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

In today's "What We've Learned" video, Matthew Parfitt, one of the authors of Pursuing Happiness, reflects on the pace of student discussion in online classes.   ... 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

The following interview with Peter Adams, author of The Hub, was conducted via email in July and August of 2020. This is the final portion of the four-part interview. * David Starkey: With all the curricular changes taking place across the country, how can we avoid having reading departments simply atrophy away?   Peter Adams: We can’t in every case. I have visited many schools that have had similar experiences to yours—where the department has been folded into the English Department or dismantled altogether—but there’s no reason that has to happen. If reading department faculty are allowed to simply “retire or move on,” I worry that reading will become more and more neglected in our integrated courses. We need a robust reading faculty to ensure that our integrated course include a robust treatment of reading.   Integrating reading and writing is not the only challenge facing corequisite faculty. Most programs have made a commitment to active learning, to group work, to having students discover meaning inductively rather than try to absorb it from lectures. Active learning results in more student engagement as, in small groups, they struggle to analyze a reading, make a list of results of some action, or define a crucial term. Students not only become more engaged with the course content but also with each other. In addition, they learn a skill that will be useful after graduation: how to work together with a team.   DS: That move to active learning can be really difficult for faculty who were trained as lecturers, or who just happen to be really good at talking to others from centerstage. I feel lucky that I never liked to lecture—and I was never very good at it—so stepping out of the spotlight wasn’t hard for me!   PA: Of course, faculty who are uncomfortable or unfamiliar with active learning should not be pressured into employing it. I was in this group when we first started ALP. But I would encourage even reluctant faculty to dip a toe into the active learning water. Most of us, when allowed to ease our way into it, have discovered its power, have even come to enjoy it. Here again, some faculty development to help faculty understand the reasoning behind active learning and to develop some techniques for employing it is very much needed.   DS: I’d like to circle back to my question about how you envisioned the audience for The Hub. Is it significantly different writing for students who are in a corequisite course?   PA: Not so different because each of my previous books was written for similar students. What is different about the audience I imagined as I wrote The Hub is that there were actually two audiences: students and instructors. If the student audience I envisioned was not that different from the audience for my previous books, the instructor audience was quite different.   Faculty teaching in today’s corequisite courses are asked to take on a number of instructional responsibilities they may have no preparation for and little experience with. Many comp faculty are now being asked to integrate reading and writing and to address students’ non-cognitive issues. ALP encourages extensive use of active learning, which many faculty have little experience with. Because The Hub invites faculty to take advantage of these unfamiliar but highly useful pedagogies, as I wrote the book, I constantly thought about what I could provide to assist the instructor in adapting these new pedagogies.   DS: I assume that’s in large measure because so many faculty have had accelerated courses thrust upon them by state legislatures. This feels like both a blessing and a curse to me. It’s a blessing because there’s so much evidence that accelerated courses propel students toward—in the case of community colleges—transfer to a four-year college, and ultimately to graduation. And yet we English teachers can be a prickly bunch when someone else tells us what we ought to do.   PA: Back in 2013 and 14, I worked for a year with six community colleges in Connecticut, where the nation’s first top-down mandate, PA 1240, had been enacted. Over the year, I met with a coordinator from the English departments of six different colleges, and prickly we were. At each of our meetings we groused about a bunch of politicians telling us professionals how to do our jobs. After a year of adapting ALP for these six colleges, of faculty development for how to teach in an ALP context, and of beginning to collect data on the success of ALP students, we gradually became committed to this corequisite model. At our final meeting, I asked the coordinators from the six schools how they were now thinking about PA 1240. The reply I remember best was this: “I still hate top-down mandates, but without PA 1240, we never would have done this.” At CCBC in Maryland where there is no statewide mandate, it took us ten years to scale the program up to 100%. Sadly, our calculation is that had we scaled up after three years, 6700 students who never passed ENG 101 would have passed. A sobering statistic that makes it hard for me to maintain my traditional faculty resistance to mandates.   DS: The numbers are, indeed, hard to argue with, and they certainly jibe with our own experiences in the accelerated composition classroom. I’ll end our conversation on that note, Peter. It’s been a real pleasure talking with you!   PA: And you, David. ... 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

Before the pandemic hit, my friend Harmony took a self-guided tour of civil rights sites: she walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge and visited the National Memorial for Peace and Justice (aka the Lynching Memorial), but she had a special epiphany at the Selma Interpretive Center. At the very back of that museum, she saw a white button about the size of a quarter with one word on it in bold black type: NEVER. Below the pin, she read that this was one of the symbols of white power in Selma and Dallas county [that was] worn to demonstrate defiance to court-ordered integration and opposition to equality for Black Americans. Sheriff James Clark and other segregationists would wear their “NEVER” pins to identify themselves in public. Harmony, who is a textile artist, says that the moment she saw that pin and read the inscription, “the idea just struck me to make an ALWAYS pin to show support for racial equality.” And so she did! (See above.) She designed the pin and then found a manufacturer owned by a woman of color in Detroit to produce 1,000 buttons that she is now giving away to anyone who wants one. (I have mine on right now and plan to wear it “always.”) When I told my grandnieces about the pin, they not only wanted one of their own to wear, but they also wanted to think of other pins or buttons they might design to help carry the message. That got me thinking about using the NEVER and ALWAYS pins as a writing prompt for class discussion about racial justice and as a challenge to students to do some research on their own or in small groups about the role buttons/pins have played in other historical periods. They could then design buttons of their own that contribute to the conversation. Their research might lead to interviews with older relatives or neighbors who might remember particular buttons (or even have them in a box somewhere), as well as to archives in their home towns. Such investigations might lead them to reflect on the line between advocacy and propaganda (is there one?) and the way such buttons or pins were used in other movements (such as feminist and LGBTQ+) or institutions (like the military and universities). And, of course and always, to the way language is used to shape our views, often without our even recognizing that it is doing so. In the meantime, you can find out more about Harmony’s trip and the ALWAYS pins on her blog. Image Credit: Andrea Lunsford ... View more

In today's "What We've Learned" video, Barclay Barrios (@barclay_barrios), author of Emerging and Intelligence, reflects on the transitions happening in higher education, the permanence of online education, and the opportunities to create an education system that is inclusive and safe for students of all backgrounds, identities, and beliefs. ... View more

    Sidney Blaylock (recommended by Kate Pantelides) is pursuing his PhD in English with a concentration in Rhetoric and Composition at Middle Tennessee State University. He expects to finish in May 2021. He teaches Expository Writing and Research and Argumentation. His research interests include multimodality, rhetorical analysis, new media, cultural rhetorics, digital rhetorics, film, and afrofuturism. Allison Dziuba (recommended by Jonathan Alexander) is a PhD candidate in English at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). She teaches courses in the lower-division writing sequence, in person during the school year and online during the summer. She also teaches the Summer Bridge writing lab, a pre-college course for incoming UCI first-years. She has served as the editorial assistant for College Composition and Communication and Rhetoric Society Quarterly. She is currently the Campus Writing & Communication Fellow at UCI. Allison's research interests include college students' self-sponsored literacy practices and extracurricular rhetorical education, and intersectional feminist approaches to rhetorical studies. Michael S. Garcia (recommended by Kimberly Harrison) is pursuing his MFA in Creative Writing at Florida International University. He expects to finish in April 2021. At FIU, he has taught Writing and Rhetoric, Writing in Action, Essay Writing, and Creative Writing: Forms and Practices. He has also taught 11th and 12th grade English at a Title I high school. As a writer, he has published short stories, essays, web articles, and poetry. Sarah Heidebrink-Bruno (recommended by Jenna Lay) is pursuing her PhD in English, with a concentration in literature and social justice pedagogies, at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA. She expects to finish her degree in 2020 or 2021. She teaches a range of composition and rhetoric courses, including English 1, 2, and 11, in addition to interdisciplinary courses in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies as well as Africana Studies. She has also taught online courses in English and WGSS, with a focus on pop culture themes, including modern relationships. Her research interests include restorative justice practices, women's literature of the 1960s-present, feminist theory and praxis, and writing center tutors' instruction. L. Corinne Jones (recommended by Lissa Pompous Mansfield) is completing her PhD in Texts and Technology with an emphasis in Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Central Florida (UCF), where she expects to finish in Spring 2021. She currently teaches Composition II (Writing about Writing and Research Writing); in Fall 2020, she anticipates teaching Business and Technical Communication. She also works as a legal writing adjunct at Barry University (Law School). Previously, she has taught Composition I (introductory writing) at UCF, as well as First-Year composition for conditionally admitted students at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Additionally, she has worked extensively in writing centers. Her research interests include digital rhetoric; circulation studies; digital, qualitative, mixed methods and methodologies; and feminist and queer studies. Sierra Mendez (recommended by Diane Davis) is pursuing a PhD in Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. She expects to finish in May 2022. Sierra currently teaches a custom RHE 309K course entitled "Rhetoric of Texas" and serves as Assistant Director for the D.R.W.'s Digital Writing and Research Lab. In the past, she has taught "Introduction to Rhetoric and Composition" and served on the Lower Division Curriculum Committee. Before beginning her doctoral program, Sierra worked for three years for a museum branch of the San Antonio Public Library, creating educational community-based resources, installations, and programming. Her research interests concern border, material, visual, and memory rhetorics: specifically, the historical and ongoing constitution of Mexicanx bodies via narratives held both tenuously and powerfully across San Antonio’s urban space. Christopher Peace (recommended by Louis M. Maraj, on behalf of DBLAC) is pursuing a PhD in English with a concentration in Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Kansas. He expects to finish in May 2022. He currently teaches Composition 102 and plans to teach a 203 course on Digital Storytelling in Fall 2020. He has also taught online first-year composition and world literature. His research interests include rhetorical genre studies, (African-derived) religious rhetorics, writing ecologies, spatial rhetorics, digital storytelling/mythmaking, and ecocomposition. He also serves as a professional tutor for the KU Gear Up program and is an affiliate of the Project on the History of Black Writing.   Kalyn Prince (recommended by Roxanne Mountford) is pursuing her PhD in English with a concentration in Rhetoric and Writing Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She serves as the Senior Assistant Director of First-Year Composition and teaches first-year writing. She has also co-taught a composition theory survey course for graduate students in the OU English Department. Her research interests include public argumentation, nostalgia as ethos, and rhetorical analysis. Josh Scheidler (recommended by Brian Gogan) is pursuing his MA in English with an emphasis on Medieval Language and Literature at Western Michigan University (WMU). He expects to finish in May 2021. He teaches WMU's first-year writing course, Thought and Writing, as a graduate teaching assistant. His research interests include ethics and politics in medieval literature, first-year writing pedagogy, rhetorical analysis, and new materialist environmental rhetoric.     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.   For biographies of Bedford New Scholars in previous years, click here.   ... View more

There are things that one wants to end. For instance, the election. You know which election. And why. And also the pandemic, which is roaring back just as the promise of reliable vaccines begins to glimmer on the horizon. But then there is this other ending—self-chosen—that will begin for me in less than six weeks: I'm retiring, and it occurs to me that retirement is something worthy of a semiotic examination. I will limit such an analysis here to the popular cultural image of retirement (excluding here the recent FIRE movement and its own particular imagery aimed at thirty-somethings), which is most often to be encountered in advertisements for investment services aimed at sixty-something retirees. These generally feature beaming couples walking hand in hand—preferably on a beach—with beautiful white hair and clearly having the time of their lives. They are also usually white, but Black couples sometimes appear, as well (which is about the extent of diversity to be found in such ads). The overall message is clear: retirement is an endless vacation, healthy and carefree, often augmented by the appearance of grandchildren: happy grandchildren playing with even happier grandparents. The image is rather different in the movies and on television, however. I think that On Golden Pond, tinged with its golden aura of well-ripened mortality, is most representative of the cinematic version of retirement, while TV's Golden Girls would make an excellent televisual example but for the fact that its spunky protagonists are still working—and retirement is not precisely synonymous with "old age." I'm sure that there are other examples (a co-starring sit-com grandparent sprinkled here and there), but the point is that retirement, while not exactly being a taboo subject in American popular culture, isn't a common one either—which is entirely to be expected within the context of a culture devoted to youth. Thus, in a society where popular culture has taken over from such traditional institutions as the family, the church, and classical literature, the task of providing framing narratives for the conduct of life, retirees have been left pretty much on their own. And that, actually, is probably a good thing, because the broad-brush narratives that cultures paint are rarely adequate to the immense diversity of our lives, and retirement is no exception. Not everyone is going to be able to retire—healthily hand-in-married-hand—to a beach. Not everyone has grandchildren, and of those that do, a significant number are having to raise them themselves. For all too many, the vanishing of company-provided pensions is turning retirement into a struggle, not a vacation. And with American lifespans getting longer and longer (knock on wood and pass the COVID-19 vaccination, please), one's retired years can actually exceed those of working life. In short, it is not a Hallmark-greeting-card cliché to say that retirement is really a beginning rather than an end, with many possible itineraries. Popular culture, with its laser focus on youth, simply isn't concerned with providing much in the way of imagining such journeys, and this, when one comes to think about it, may actually be the most semiotically significant thing about American retirement of all. Photo Credit: Pixabay Image 1334441 by geralt, used under Pixabay License ... View more