A little over a week after the 2020 election, it seems that the entire country is in a state of exhaustion. No matter who we voted for, we are worn down and exhausted physically, mentally, and emotionally. What an ordeal. Of course, now the real work—of actually governing—needs to go on. Or begin. But as the so-called transition goes forward, perhaps it would be good to take a time out and to reflect on what we’ve experienced, to write about those experiences and feelings, to share with others, and to begin or to carry on conversations intended to help us understand each other a little better. I also like the idea of backing away from the intense drama and emotion-laden angst of these last few weeks and going in for a little analysis. And because so much of our knowledge comes to us today via the sound of the human voice, I think it would be appropriate to analyze several speeches. Three that I think would provide rich material for analysis and reflection are the “non-concession” concession speech Stacey Abrams gave when she lost the race for Georgia’s governor (Nov. 16, 2018), the concession speech Hillary Clinton gave when she lost the presidential election (Nov. 9, 2016), and either Donald Trump’s concession speech following his defeat in this election (if he ever gives one) or John McCain’s concession speech when he lost to Barack Obama (Nov. 5, 2008). The questions: What are the characteristics of an effective concession speech? Does there seem to be an average length for a concession speech? If so, what is it, and why does that length seem effective—or not? How would you describe the tone of each concession speech? In what ways are they similar or different in tone? What role do personal pronouns (I, me, you, we, they) play in concession speeches? How do they affect the tone? How does the speaker in a concession speech characterize or refer to the person who won? How does the speaker try to relate to the audience? To build credibility? Of course, we could ask students to compare and examine other kinds of speeches: the ones candidates give when they have won an election, or the acceptance speeches they give at conventions. In any event, the goal is to get some emotional distance from recent political upheavals and to focus on how language works or fails to work in sending messages to others. So—a little rhetorical analysis as a post-election elixir. Image Credit: Pixabay Image 3926344 by lograstudio, used under the Pixabay License ... View more

In today's "What We've Learned," Mike Palmquist, author of Bedford Researcher, reflects on teaching in-person during the pandemic: how he's had to rethink class discussion, group work, and seating, as well as the challenges of parsing student expressions under masks.   ... View more

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.   How does the next generation of students inspire you? I’m constantly impressed by my students’ inclination towards advocacy—both personal advocacy and advocacy for others. My students are not content to learn about rhetoric and writing in the abstract. They want to engage in the world and find solutions to the problems we discuss in the classroom. From Black Lives Matter to TikTok, this group of students actively takes a stand on injustice and is uniquely capable of doing so with their various social literacies. My job as their teacher is to help them think critically about the issues they care about, teaching them to thoughtfully analyze the arguments and stakeholders in the issue and consider their own unique abilities to intervene. How do you hope higher education will change in the next ten years? My hope is that higher education will follow the lead of this generation and find better ways to leave the classroom. In the time of COVID-19 and worldwide Black Lives Matter protests, it can come as no shock that composition studies cannot only reside in the university. So many of us enter into higher education—both as students and instructors—hoping to make meaningful change for the communities we care about, but instead our work gets trapped in the halls of the university, never to breathe the air outside. It is my hope that those of us in higher education will continue to intervene in public discourse from our place in the university and that we will increasingly find ways of becoming scholar activists, joining our students in understanding and crafting arguments that will have a real-world impact. What is it like to be a part of the Bedford New Scholars program? Being part of the Bedford New Scholars program has been such a rewarding experience. It’s been so encouraging to work with other graduate students with whom I share research and teaching interests, discovering that they have the same goals and frustrations that I do! The Scholars have shared insight from their home institutions’ writing programs, which provides a unique opportunity to get a sense of what is going on in composition classrooms across the nation. It’s uplifting to discover our mutual hopes and concerns for teaching composition in 2020 and exciting to think that these passionate, brilliant Scholars will be directing writing programs in the future. I’ve also loved getting to work with the editorial team at Bedford/St. Martin’s as they guide us through textbook, program, and catalog reviews. They consistently impress me with their thoughtfulness and intentionality, time and time again thinking of incredible solutions to challenges we face in the writing classroom and designing course materials that our students can find accessible and instructive. The entire experience has been a delight, and I’m so grateful to have this opportunity. How will the Bedford New Scholars program affect your professional development or your classroom practice? This program has inspired me to be more intentional in how I craft my classroom activities. During our Summit Week, Kendra N. Bryant ran a session on teaching philosophies and Shelley Reid ran a session on assignment design. What both of these sessions had in common was emphasizing the imperativeness of having classroom practices that match teaching philosophies and student learning goals. While this should seem obvious, it can be easy to lose sight of our ultimate goals when building small classroom activities or homework assignments. But just because our project or essay assignments are sound doesn’t mean the rest of the course is. The Bedford New Scholars program has reignited my concern for backwards design in lesson planning and inspired me to be even more intentional in crafting smaller activities to ensure that I’m giving students every opportunity to thoroughly develop critical thinking skills that will allow them to make change in the world.   Kalyn’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 Kalyn's assignment. For the full activity, see Synthesizing Primary Research. I’ve found that when I ask students to engage with real-world social/political groups or organizations, they often have trouble synthesizing all of their primary research, secondary research, and analysis. Such synthesis is crucial for students to be able to develop in critical thinking, understand the nuances of a group’s political engagement, and consider their own stake in these issues. To help them practice synthesis, I run students through this scaffolding activity where they begin to consider how synthesis works in documentary-style television shows. Students watch a clip of Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown (any documentary-style clip could work) and then respond to a series of questions regarding the different research components being synthesized in the segment. For this activity, you can customize the questions and materials to better fit with your classroom language and the skills you’ve been developing with your students. ... View more

In today's "What We've Learned," Erica Duran, one of the authors of Science and Technology, discusses the challenges of motivating students remotely, identifying why students might be struggling, and supporting students through personal challenges by offering understanding, care, and the resources they need. ... View more

I just finished reading Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett’s The Upswing: How Americans Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again (2020). Putnam, a political scientist at Harvard, is probably best known for his best-selling 1995 book Bowling Alone. This new book argues that the United States has oscillated between individualism and mutual concern—referred to as the “I-We-I cycle.” More specifically, Putnam and Garrett begin by returning to Alexis de Tocqueville’s assessment of the United States as a country where individualism (a word Tocqueville coined, incidentally, to describe this country) was balanced by a concomitant commitment to others, a balance that the Gilded Age ended, with its personal and political and corporate corruption, its selfishness and disregard for workers, and its destruction of the environment (sound familiar?). According to Putnam and Garrett, this period slowly gave way to another swing of the pendulum, culminating in Johnson’s “Great Society,” which was much more committed to recognizing and helping others. Since the late 60s, however, that society has disappeared and in its place has come “declining economic equality, the deterioration of compromise in the public square, a fraying social fabric and a descent into cultural narcissism,” a shift epitomized, not to put too fine a point on it, by Donald Trump and Trumpism. I’ve just sketched, in very broad terms, the thesis of The Upswing. I think that the book is worth reading, especially for its chapters on race and gender. But as to the overall thesis, I have heard all this before, most notably in Robert Bellah and his co-authors’ 1985 book Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Like Putnam and Garrett, Bellah and his colleagues turn to Tocqueville, who predicted that American individualism could easily lead to what he called “democratic despotism,” in which the public would be duped into following without thinking: "They will rise from their torpor every four years to elect their masters and then sink back into slavery." Thus American individualism disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends; with this little society formed to his taste, he gladly leaves the greater society to look out after itself. In short, it will leave Americans unable to protect their own freedom. This is the danger, one that Bellah and his colleagues hope can be avoided through commitment to others, and the second part of their book provides case studies of people who embody that ethos. I read Putnam’s book—and returned to reread Bellah’s—because I’ve been reflecting on the work that Lisa Ede and I did, beginning in the 80s, on collaboration as a method and a way of life. In two books and a series of articles, we advocated for collaboration in general and collaborative writing in particular as one way to resist the embrace of radical individualism. In countless conference presentations and arguments on our home campuses, we challenged the individualistic basis of higher education and its artifacts (especially the single-authored monograph and the dissertation). We wrote about (and founded) writing centers devoted to collaboration and cooperation, and we incorporated collaborative principles into all our classes. The field of composition and rhetoric as a whole moved from the individualistic focus of the writing process movement to the much more socially-oriented approaches that followed. So writing teachers, too, especially those who have been around for a few decades, have no doubt lived the “I-We-I cycle.” As Kenneth Burke says frequently (and maddeningly!) in many of his essays, “So where are we now?” As writing teachers, we are at the very least between a rock and a hard place, one that leaves us on our own to find a balance between “I” and “we” and to help students negotiate that balance in their writing and in their own lives. Burke notes two basic human forces at work in all of us: the drive, the desire, the need for identification and consubstantiation with others; and the drive, the desire, the need for separation and division from others. That is, the desire for individualism and the desire for togetherness, for commitment. The “I” and “We.” Certainly the values of an “I” society seem perfectly embodied in Donald Trump: is this the despot Tocqueville foresaw, one the American people would not only be vulnerable to but would follow blindly, waking from their torpor every four years only to sink back into slavery again, their freedom gone? For someone who has spent a long career advocating for and trying to embody the goals and values of “we,” these are terrifying questions. Perhaps it’s time to ask students to join us in confronting this dichotomy, to explore it in personal narratives, in quantitative and qualitative research, and in understanding what in our society allows us—and prevents us—from finding and embodying a healthy, life-sustaining balance. Two days after the 2020 election, this goal seems more imperative than ever. Image Credit: Pixabay Image 5012919 by RoonZ-nl, used under the Pixabay License ... View more

In today's "What We've Learned," Holly Bauer, author of Food Matters, reflects on using shared documents for group annotation, as a way to improve students' understanding and to encourage participation.  ... View more

Students generally have little trouble distinguishing between and among claims of fact, value, and policy. Unlike the other claims, claims of policy advocate an action, or at least a change in thinking, and they most often explicitly state what should or should not be done. At election time, we act on claims of policy that we accept: You should vote for Candidate A. You should help vote Candidate B out of office. You should vote a straight Republican ticket. This year, we had to decide which other related claims to accept: You should vote in person. You should not vote in person due to the presence of COVID-19. You should return your absentee ballot as soon as possible. And the most basic: You should vote.  More than ever this year, the election has become entangled with the choice of a new justice of the Supreme Court. The nine justices constantly deal with policy issues, and they answer some of our most critical “should” and “should not” questions. Should Roe V. Wade be overturned? Should the Affordable Care Act be struck down? Which ballots should be counted, and which should not? Each ruling is grounded in a specific case, but each has effects that reverberate throughout the nation and through history. Decisions made by the Supreme Court are, of course, based on the Constitution and on laws passed by the legislative branch. What a law states is a fact. The need to interpret laws is what makes the whole judicial system necessary. As with any argument, an argument that reaches the Supreme Court is built on claims of fact and value that must be agreed on before a claim of policy can be. The first cracks in the foundation of our democracy appeared when the two major political parties could no longer even agree on what a fact is. Claims of fact are usually based on logic, and two people or groups who can think rationally can usually reach an agreement on them. We should have known we were in trouble when Republicans and Democrats could not even agree on something as relatively simple as which inaugural was attended by more people – that of Trump or those of Obama. We could find that mildly amusing, but we were less amused when Trump’s staffers resorted to the concept of the alternative fact. Added was the fact that we had a president to whom expressing “alternate facts” came as naturally as breathing, and there could be no faith any longer in “facts.” Once the president convinced his supporters that any news that presented him in a negative light was “fake news” (non-fact), he could present any untruth he wanted to as fact, up to and including listing the ending to the pandemic as one of his accomplishments at the exact time that the number of new cases was breaking old records. If two parties cannot even agree on factual claims, there is little chance they can agree on more controversial claims of value. They, too, often read what is posted on social media and accuse their opponents of the most extreme stance on every issue. Democrats cannot be counted on to protect new life and want to take away all of your guns. Republicans are racists who want to put women in prison for having abortions. Reasoned debate is not possible when each party is guilty of the straw man fallacy in attempts to get their opponents to argue against a position more extreme than that which they actually hold. The last four years have revealed differences in values between Democrats and Republicans that run even deeper than many of us realized – our country has not been this divided since the Civil War. Some people are grateful COVID-19 will keep them from having their annual family gathering for Thanksgiving, because what do you say over dinner to Uncle Ray, an avid Trump supporter, as a liberal through-and-through? Decades-long friendships have ended, and a popular meme sums it up well: “I was asked, ‘You’re going to lose friends over politics?!’ I said, ‘I’m going to lose friends over morals. HUGE difference.’” We are well past checking for cracks in the foundation of our democracy. Those foundation are crumbling, and no single presidential election will solve all of our problems. Our founders did not foresee anything like a Trump presidency. They didn’t foresee that the Electoral College would become outmoded and work against the will of the majority of Americans. They didn’t foresee a president who would take advantage of the power of the pardon to pardon himself. They did not foresee the willingness of so many to put party over country. Only a relatively few years ago, a superb candidate for justice of the Supreme Court would be approved by well over ninety percent of all members of Congress, in spite of party, not passed because of party. There is no easy solution to our country’s problems. The balance of power among our branches of government is so akilter that righting it may prove impossible. It’s scary how much that depends on those nine justices referenced earlier. For the rest of their working lives, they must write and rewrite policy for our country. They must do so on the basis of carefully selected cases brought before them to test our laws and the Court’s precedents. They must forget who nominated them. They must forget the animosity of those who disagreed with the way they came to their positions. They must forget party. They must put aside their own values to decide cases based on the law of the land. They aren’t expected to do that. Our current president has made it clear that the justices he nominated are there to do his bidding. It’s a lot to ask when those in the other branches of government who put them there have proved their own lack of integrity. The amount of rebuilding our country must do depends on whether nine people can live up to the role that the writers of our Constitution envisioned for them. Photo Credit: Pixabay Image 39982 by Clker-Free-Vector-Images, used under Pixabay License ... View more

In today's "What We've Learned," Samuel Cohen, author of 50 Essays, reflects on ways to make connections with students when teaching online, and how to bring their daily lives into the classroom.  ... View more

To paraphrase Sylvia Fricker Tyson's marvelous song "You Were On My Mind," I woke up this morning with a blogging deadline on my mind, but hard-pressed for a topic. I then performed a self-analysis of this situation, and, lo-and-behold, arrived at two conclusions—one of them pretty obvious, and the other one pretty significant. So, here goes, in ascending order of importance.  The obvious explanation for my relative dearth of topics is that the pandemic is really taking up all the oxygen in the room these days. Yes, the World Series is on, and the NBA championships have just concluded. The Emmy Awards have been held, and the streaming revolution in TV barrels ahead. But popular culture has been sidelined somehow. There's no Game of Thrones, Mad Men, or Breaking Bad to enliven the conversation. Even The Handmaid's Tale and Orange is the New Black have lost the cutting edge. The movies are in hiatus, and no one's going to live concerts. There is, of course, plenty of material still out there for analysis, but there are more burning issues in the air—and I'm not talking about all the fires here out West. So, all in all, I'm rather stumped. But my self-analysis has also turned up something else, for while I have been avoiding my keyboard until right this moment as my blogging deadline approaches (didn't Carly Simon write a hit song called "Procrastination"?), I have been engaged in an ongoing Internet, um, conversation, with a group of COVID-19 deniers on a hobby forum that I've been an off-and-on contributor to over the years. They aren't exactly COVID-conspiracy types (I would never habituate a forum that had that sort of people), but they're all in for playing down the seriousness of the plague, promoting "herd immunity" and whatever COVID cure of the day is making the rounds (hydroxychloroquine anyone?), while attacking Anthony Fauci, fully credentialed epidemiological scientists, and "lockdowns." And, quite frankly (one has to be honest with oneself when conducting a self-analysis), this sort of thing makes me angry, so I am irresistibly drawn back again and again into the fray. And therein lies the significance of the matter: anger is a great motivator. I know that may be disturbing to contemplate, but it explains why the Internet is so full of angry writing. It explains why, almost every day, some professor or other wrecks a career by throwing something out on Twitter that it really would have been a lot better to just keep to oneself (nota bene: I am being very careful in this respect on the forum I have referred to). And it also explains the penchant for conspiracy "theories" that is turning the Internet into a kind of dystopian playground for the paranoid. I'm reminded in this regard of the history of television, which in its very early days was widely regarded as a potential medium for the dissemination of high culture, but which by 1961 had devolved into Newton Minow's notorious "vast wasteland." And so too have the high hopes for the Internet been dashed. The digital global village is now a gladiatorial battleground where rhetorical violence is the order of the day. It's little wonder, then, that people prefer to hunker down within their silos: it's a lot safer there, and all you need to do is hit "like" to express your opinion. Photo Credit: Pixabay Image 4999857 by cromaconceptovisual, used under Pixabay License ... View more

I’m writing this post on October 26, just eight days before the 2020 election. Like many other teachers of writing, I’ve spent the last few months not only wearing a mask, social distancing, and being away from family and friends, but also reading and listening to political speeches and to political commentary. I’ve done some fact checking for myself—on candidates on both the left and the right. I’ve studied the ballot initiatives in California, trying to read between the lines well enough to decide how to cast my vote. And I’ve done some rhetorical analysis of speeches, which has led me to worry about the state of public discourse in this country. I’ve given up trying to count the number of the same tired superlatives employed by the president, the same patterns of speech that reveal a sparse vocabulary and a dependence on repeating the same false bromides over and over again. And I’ve wondered why Saturday Night Live and Jim Carrey haven’t made more of the catch phrases Biden depends on: “Here’s the deal.” “Number one . . . number two . . . ” “Folks, this isn’t a joke.” “C’mon, man!” All in all, it’s been interesting and instructive work, and it has helped to pass the time during the pandemic while feeling like I’m at least exercising my brain a little. So I was very interested to read an article in Wired about a Carnegie Mellon study of 86.6 million comments from over 6.5 million users on over 200,000 YouTube videos. That’s some data sample! The researchers used an AI technique used in translation studies to look closely at the discourse of liberals and conservatives, left and right. So far, so good. And the preliminary findings are interesting, if not at all surprising, at least not to rhetoricians and writing teachers: they found that “people on opposing sides of the political divide often use different words to express similar ideas.” For example, liberals use the word “mask,” which has a positive connotation to them, while conservatives use “muzzle,” with its negative connotations. Eighteenth century scholar Joe Bentley called this general principle “semantic gravitation,” the way a writer or speaker can raise or lower the status of one word by associating it with others. So “mask” has “patriotic” and “protecting others” for companions, while “muzzle” or even “mask” in conservative circles consorts with attacks on “freedom of speech” and “weakness.” Members of the Carnegie Mellon team say they hope that social networks might use similar AI techniques to “surface comments that avoid contentious or foreign terms, instead showing ones that represent common ground.” This relatively new research has its critics, including those who point out that AI algorithms are “notoriously bad” in that they tend to oversimplify issues. Others concur, saying they “would prefer an approach that is not binary—treating people as either on the left or the right,” for instance. I would agree with those who urge caution. But I also think that AI will have a lot to offer teachers of writing and our students as the discipline matures—and that we should therefore keep a careful eye out for their experiments and preliminary findings. After all, when I was a graduate student, scholars were building concordances (revealing the number of times a writer used a certain word) by hand. By hand! Now a concordance can be built with just a few clicks on the computer. There’s no reason to think that AI analytic techniques won’t also improve exponentially—and swiftly. In the meantime, students can carry out analyses of discourse on their own, using available corpora such as the Corpus of Contemporary American English. And many sources will allow for searches: on the OED, for instance, researchers can search for a word AND the words it most often appears with. So instead of wringing our hands over the state of public discourse, we and our students can dig in and do some data-driven analysis—and share findings through social media and campus publications. Image Credit: Pixabay Image 583537 by kuszapro, used under the Pixabay License ... View more

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.   What do you think is the most important recent development in teaching composition? The recent materialist turn in rhetoric and composition is important for teaching composition because it provides language to describe the multifaceted spatial dimensions of language and composition. Engaging with the spatial dimension of language is articulated through genre, which is the dimensions of typified communication that responds to the rhetorical situation. Rhetorical genre theory and mapping allows for a spatial engagement with composition in innovative ways, especially for multimodal composition. I’m interested in multigenre projects in composition: writers compose in multiple genres that are connected rhetorically, and they explain how different genres circulate differently in discourse communities. I think projects like this ask students to engage materially with certain discourse. One of the most important pedagogical shifts in composition studies has been the move from product-centered teaching to process-centered teaching. Instead of student writers focusing on the product of writing, process-centered pedagogy focuses on the multiple processes that occur during the act of writing. A focus on materiality expands on the situatedness of writing in an academic context, and I think it has given students more options in completing the tasks they must solve in coursework. What is your greatest teaching challenge? My proposed class for the Fall semester was canceled due to low enrollment, and I am now teaching a Professional Writing class. The Professional Writing course is divided into two eight-week online courses, and the modules for the courses are already set up for me. Therefore, I don't have as much control with this course as I did with my proposed course. I have some control over the syllabus, but my department has suggested that I shouldn’t change anything because everything is already set up for the online course. Currently, my difficulties with teaching involve moving around content to make it more comfortable for me to navigate. With the syllabus already designed, it feels like I have to learn just as much as the students, and it places me in a less stable situation when speaking through the course material. This course is generally online, but I want to make sure my students access the learning goals of this course in a way that is just as effective as an in-person course. I enjoy small-group conferences, so I will definitely find a way to implement that more into this online course. What is it like to be a part of the Bedford New Scholars program? I’m sure my experience with the Bedford New Scholars program has been unique due to the current pandemic, but our distanced situation hasn’t stopped the success of the program. Reviewing Everything’s an Argument was one of my first experiences as a Bedford New Scholar. First of all, I was surprised that my opinion mattered enough to be asked to review a well-known textbook. I’m really excited to be a part of that process as an upcoming academic, and an instructor who teaches argumentation frequently in composition courses. I believe that reviewing textbooks at this level is necessary for the cultural inclusion needed in the texts we normalize in academia. The BNS Summit was engaging and made me aware of my pedagogical leanings. It was really great to share teaching experiences with other Scholars. Although we couldn’t meet physically, the breakout sessions during the summit were personal and added a layer of closeness needed to have a successful experience. I didn’t feel out of place when it came to interactions with others. I know this experience will be beneficial to my future in rhetoric and composition, and to any editorial opportunities that may come my way. What have you learned from other Bedford New Scholars? I learned the most from other Bedford New Scholars during the summit. During the “Assignments that Work,” I learned a lot of practical moves from other Scholars. One Scholar reviewed a student information sheet—I had never thought to do the assignment in the way the Scholar presented it, especially since the assignment was geared toward preferred learning styles. I think more assessments like this could impact how my semester is set up toward the beginning of the course. I enjoyed another Scholar’s assignment that scaffolded synthesizing primary research by asking students to identify the rhetorical situations present in interviews, observations, and analyses. I’m always looking for ways to make primary research easier for students to follow, so having them see another person do primary research is a great way to explore synthesis. I liked sharing our teaching philosophies as well. The philosophies were articulated in multiple ways, and I gained several ideas about the complexities of my own dispositions to teaching. As Dr. Kendra Bryant mentioned, “philosophy” is about the love of knowledge. Being with a group of scholars to talk through the inspirational and emotional impulses of our teaching philosophies helped me articulate why I’m on this journey of completing this doctoral degree.   Christopher Peace’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 Christopher's assignment. For the full activity, see Multigenre Dystopian Invention. The Multigenre Dystopian Project is a multigenre project that asks students to invent a dystopian society through the creation of multiple genres. A dystopia is often characterized by an authoritarian or totalitarian form of governing and normalized social control of space, with seen or unseen intentions. It suggests different kinds of repressive social control systems, a lack or total absence of individual freedoms and expressions, and a state of constant warfare or violence. In this multigenre project, students create an original (as possible) dystopian society using written and visual genres. They come up with a fictional (or twistedly realistic) place that is intended to be perfect but has gone wrong due to some external reasons. Students invent social media, medical, and legal genres that express tension between the governing body and protesting citizens. This project aims to connect rhetoric of place and space with genres of writing, power, and control. I like this project because students combine rhetoric, creative writing, and literature together in a way that is unlike the standard essay—students are usually excited to be as multimodal as possible when creating different genres for their dystopias. ... View more

Photo description: Two selfies of Susan standing against two brick walls. In the first photo (2014) she is standing under a sign that says, “Welcome to Normal.” In the second photo, she is wearing a blue mask. The two photos are placed on a drawing meant to resemble the imperfections of a brick wall. To connect students across time and space, I have been making videos for my remote learning first-year writing classes. To create the videos, I use iMovie trailers, royalty-free music from bensound.com, and photo archives of my teaching materials.  “Multimedia Projects: 2004-2020” features multimedia projects created collaboratively with students in face-to-face classrooms in New York City, Houston, TX, and South Central Arizona. In Zoom first-year writing classrooms where students often do not have cameras or microphones, connection might seem like an implausible plan, and certainly not a plan that can be realized through making videos. At the same time, my hope is that a video archive of face-to-face learning can become a form of mutual aid.  In the video, projects from previous semesters present images relevant to remote learning students in 2020. The major themes that emerge from the video are the consequences of state-sponsored violence, the urgent need for equitable access to higher education, and the possibilities for a more just world reflected in nonviolent peaceful protest. In other words, students from previous semesters, through multimedia projects, offer testimony that they, too, endured crisis and catastrophe, even as they struggled for resilience. Students’ lives, before and during the current pandemic, have never been “normal.” “Normal” standardized first-year writing classes are impossible in this pandemic and, for many students and teachers, were not possible under the circumstances of the white supremacy that led to this pandemic. In “America’s History of Racism was a Pre-Existing Condition for Covid-19,” Alan Gomez and his co-writers delineate many of the root causes of racism and oppression, listing the inequality of “America’s education and economic systems,” “decades of discrimination in housing,” “environmental policies” that exacerbate pollution, and “a lack of federal funding” for healthcare.  Oppressive conditions, before and during this pandemic, are not normal.  In my remote learning class, students are currently reading “In a Word--Now,” an essay from the New York Times Magazine, in which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. described strikingly similar conditions in 1963, and suggested that if social transformation was not addressed immediately, that “a seething humanity [would be driven] to a desperation it tried, asked and hoped to avoid.” In strictly rhetorical terms, King’s essay models a proposal or problem/solution essay, demonstrating one writer’s approach to synthesizing ideas for audience and purpose.  In practical terms, this semester and in previous semesters, King’s essay offers a model for social transformation that resists and disrupts preconceived notions of what constitutes “normal.” With images created in response to my former students' interpretations of King, James Baldwin’s “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity,” and other texts that serve as problem/solution models. The video “Multimedia Projects: 2004-2020” ends with a photo from early 2020, in the weeks before remote learning began. Students, based on their reading of Baldwin’s lecture, suggested that Baldwin might respond to current conditions in higher education through peaceful protest. The resulting image attempts to serve as supporting evidence for resisting the concept of “normal.” What defines “normal”? Does “normal” mean dining in restaurants or working out at the gym, or going to the movies? If so, then additional questions need our attention. Who are the workers who clean and serve us in the crowded indoor spaces of “normal”?  What if those workers happen to be our students? In the pre-pandemic world before 2020, was it “normal” to attend face-to-face college writing classes while juggling three gig jobs at the restaurant, the gym, the movie theater? Is earning poverty wages, despite juggling three gig jobs, “normal”?  Is it “normal” when first-year, first-semester students cannot complete a full-time load of college classes, and work three jobs at the same time? At whose expense do we hope to achieve “normal”?  If, as Dr. King suggests in his essay, we must “sweep barriers away,” to pursue racial and economic justice, we must understand that our longing for “normal” comes at the expense of others, including students, staff, adjunct workers, and the many people in our communities living in precarious conditions. Yes, all of us have suffered, and many of us, especially BIPOC, disabled, and the LGBTQ+ community have suffered disproportionately. In a world that has never been “normal,” attempting to create “normal” conditions, always, but especially in this pandemic, means that we continue to ignore the obvious. Yet to heal our suffering, we must do better. We must go beyond the obvious.  We must resist “normal.”  ... View more

In today's "What We've Learned," Elizabeth Losh and Jonathan Alexander, authors of Understanding Rhetoric, discuss how to use Zoom's breakout room feature to give students agency and engagement in remote instruction.   ... View more

I can't be the only instructor who asked writing students to watch the first presidential debate. And I can’t be the only one who regretted that decision.  Still, even a poor example can be useful pedagogically, as Donna Winchell reminds us in her recent post on logical fallacies. While my students hold a range of political perspectives, they agreed that the yell-fest that we witnessed in the first Trump-Biden debate does not make for a productive discussion. (I am writing before the second debate.)  In response to that first debate, I designed a quick exercise that worked well on Zoom with 25 students. My inspiration was Rogerian argumentation, which my co-author, Stuart Greene, and I explain in the 5th edition of From Inquiry to Academic Writing. The Rogerian strategy is designed to reduce threat and to open a listener/reader to alternatives by conveying to readers that their different views are understood, acknowledging conditions under which readers’ views are valid, helping readers see that the writer shares common ground with them, and creating mutually acceptable solutions to agreed-upon problems (118).  This is a high bar, but my students were game to practice a Rogerian approach to discussing the question of whether a dog or a cat is the ideal pet. (Low-stakes, a bit silly, and good fun.) The guidelines for the exercise are outlined below. One student begins by asserting that either a dog or a cat is the ideal pet, and then offering evidence and specific examples. That student calls on someone else in the Zoom room, and they continue the exercise by saying “I hear you saying that X is the better pet (showing they are understood) because of Y (acknowledging the conditions under which the person’s perspective is valid), then offering a new perspective on whether a dog or cat is the ideal pet, offering evidence and striving for common ground if possible, and finally calling on the next student. Because students weren’t sure who would be called on next, they were all on high alert, and their listening and smiling faces in the Zoom grid were wonderful to behold. They were kind and hilarious, summoning serious tones while offering gems such as, “I hear you saying that you find cats super-snuggly, and I, too, value a snuggly pet. However, I’d suggest that my mutt, Roscoe, is as snuggly as any cat, and has softer ears.” Afterward, students were able to apply their insights to their own academic writing. Weeks later, we keep returning to the exercise as we navigate conflicting perspectives in discussion and on the page. Because COVID-19 cases are surging in our community, we closed class recently with another fast Rogerian exercise on how best to persuade more people to wear masks. Some students supported fines for non-maskers; some did not. The mic-drop comment came from a quieter student who un-muted herself to shout, “Oh, I know! We can all agree, can’t we, that we could get more people to mask-up if we offered the state with the most mask-wearers… FREE TACO BELL?” Every student reached for the applause button. Photo Credit: Pixabay Image 2798628 by chayka1270, used under Pixabay License ... View more

In my last post, I wrote about a gen ed course I teach that introduces students to literatures of the 21st century. My overarching argument in the course is that the 21st century started on September 11th, 2001, at the moment the news broke that planes had hit the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. What happens to story-telling after this moment, when one version of the world (a world where the United States was inviolable, the globe’s uncontested superpower) crumbled before the eyes of a dumbfounded nation? I make this argument in broad strokes so that we can test and complicate this idea over the course of the semester.  The syllabus is comprised of documentaries, novels, a streamable series, and a graphic novel, all chosen on the basis of quality and formal innovation. About halfway through the course, we were finishing up Ruth Ozecki’s A Tale for the Time Being, which has an ending that many readers find infuriating. I must confess that this is one of the reasons I enjoy teaching Ozecki’s genre-bending “auto-fiction” so much: it lays bare how strong the idea is that a story has a beginning, middle, and end. One of the central characters in Ozecki’s novel is Ruth, a writer who lives with her husband on a remote island in British Columbia. While walking on the beach, Ruth finds a lunchbox that contains a diary and a set of handwritten letters. Ruth, who is struggling with writing her autobiography, starts spending more and more time with the diary, which she discovers was written by an adolescent girl who had been raised in Silicon Valley and then returned to Tokyo after her father lost his job in the tech industry. How did the diary get from Tokyo to the shores of Western Canada? And what has become of the diary’s author, Nao (pronounced “now”)? As the novel processes, both Nao and Ruth become more and more focused on the fate of Nao’s great uncle Haruki, who was a kamikaze pilot at the end of WWII. What did he do on his one and only mission? How did it end? Did he crash into a battleship belonging to the Allies or did his take his plane to the bottom of the ocean? Both Ruth and Nao are driven by this deep, seemingly unsatisfiable desire to know what happened.   The overwhelming majority of my students are not “readers,” as the term was understood when I entered graduate school . . . 35 years ago! This is not to say that they don’t read, scroll, skim, game, and multi-task for pleasure, but only that few of them are given to leisure time reading of extended works of fiction. But, when Ozecki concocts a way for Ruth to communicate to Nao what her research has revealed about Harucki, literally causing the words at the end of Nao’s diary to disappear and then reappear, revised to reflect Ruth’s understanding, the students as a whole suddenly discover that they have firmly held beliefs about what a writer can and cannot do late in a story. Has Ozecki “cheated”? Is her novel not a novel at all, but an ersatz introduction to Zen Buddhism? Is the ending a meta-commentary on endings that hovers above the ephemeral story that has preceded it? This raucous discussion was still metaphorically ringing in our ears when we got the email ending in-class meetings a week before Spring Break. The students disappeared and COVID took center stage. We’d been studying the challenge of constructing endings in uncertain times when our course, as we knew it, disappeared into thin air. If this were a fictional story, the parallels would be too obvious to be believed and the ending itself disappointing (and, even, dumb). What I’m at pains to teach my students, though, is that the future is always unknown. Narrative is one way to calm the anxiety produced by that reality. But narrative can also be used to explore that reality. Similarly, essays that have beginnings, middles, and ends can provide the calming illusion that we live in a world where clarity of argument is what carries the day and that deep truths arrive without qualifications or complications. When the mold for conventional instruction broke, none of us had a map for how to proceed or previous experience to build on. We had to make it up as we went along. And that, I believe, it one of the reasons that the writing projects I received at the end of the semester were unprecedented for me—and for the students. I’ll discuss other reasons/forces that contributed to the final projects I received in my next post, but this reason strikes me as the most important one: we were all responding to the same unexpected event. No one—regardless of education or class or fame or any other variable or vector—was immune from the effects of the event. If this has sparked anything for you, comment below. Happy to say more, clarify, qualify.   To be continued. ... View more