate point here could be seen as another answer to the question answered in a previous entry, “Why I Teach Literature.” Another reason I teach fiction is to offer my students the opportunity to see the competing narratives in the books I assign and in the world around them, to see how these stories are built on other stories, and to see how there are more than two sides to every story. There are ways to teach that encourage these lessons, which any teacher can easily enough apply in their classroom, methods that highlight the opposition, nuance, and ambiguity in fiction and in the stories we tell outside of the pages in books. Helping students to look at things in this way can, in a hoary old humanist formulation I still believe in, help them to better appreciate and understand not only literature but also life, which, to borrow an old concept, is stories all the way down. ... View more

This post originally appeared on March 25, 2014. I am both very organized and a complete organizational nightmare.  I am thankful that computers can easily and quickly search documents for key words.  I would never find old teaching material otherwise, because I am both a hoarder of the old stuff and a person who dallies with organizing systems, then tosses them aside.  (I did finally purge a large portion of my paper files last year, but I’ve still got a box of teaching files that I want to keep on hand.) Now that I have about a decade’s worth of teaching files – some paper, but mostly now digital – I am terrified by this fact.  While I don’t want to be that straw man version of a professor pulling out the yellowed old lecture notes, I also know that I like to refer to my old notes as I plan to re-teach texts.  I want to look back at what I’ve done before and figure out what worked well, or even what didn’t work the last time I taught a particular work of literature. This came back to me with some force as I’ve been preparing to teach Tartuffe to my world lit students.  I’ve taught the play a few times, but it’s been more than 5 years since I’ve done so.  I realized that I wanted to look at what I did last time I taught the course, even though I really won’t use many of those ideas.  I mostly just wanted to see what types of discussion questions I had asked last time around, to see if anything inspired me this time around.  Fortunately, I could find these by that search function, because I surely wouldn’t have found them just looking through the files on my laptop or my external hard drive. But that really doesn’t get at the heart of the problem, which is that as college professors we tend to acquire a lot of stuff.  And we have to do something with that stuff.  I’ve got decent organizational patterns in place for my own scholarship and for any campus service that I do, but that’s mostly because I don’t repeat the same things over and over again – and because those files don’t serve the multiple purposes that my teaching files have to serve.  So I’ve been thinking about how to manage the files this semester from the get-go, something especially important to me because I’ve got four separate preps this semester (3 literature courses, 1 composition course). As I’ve been thinking about organizing the materials, I’ve realized that I need to think about the multiple purposes of keeping teaching files and planning charts.  The first purpose is the more immediate one: I need to know what I’m doing class-to-class, and what I’ve done in previous classes.  The second purpose is to hang on to records over the long term, mostly for the possibility of future reference (something that digital storage makes much more possible, as I seem to occasionally move across the country for work). In the past, I’ve had a tendency to just name things for the date that I did them in class, with the hope that I’ll go back and resort them later.  This means that I have a lot of files titled things like “February 20” – but with no reference to the course or to the material in them.  There’s also the problem of working on both my home computer and my office computer.  I use Dropbox for a lot of things, but that requires installation on a computer not my own, so this semester I’m trying Google Drive, which allows me to work at home and in the office on documents.  I’m also trying to keep titles descriptive, or at least numeric – a document titled 206Sept5 is the plan I’ve made for my world literature course for September 5, and I’m trying to do the same with titling any presentations (so a presentation titled 206Sept5 is a presentation relevant to that particular class period).  This doesn’t solve the long-term storage problem, but it does at least start me with a consistent system for titling things, something that has become a problem in the past with mini-lessons that I’ve used in PowerPoint or other presentation software. On top of that, before the semester began, I spent a good chunk of time creating charts for each class that included the reading assignment, the relevant writing assignment, the relevant course objectives, and/or potential lecture topics (it totally depends on the course, but you get the general idea).  It’s something that I think will help me keep on track, and, perhaps most importantly, help me stay in control as I undertake this complex semester of learning the ropes of a new institution, teaching 4 preps (2 completely new, one  a course I’ve taught before with a textbook I taught in a very, very early version). This is, I suppose, the lament of every person who teaches.  So I suppose I’d like to hear from you, dear readers: How do you keep yourself organized when it comes to teaching materials?  And should I just give up on the old stuff and simply create things anew and hope for the best? ... View more

Another year and I’m once again humbled by our new TAs—how intuitive WAW work is for them, the ideas they contribute to our program for teaching WAW approaches, the possibilities they see for it. Concurrently, our second-year TAs have come back to their third semester of teaching with tweaks, new assignments, and ideas for how to better teach existing assignments. Last spring, a group of our senior adjunct faculty held an 8-week salon series on developing WAW pedagogy. Everyone’s ideas for where to take their courses were different. On other fronts, I’ve been peer-reviewing a number of journal submissions, as well as drafts for an edited collection, that in one way or another focus on WAW. It’s both wonderful and amazing to see some of the emerging scholarship making its way to print, especially the breadth of approaches to WAW being described. Elizabeth and I have also begun developing the third edition of Writing about Writing. Amongst all this intellectual fecundity, occasionally—both in my own program and in the literature on WAW—a troublesome question arises: “Is what you’re describing really ‘writing about writing’?” These moments make me squirm, for two reasons. First, the question gestures toward a “core” of principles underlying the purposes and configurations of WAW approaches. Having to ask if an approach is “really” WAW suggests those deep values are somehow being confounded. Second, and more uncomfortable, the “really WAW” question foregrounds ownership: who gets to call what WAW? If an approach is inconsistent with the core that most instructors of writing-about-writing would recognize, do we really have grounds to say “this isn’t that”? Does it matter? Does having a name risk creating a diversity-crushing monolith? What distinguishes writing-about-writing, across the hundreds of programs and instructors using some version of it, seems to be Purpose: teaching declarative knowledge about writing in order to enhance metacognition, vocabulary, and writing processes and behaviors—for the purposes of shifting conceptions of writing to more accurate and effective ones, strengthening learning transfer to future writing scenes, and shifting epistemologies (particularly in relation to sources and contingency). Methods: reading scholarship in writing, rhetoric, and literacy studies; creating writing projects whose themes interrogate various aspects of the same subjects; intensive, iterative reflection on students’ own literacy and writing experiences ; and, frequently, conducting primary research projects on questions related to writing, literacy, and rhetoric. This is a quite small set of limits on what “counts” as writing-about-writing; these scripts are what making a given instructional approach recognizable as writing-about-writing. It seems to me that the only reason this name—or any other for these approaches—matters is because of the function of names as shorthand, a “handle on a briefcase,” for identifying the underlying philosophy of instruction. In the moments where it occurs to anyone to ask “You’re calling this approach writing-about-writing, but is it really?” part of the concern is simply, if someone looks at what you’re calling writing-about-writing, will they think that WAW is something other than these purposes and methods?  Is what your students are writing actually about writing? And if not—why bother to call the approach something it’s literally not? Ultimately, though, the name simply offers a reminder to ask what the focus and purpose of a given course truly is. What is truly neat to see is the wealth of ways people are expanding on those very basic scripts to do WAW. ... View more

As I write this, Donald Trump is the frontrunner for the Republican nomination. He’s also a lightning rod for all kind of criticism across multiple fronts.  One thing is for sure: people are talking about Donald Trump, good and bad. Of all of his polarizing remarks, Trump’s statements about immigration seem to have provoked the strongest reactions. I thought I would offer some insights on how to teach Trump, with a focus on immigration. By Michael Vadon [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons Julia Alvarez, “Selections from Once Upon a Quinceañera.” Alvarez’s essay is a useful antidote to some of the notions about immigrants circulating out in the ether.  Her portrayal of the economic challenges of the quince offers a particular understanding of immigrants in relation to work and economics. Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Making Conversation and The Primacy of Practice.” Central to Appiah’s notion of cosmopolitanism is the idea that in a very crowded world we will need to find a way to get along.  Appiah reframes some of the challenges around immigration and, in particular, suggests that isolationist maneuvers (wall building, literally and figuratively) really are no longer realistic given how interconnected the world is today. Manuel Muñoz, “Leave Your Name at the Border.”  Muñoz is a great shorter piece for considering the forces of assimilation that face immigrants.  He helps students think about the costs and benefits of fitting in as an immigrant. Jennifer Pozner, “Ghetto Bitches, China Dolls, and Cha Cha Divas.”  Given Trump’s experience with reality TV, I think Pozner would be a particularly interesting choice since her work examines the intersection of reality TV and ethnic/racial stereotypes. Thomas Friedman, “The Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention.” Friedman’s essay is useful for thinking about global economic connections, which explains (for example) why the line of suits with Trump’s name on them is manufactured in Mexico. Friedman’s central point is that global economics and global politics are centrally linked; Trump is an interesting test case for further examining Friedman’s ideas. 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

I don’t think it would be too much to claim that the publication this summer of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman has been the literary event of the year, but it isn’t the novel’s literary value that makes it so significant.  Rather, Lee’s new (old) novel is a cultural signifier of profound importance, and it is as such that I wish to approach it here as a topic for semiotic analysis. Of course I am writing this after much of the dust has already settled on the matter.  It has been widely explained that Go Set a Watchman is not a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird but is actually an earlier draft.  And it is quite well known that the Atticus Finch who appears in Watchman is hardly the saintly hero of Mockingbird.  In fact, he is someone who is a far more likely representation of mid-twentieth-century small-town southern (white) opinion, especially on racial matters, than is the Atticus that we have come to know and love so well—a nod to realism that might have been applauded by historically-minded reviewers.  But that, of course, hasn’t been the dominant response at all. Instead, the reaction has been one of more or less shocked betrayal.  Gregory Peck, Peck’s own son has intimated, may just be rolling in his grave. The question for cultural semiotics, however, is not why Lee changed the character of Atticus Finch so much between drafts (though this is a fascinating question for literary history, possibly involving the emergence of another Maxwell Perkins); the cultural semiotic question is, why is the change so important?  Why have so many readers been so shaken? In answering such questions I can refer back to a blog I wrote here a few years ago in which I noted that, lovely and heartwarming as To Kill a Mockingbird is, there is an uncomfortable hitch in it which lies in the way that the novel basically shifted the responsibility for southern bigotry away from the upper and middle classes onto the shoulders of the lower classes, the “white trash” to which such clans as the Ewells belong.  Living the life of a modest middle-class lawyer (who is actually descended from an old plantation family), Mockingbird’s Atticus Finch joins his middle-class neighbors and colleagues (the town Sheriff, the local Judge) in resisting the lynch mob mentality of people who are clearly identified as “red neck” troublemakers.   While it is true that Atticus Finch’s sister, who still lives on the family plantation at Finch’s landing (but who does not appear in the movie), is also no paragon of racial tolerance, it is the patently evil Bob Ewell that readers are going to remember as the face of southern bigotry. Thus, Atticus Finch performed a service for white middle-class Americans when he first appeared in the midst of the turmoil of the Civil Rights era.  While images of identifiably middle-class southerners could be seen on TV screaming in the faces of black school children being escorted by federal marshals onto the grounds of newly desegregated school campuses, the upright figure of Atticus Finch, who was a southerner to boot, stood as a reassuring symbol of a fundamental human decency.  No nobler man has appeared in American fiction, and when that man is portrayed by Gregory Peck, one of Hollywood’s most magnificent specimens of manhood and character, you have the makings of a really profound cultural icon with extraordinary powers of healing. But now, at a time of intense racial uneasiness, the prospect of Atticus Finch falling off his pedestal threatens to undo all that. I suspect, however, that America really can’t afford to lose the good Atticus, and so will protect him from his earlier avatar through the simple device of isolating him within the confines of the work of art called To Kill a Mockingbird, leaving the Atticus of that rather inferior work of art called Go Set a Watchman to literary historians, set aside as an aesthetic curiosity but not taken as a credible threat to a fictive man that Americans continue to need to be real. Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Join the Macmillan Community (it’s free, quick, and easy) to get involved! ... View more

This post originally appeared on March 26, 2013. I spent last weekend watching documentaries. This may not sound at first hearing like the most exciting weekend a person could have, but every year at this time I spend all of my money and time to go see more documentary films than a person should see in four days at True/False, a documentary film festival in its tenth year that is a highlight of the year for me and my little town. Directors and producers and writers and fans descend on the city and turn it into temporary mecca for (mostly) nonfiction narrative cinema (and for hoodies, which for some reason go with documentaries like Botox goes with Hollywood), and normal residents like me get to forget our day jobs and immerse ourselves in a vibrant and inventive art form. Emerging bleary-eyed and wrung out (maybe that explains the hoodies) on the other end of my sixteen-film weekend, I’ve been thinking about documentaries, especially in light of what I do, which is study and teach fiction. This isn’t so paradoxical—nonfictional and fictional narrative share more than most people think, and have a lot to teach us about each other. The most important thing they share, of course, is that they’re narrative. While I am more in the theory of the novel camp than the narrative theory camp because the latter looks for the keys to all narrative while the former keeps its eye on genre, it is important to recognize the specific shared goals and forms of nonfictional and fictional films and prose. In plainer words, it is correct to say that one genre is true and the other is false, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t both used to tell stories (and that both are not both true and false). Through these genres, writers and filmmakers tell stories with certain effects in mind, using a toolbox of techniques to achieve those effects. One film I saw, Dirty Wars, follows reporter Jeremy Scahill’s investigation of covert military operations in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The structure of the film is dictated by Scahill’s activity—the filmmakers follow the trail of the reporter’s story, watching over his shoulder as he tracks the activities of the Joint Special Operations Command through small villages and along the banks of the Potomac. As they do so, they mix genres, using the tricks of straightforward investigative journalism alongside those of the diary, the personal essay, and the travelogue, taking advantage of the power of identification to tell a haunting story and make a strong argument. The Act of Killing, my favorite of the weekend, looks back at Indonesian death squads active after the 1965 military coup. It is a strange and powerful film (the presence on the Executive Producers roster of Werner Herzog and Errol Morris, two masters of strange and powerful films, is unsurprising in this regard) in which former members of one such squad proudly recreate scenes of torture and murder from the past. These scenes become part of the film, are presented as they are made, and are accompanied by interviews of the players.  The filmmakers follow the squad members as they confront (and fail to confront) their memories, and show the reactions of the rest of the nation—the victims and those who still celebrate the nominally anti-communist purge. It is an incredibly inventive and even (to use an overused word) surreal film, one that rides the line between nonfiction and fiction in the service of an unfortunately true story. It is an excellent example of the ways in which narratives can bend themselves to accommodate experiences so traumatic that straightforward storytelling forms seem unable to capture. On a lighter note (these documentary festivals can be murder), I saw a film, Village at the End of the World, that visits a tiny fishing village in Greenland as it faces change. It is not formally radical, nor does anyone but some fish and a polar bear die in it. However, in the way it takes viewers to a remote, foreign, frozen place— accessible only by helicopter and storytelling— it is a model for what narrative can do. Telling the story of the village as it deals with historical change and the individual stories of a few of its residents, including that of a teenage boy as he figures out and steps into his future, the documentarians invoke old generic standbys such as the wilderness story and the bildungsroman to make viewers experience a way of life that is very different from their own. I am unsure just how all this will translate into the classroom. I want to help students studying fiction to better see how fiction works by looking at its techniques at work in nonfiction (and to see nonfiction’s techniques at work in it). And I want them to think about the shared goals of fiction and nonfiction—to move an audience, to make people think, to show them something about the world. That may mean bringing some examples into class, or assigning these films as they reach wider distribution (if they do). I welcome suggestions. It just seems that the examples of what narrative can do are so powerful and plentiful in documentary film that it would be a shame if I can’t use them somehow. ... View more