In "When You're Not Ready," Ashley Smith, reports for Inside Higher Ed on how Florida's remedial education changes result in higher drop out rates. She writes, This passage is useful for unpacking the issues at hand. First, the intent of the law: Legislators tried to address a pressing issue: too many remediation programs fail to keep students in college. Those students, likely to be poorer, take out loans to take these courses, accumulating debt. In Florida, some students were placed on a remediation path that required nine courses: 3 remedial writing, 3 remedial math, and 3 remedial reading. And this issue is not a Florida issue alone. The National Conference of State Legislators explores it here, http://www.ncsl.org/research/education/improving-college-completion-reforming-remedial.aspx, offering suggestions legislators can study and encourage colleges to follow. The models they suggest appear in a section called "Encourage Colleges to Innovate Remedial Education," and include: accelerated remedial course sequences; learning communities; traditional college courses applying an ALP model; and "remedial courses combined with job training." All of those models -- explore the links in each to learn more about them -- work because they are serious about applying insights from the scholarship of teaching and learning into programs that were developed and supported over time. They include in their operation time and space for faculty professional development. Sadly, Florida legislators, rushed the process. In 2011 they passed a law that "made college placement testing mandatory for most 11th graders. High school students who don’t make the cut are required to take courses during their senior year that are designed to address remedial needs" (Fain, Remediation if You Want It). In 2013, after only two years of implementation, they passed a law that says, essentially, if you graduate from a Florida high school, you will not need remediation in college, allowing students to opt out of remediation testing and/or remedial courses. Those are the students now failing more than they had when remedial testing and placement was required. Yes, the situation they sought to address was indeed dire and unconscionable. But if the legislature had been serious about addressing the issue, they'd have done more than write a law based on the magical thinking that asserts by virtue of graduating high school in Florida, you are ipso facto, presto chango, College Ready. Asking high schools in one grade -- the 12th -- to address deficiencies in college readiness that have grown over the prior 11 grades, and to demand that change only two years before changing the rules for college remedial testing, shows how little legislators know about systems and people, about teaching and learning. They view the education process as a factory.  They asserted that a quality control test and then quick retooling of the assembly line to remove defects is all that is needed. But education ain't no factory, and in real life, even good business people know that to change operations takes more care and planning, retraining and motivation of workers, than simply the dictatorial insistence to fix it, damn it! So the high schools were set up to fail because they were not given the time nor funding to develop a program that could address in one year the remedial needs of students tested in 11th grade. An analysis of the bill's effects -- http://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2011/1255/Analyses/h1255z.EDC.PDF  -- shows the changes the required, but makes no mention of support or monies for institution remedial courses in high schools or training faculty to teach such courses. The bill itself, http://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2011/1255/BillText/er/PDF, made available funds only for more standardized testing: But no where did that bill suggest or request or require funding for faculty and curriculum development to met the demands the bill makes. Similarly, colleges faced with de facto placement of students not ready for college courses in those courses received no professional development support for faculty on how to address courses with mixed ability students. Some programs on some campuses turned to textbook publishers, hoping that putting students in online tutorial programs via required supplemental labs would do the trick. I do a lot of campus travel to Florida community colleges, working closely with several departments on using what modest technology Macmillan has to help address remedial needs in the remedial courses that do fill, and as well the traditional first year writing courses that are seeing students who in the past would have been in a remedial course.  I am convinced that simply asking students to do online activities, even if they're adaptive, such as our LearningCurve software is, or comprehensive, such as our Launch Pad Solo for Readers and Writers seeks to be, will not work for most students in isolation. Unless the software's use finds integration and purpose in the course work students are doing, and unless instructors create assignments that give students practice applying what the software teaches to their own and classmates' writings, their own and classmates' reading responses, the software will do nothing but get the students good at doing the activities the software offers. Don't get me wrong, LearningCurve does a good job of teaching the content of a handbook. So the module in LaunchPad Solo for Readers and Writers on fragments explains why fragments can be issue, helps distinguish between their intentional and accidental use, instructs a bit with video to complement the text, includes a LearningCurve multiple choice exercise in identifying and defining what a fragment is, and offers a consoling ten question multiple choice concluding quiz students will almost always pass if they do the unit that comes before the quiz. But doing all that doesn't mean students, in the heat of composing and peer reviewing and revising, will write with full control over fragments. Because the software doesn't give them practice in writing, peer review, sharing writing, talking to other writers, reading good writing, discussing that writing with classmates. Those necessary and student centered communal learning activities, which research shows to be the most effective means of learning to read and write, require classroom teachers to set a safe place for learning and sharing, and assignments that encourage every student, weak and strong, to participate, and to improve. As Joshua Kim writes in "EdTech and Supporting Teaching by Teachers," And when I visit and work with faculty, they are ache to learn how to help students succeed, and we try help them make our technology assistive rather than a "false idol." Faculty want more time and space to try new approaches. But with increases in teaching loads, gutted support for community colleges from the state, an increasing reliance on part-time faculty, administrators running academic departments who do not rise from faculty ranks nor necessarily have degrees in the discipline the supervise, support is sparse, time is limited, and morale is low. That work -- the work of designing courses to make the best use of what software can do, in the context of the student readiness reality Florida legislators created by burdening community colleges with essentially unfunded mandates -- is the work that needs to be done. Unless and until it is done, unless their is fully funded and sustained faculty and curriculum professional development at the high school and community college level -- perhaps in summer joint high school/college sessions -- neither of the two bills above will achieve the aims, worthy aims, the legislator intended. But what do you want to bet that now that those laws have passed and aren't working, the blame will get pushed not to the lawmakers but to the schools and teachers not given the tools needed to make it all work? ... View more

Last week, I proposed a compass-based activity for Discussing Ethics Scenarios in Professional Writing classes. This week I’m sharing ten scenarios to use with last week’s ethical compass. Most of the scenarios have alternative solutions or choices that you can discuss beyond the simple choice of where the situation falls on the ethical compass. Ten Ethical Scenarios You need an illustration for a pamphlet you are designing. You have saved the perfect image of the Casa Grande Ruins National Monument, but you cannot remember the source and do not know whether the image is free to use under Creative Commons or in the public domain. You decide to use it anyway and hope for the best. Is the choice right? Your colleague has written a progress report that indicates the project is on schedule and on budget. The report does not mention that the colleague has been substituting cheaper, generic supplies, rather than ordering the brand of supplies that the client requested to avoid going over budget. The supplies meet safety requirements, and it’s likely that the client will not notice the change. Is the colleague doing the right thing? The marketing department has asked your supervisor for screenshots to illustrate the forthcoming features that will be added to the app you are developing. When you tell your supervisor that the features are not programmed yet, he tells you to fake something in PhotoShop. Is your supervisor choosing the right solution? The disposable knives, spoons, and forks that your company manufactures are not recyclable. Though they are made with 10% recycled materials, they go to the landfill, not the recycling bin. A customer has asked on your company Facebook page whether the spoons are eco-friendly, and the social media manager has replied that they are. Has he made the right choice? Your department has just learned of a significant security flaw in the shopping cart software the company markets. The director of software development is not releasing details on the flaw to the public, leaving millions of users’ personal information at risk. She wants to avoid giving hackers information that could lead to security breaches. Your team is working overtime to fix the flaw, and the director plans to send out a press release on the flaw when the fix is ready. Has she made the right decision? You are writing specifications for a project your engineering firm is designing. You confess to your supervisor that you are behind schedule, and he suggests that you copy several sections from a similar specification that a colleague in the office wrote for another project. Is the supervisor suggesting the right solution? You are preparing a resume for an entry-level job. Your friend tells you to change the details on your active membership in the military reserves to suggest that you are no longer serving. He explains that some employers may be concerned about your military service causing you to miss work. You know it is illegal to discriminate on the basis of military service, and you are proud of your service. You include the information against your friend’s advice. Did you make the right choice? An intern who worked in your department has asked you to fill out a recommendation form for a scholarship application. You agree, but when you review the form, you notice questions about the intern’s religious affiliation and her commitment to her faith. You do not feel it’s appropriate to answer these questions, so you write, “I do not have enough information to answer this question” in that section of the form. Did you make the right decision? Your company has been taking shortcuts with quality control, resulting in the manufacture of food products that barely meet health and safety requirements. You create anonymous accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and you post evidence of the quality control issues on the accounts, tagging the corporate accounts. Was your action right? You wrote an extensive manual for using petroleum drilling equipment that your company manufactures. To save money, an editor pared down the manual, removing 2 pages of information overall. You review the changes and restore half of the information, which consisted primarily of important safety warnings. Your supervisor is unhappy about the cost, but you stand firm that the information must remain in the manual. Have you made the right decision? Because I am teaching online, I plan on using the scenarios throughout the term, posting two or three each week on our online discussion forum for students to respond to. I’ll try beginning with an anonymous poll on each scenario to gauge where the class stands before discussing the nuances of the situation and possible alternative responses. In the face-to-face classroom, I think I’d have students work in groups to propose ways to deal with the situation and then as a class work to a solution we all feel ethically deals with the scenario. This activity grew from conversations during the Pathways Summer Institute, sponsored by the Virginia Tech Office of General Education. Where do you find your ethical discussion starters? Do you have resources to share? Let me hear from you. Just leave me a comment below, or drop by my page on Facebook or Google+. [Photo: Casa Grande Ruins National Monument by Kevin Dooley, on Flickr] ... View more

Recently, I read an article in the New York Times about Snapchat, the video messaging app that has barnstormed its way toward valuations in the billions of dollars. The article’s title, “Snapchat: A New Mobile Challenge for Storytelling,” caught my attention and got me looking around the Snapchat site and watching some of their “stories.” The ones I watched were mostly reportorial, with someone giving information accompanied by images. But they got me wondering about other kinds of stories and how they might be told and circulated via Snapchat. One aspect of the app—its claim that snaps are deleted after 24 hours and can’t be retrieved—has been challenged by some who say that nothing on the Web is completely irretrievable, and by others who object to the cursory nature of snaps. Privacy issues aside, I like the idea of the ephemeral nature of Snapchat postings since it seems to open a special space for experimentation and creativity. I’m much more interested in this aspect of Snapchat than in the ability to “follow” people (aka celebrities), as detailed in a Time article on viral Snapchat stars. I also like the way this app demands multimodality—telling stories with words and images. And I’d particularly like to hear whether Snapchat is being used in classrooms. So, if you have any information on this topic, please let me know! ... View more

For a crowd-sourced blog post for “Beyond the Basics, ” I invited participants on the Council on Basic Writing Facebook page to respond to the following question: What one piece of advice would you offer to new teachers of Basic Writing? Why? The responses clustered around three main themes: Create classroom community Draw on compelling pedagogy Offer compassion, empathy, and transparency While this advice may be especially helpful for new teachers, all of us can benefit from the ideas presented here, and the range of experiences suggested by the respondents.  I have not imposed separate categories, since these themes intersect as tributaries meeting at the same wide ocean.  Through deeply embodied pedagogy, the respondents theorize practice and emphasize the passion necessary for our work together with students. Participants were self-selected and their contributions are listed in alphabetical order.  Thanks to everyone that responded, and please follow the Council on Basic Writing Facebook page for additional opportunities to participate in other crowd-sourced posts throughout the summer and in the next academic year. Ann Amicucci Teaching basic writing means teaching writing confidence. Students need to be shown (or reminded of) what they’re capable of as writers. We can give them opportunities to develop writing confidence by crafting situations in which students write on topics they care about and are genuinely interested in and in which they have the chance to explore ideas through words without the fear of being told those words or the ways they’ve used them are wrong. Elizabeth Baldridge Get to know your students, and respect and care about them as human beings. That is the most important work I do every semester. Andrea Dickens Asking each student to set one writing goal for themselves each term allows them to start to think of themselves as capable of guiding their own learning. It allows them to move beyond passively accepting their writing abilities or lack thereof as being fixed, and lets them start to feel empowered about improvement. Traci Gardner Allow for multiple modes of communication and multiple languages in your assignments and activities. Basic writers may struggle with the linguistic mode of expression in academic situations, but they are fluent readers, writers, and creators in many other scenarios. Find activities that let them demonstrate their understanding of visual composing by including photos, cartoons, mind maps and similar visual elements. Invite them to bridge from the languages they are best at to the language of the classroom with activities that focus on dictionary writing and definition. Respecting students’ existing communication skills is key to expanding their capabilities. Ann Etta Green RE Commenting: less is more. RE Writing: more is more. Nicole Hancock This is really basic, but learn students’ names on the first day of class and make sure they know what you would like to be called. It is especially important for Basic Writers to know that you see them each as individuals with stories to be told, and learning names is a good first step. Also, take the time to go over bits of the syllabus that are less intuitive: how office hours work, what we mean when we say the book is required vs. recommended, how the grading will work, how to read your assignment calendar. Instead of covering the entire syllabus at length in the first day, spread it out across the first week and reserve class-time for getting them writing and talking as soon as possible. This, more than anything else, will show students what the class is supposed to be. Dale Katherine Ireland We teach best when we meet our students where they are. Because our students in basic writing classes arrive with differing skills and strengths, the basic writing class thrives in a student-centered learning frame; our students benefit when they teach to learn and learn to teach. Meeting our students where they are means we can invite them to teach and advance their strengths as they develop new strengths. When we join our students as co-learners, we help make learning transparent, including the benefit of failing, taking risks, and trying again. ‪Joanna Howard‪ I would add patience to the mix— and the ability to be patient while holding high standards. That is, patience during those times the students are trying something new, and are frustrated with their progress and results. That’s the moment to reassure them that they will get there. Because they will. Cara Minardi‪ Be kind. Allow students opportunities to use writing as healing themselves of past intellectual hurts. Lynn Reid All of the above AND: Experienced writers have internalized many things about writing that are implicit and implied. Make these things visible to your students as often as you can. Provide model texts that highlight the difference between successful and less-successful attempts at the assignments you have created so that students can see the contrast. When you model, help students to see not only the structures of a text, but also the thinking that underlies those structures. Always ask students to explain the logic behind the way they structured their own papers because, however it might look, they almost always had a plan in mind. Listening to what it looks like from their perspective will tell you a lot. [Dale Katherine Ireland (I just had to respond to Lynn) Lynn Reid, yes to all you say, especially this: "When you model, help students to see not only the structures of a text, but also the thinking that underlies those structures." It's important that we help students understand their writing moves as choices. Asking students to consider the choices other writers make helps make the concept of choices more transparent. This thread has lifted me today. Thank all of you very much.] Kristen Ruccio‪ Give students rights to their own stories and language. Our basic writing students often expect the system to fail them–because it has in so many ways. Don’t begin your relationship in that punitive vein. Most importantly, these are not basic people, so don’t lower your expectations for them. Lynn Buncher Shelly Build community within your classroom (I learned this from Ann Amicucci) Bradley Smith Imagine: year after year, having to face of English teachers giving you bad grades, marking up your essays with errors in convention, telling you it’s not good enough. Understandably, a lot of basic writers don’t like writing all that much—or at least what they write in school. A basic writing instructor’s job is to get such students to enjoy writing, to get them invested in the class. Once you have accomplished that feat with some (you won’t reach them all) those students can be proud of their work, critically assess their writing, and begin to work on their issues. Jessi Lea Ulmer Do not treat the students like they are stupid. Most students in my basic writing classes are more than capable of writing full out essays, but have come to dislike writing since they were forced to write paragraphs or five-paragraph essays over and over. If you take the time to walk students through the process of writing, you will be amazed at what they can produce, even at the very beginning of the semester! Chris Vassett Maintain high expectations, avoid grammar instruction (it is insulting to begin the college experience with such hegemonic soul crushing instruction), assign college level reading, and read Patrick Sullivan’s, “A Lifelong Aversion to Writing: What If Writing Courses Emphasized Motivation?”–Teaching English in the Two-Year College v39 n2 p118 Dec 2011. ... View more

Today’s guest blogger is Caitlin L. Kelly, a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology where she teaches multimodal composition courses using 18 th - and 19 th -century British literature and serves as a Professional Tutor in the Communication Center. Alongside work on the intersection of religion and genre in British literature of the Long Eighteenth Century, she is also interested in exploring applications of a multimodal approach to composition to traditional literature pedagogy. One of the most difficult assignments to teach is the one at the heart of most college composition courses: the research project. Taking students from brainstorming a topic to a polished argument over the course of a semester is daunting; in the composition classroom, we are tasked with teaching—under very inorganic circumstances—a research process that should evolve organically. And one of the most challenging parts of that process for many students is learning how to engage with sources once they have found them. This is where the listicle comes into play in my courses. The listicle provides a dedicated space where students can explore the many different arguments that they can make with the sources they have found in researching their topics. It can then become a form of multimodal outline and first draft. The listicle can also help to emphasize that any presentation of research—written, oral, visual, and multimodal—has a narrative and tells a story. In this way, it has much in common with Andrea Lunsford’s Storify assignment in which she harnesses the affordances of that multimodal platform to collect evidence and “pull all the pieces together to see what results.” What’s a Listicle? A listicle is a hybrid genre, an article in list form. While listicles can be found in a variety of print and digital publications, the genre is best known for its use on the websites Buzzfeed and Cracked. As a result, listicles are often not considered as “professional” and appropriate for “serious” subjects. Slowly, however, that view has been changing, and that is good for composition teachers. Not only does it make the genre more accessible to us as educators but also it allows students to participate in its evolution. As defenders of the listicle have pointed out, the genre is responding to our need to deal with the ever-increasing multitudes of data that are readily available to us. Listicles give us a tool with which to “curate” that information, and they provide “additional ways to interact with [it]” and act as “jumping off points” for further research. As Maria Konninkova explains in the New Yorker, listicles do the “mental heavy lifting of conceptualization, categorization, and analysis” at the outset. In a digital environment, this improves the chances that readers will indeed read—and understand. Learning Objectives Jessie Miller, writing about her multimodal annotated bibliography assignment, describes the way that using “a visual display of information to map out the interplay between their sources” can be an effective way “to get students to see source use as an engaging and active practice.” The same can be said of listicles. Additionally, in composing a listicle, students gain: a space to explore the many stories their research can tell, a chance to focus on how the parts of their argument relate, an opportunity to explore communicating specialized, academic topics in a way that is accessible for wide audiences, a better understanding of copyright, and practice in attributing sources in a digital environment. The Assignment After spending the first 4-6 weeks of the semester reading and exploring potential research topics, students first put together a robust annotated bibliography. Using those bibliographies, the students remix the information into a listicle. In the process, I also make a point of discussing how the structure of the listicle maps onto more traditional writing assignments. Assigning readings on drafting, constructing arguments, and revision from texts like The St. Martin’s Handbook are all options, depending on your students’ needs and how you are using the assignment. Chapter 1 of Everything’s An Argument would be a particularly good pairing if you want your students to identify a specific type of argument that they want to make in their listicles. In terms of what platforms the students use to present their listicles, I leave that up to them to determine. They have found that free website builders like Weebly, Wix, WordPress, and the like are good options for this project. With its emphasis on images, Tumblr can also be an effective platform. A few students have even posted their work on Medium and on Buzzfeed Community. Each platform presents a different range of affordances, so students also have a chance to reflect on the ways that various platforms inform their composition strategies. The assignment also affords students with a unique opportunity to practice using images alongside textual evidence in their arguments. An effective listicle uses images to advance its argument and to connect with a wider, nonacademic audience. These are vital skills for students, particularly those in STEM fields. Images can be used to present evidence, help readers to visualize complex concepts, or to demonstrate significance or perspective. Students can even create images to use by taking their own photographs and creating their own graphics. Determining what permissions are required to use these images and the appropriate ways of attributing them provide invaluable lessons in applying traditional methods of citation to digital environments where the rules are still emerging.  I have included sample assignment instructions​, and below is a template showing the first section of a listicle and the defining characteristics of the genre. Finally, because the listicle is such an exploratory assignment, reflection is an especially important part of the process. That reflective work can be done formally by making reflection an explicit part of the assignment or, as I have done, reflection can occur in the course of peer review. I schedule two class sessions for peer review. In the first I ask students to bring several copies of the written parts of the listicle–the title, section titles, and short paragraphs for each section. Then, they cut those up and have classmates reassemble them. Many students find that the story they are hoping to tell is not the one that their readers anticipate or find engaging. So, in drafting their listicles the students have taken the first step in determining what it is they want to say; in giving a fragmented draft of the listicle to their peers, they get to see how readers would use the same sources in different ways. The next step for students is reconciling those different views and determining which path it is that they want to take—how they want to enter the conversation. For the second peer review, then, the students bring a draft in which they have assembled all of the parts of the listicle in the media they will submit it in. Here, they refine the presentation of their research narratives and the emphasis shifts to tone, style, design, and attribution. Concluding Thoughts One of the most exciting things about incorporating a listicle assignment in a composition class is its newness as a genre and its flexibility. A listicle might be one step on the way to a larger project or it might be the larger project itself. A listicle could also be formal or informal, left in draft form or polished, composed offline or online—depending on the instructor’s needs and learning objectives. An emphasis could be put on research, genre, public writing, digital writing or any combination thereof. There is plenty of room to develop the listicle as a genre and assignment for a variety of purposes, making it highly accessible for composition teachers at all levels and institutions. Want to collaborate with Andrea on a Multimodal Monday assignment? Send ideas to leah.rang@macmillan.com for possible inclusion in a future post. ... View more

Several weeks ago I promised in one of my blogs that I would share the results of an exercise in critical thinking that I was preparing to conduct with faculty in my role as Director of Assessment and Program Review at my university.  Since the outcome of this exercise is equally relevant to the teaching of critical reading and writing—not to mention popular cultural semiotics—I am glad to be able to keep my promise here. Let’s begin with my premises and anticipations.  My fundamental premise is that there is an elemental core to all acts of critical thinking, no matter what the academic discipline or real world context.  As I mentioned in my earlier blog, I call this the what .  .  . so what then? basis of critical thinking.  That is, in all instances, critical thinking constitutes a precise identification of a problem or topic (what) and moves from that to an exploration of its ramifications, meanings, or (as in the case of a problem) possible solutions (so what then?). Now, I anticipated (and will continue to anticipate) some objections to this claim.  Its worst feature is its claim of universality, which is a frequent characteristic of definitions of critical thinking, including those that are currently most influential in the teaching and assessment of critical thinking in this country.  Most standardized tests of critical thinking, for example, lean heavily on the traditional philosophical definition: that critical thinking constitutes the ability to spot—and formally identify—logical and argumentative fallacies.  I happen to agree that such an ability is necessary to effective critical thinking, but I also think that it is too narrow a definition, and, more importantly, too passive.  It enables one to identify a fallacy in somewhat else’s thinking (critical reading) but it does not describe how to think critically (and creatively) oneself, beyond pointing out what to avoid. A second extremely influential definition of critical thinking in assessment circles is based in educational psychology, and centers on something called Bloom’s Taxonomy, which is a hierarchical description of the cognitive functions that take place in the course of critical thinking.  Once again, I have no quarrel with this approach, but it, too, is rather narrow, and, more importantly, too abstract.  I mean, when thinking critically one doesn’t say, “now I am going to use my knowledge,” “now I am going to comprehend,” “now I am going to apply,” “now I am going to analyze,” and so on and so forth.  Critical thinking is a lot more like riding a bicycle: when you are doing it you are doing it, not consciously isolating each muscular and mental component in your movement. But what about the what  .  .  .  so what then? descriptor?  What I wanted to demonstrate to my faculty is that that is precisely what is going on in their minds when they are engaged in critical thinking, whether their initialwhat is a problem to be solved in business and marketing, or a topic to be taught and analyzed in an ethnic studies course.  I was way up on the high wire without a net in trying to do this, but I didn’t fall, even when business/marketing and ethnic studies examples were volunteered from the participants in the session.  In fact, those two examples, serendipitously proposed by my faculty colleagues, served as the core examples for our discussion and helped establish the fundamental continuities between otherwise widely diverging acts of critical thought. One of the key elements of the movement from what to so what then? in our discussion was the importance of the analysis of assumptions (this is one of the features of critical thinking that you can find on the VALUE rubric for critical thinking)—in cultural semiotics, this analysis is called the evaluation of cultural mythologies.  Another point that a faculty member brought up was the importance of considering alternatives in thinking critically—in semiotics, this is referred to as the overdetermination inherent in semiotic analysis. For my part, I stressed the importance of being very clear on the what (in semiotics, the denotation of the sign) before moving to the interpretativeso what then? (in semiotics, the connotation of the sign).  I also noted how the movement from what to so what then? required historical and situational contextualization (in semiotics, the construction of systems of association and difference.) In other words, the semiotic model worked as a fundamental descriptor of what we are already doing when we are thinking critically.  This was even the case when a colleague who is a composition specialist noted that in rhetoric one is concerned with a who, not a what.  But when I pointed out that a who stands in the place of the what that a rhetorician must first identify before moving to a persuasive strategy, we were able to agree that whos are whats, too. OK, I know that I’m starting to sound like Dr. Seuss.  The point is, my exercise worked.  The complete practical description of how to teach, and perform, critical thinking according to this model can be found in Signs of Life in the U.S.A.  ... View more

Last Thursday, Here and Now’s story on “Social Media Buzz” included a discussion of livestreaming and stormchasers. The story started on a positive note, discussing how posts on social media sometimes reach people with word of an impending storm more quickly than news updates and the National Weather Service. Yay! Social media helps people! Then the perspective changed. Host Robin Young talked about how stormchasers sometimes continue to film a storm when they should be taking cover. She commented, “Social media drives people to do things they might not otherwise do.” Boo! Social media is the devil! Sigh. No. Social media is not driving people to do anything. People do not say, “Oh, I have social media so I have to do this.” You can blame the love of attention, a desire for approval, and perhaps an adrenaline rush. The motivations in this case are similar to those that a daredevil or actor might have. Yet, as an example, I don’t recall anyone ever saying Evel Knievel was driven (pun intended) to jump a canyon because cars encouraged him to do things he might not otherwise do. Social media may help stormchasers reach an audience in ways that bring them attention, approval, and an adrenaline rush, but social media itself isn’t doing anything. Unfortunately, stories that blame Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram are quite common, despite their basis on causal fallacies. I wasn’t even looking, and I happened upon “Woman: My Facebook obsession caused divorce” from my local television station. My colleague Kathy Fitch found a more developed example in an ESPN article that seems to blame Instagram for the suicide of a student at that University of Pennsylvania. Alongside an image of the student, the article explains, “The Instagram account of Madison Holleran seemed to show a successful and happy college freshman. But behind the scenes, the University of Pennsylvania track athlete was struggling with her mental health.” As Fitch responded, “Suicide and depression thrived in the days before social media. Did it have a role in her distorted view of life? Yes, of course. Causal? No.” My response to the story was a bit more literary: A person wandering through the world. Everyone thinks everything is fine. Some even envy the person. Um, “Richard Cory,” anyone? So what’s my point, beyond having a rant? If I can borrow Nick Carbone’s hashtag, media stories like these seem #worthassigning. They raise questions about cause and effect, the role of social media, and the ways we communicate. How would you use these readings in the classroom? Do you have an example reading that blames social media for what’s wrong with the world? I’d love to hear from you. Just leave me a comment below, or drop by my page on Facebook or Google+. [Photo: Cute Lil Devil by Crystal Agozzino, on Flickr] ... View more

Wednesday morning, the Virginia Tech community woke up to find a Crime Alert emailed by the campus police department, giving us these details: Last evening at approximately 11:15 p.m., a statement appeared on Yik Yak which read “Another 4.16 moment is going to happen tomorrow. Just a warning”. For us, this was more than a generic threat, even if the police had indicated that there was no evidence this was “a credible threat.” We marked the eighth anniversary of the April 16 shootings on our campus not quite two weeks earlier. While few of the current undergraduates were on campus that day in 2007, they are all quite aware of what happened and they join in as we mark the anniversary each year. After receiving the Crime Alert, my students were understandably anxious. They chatted nervously, conjecturing that the absences that day were because people were staying away from campus “because of that message.” They weren’t talking about it explicitly. I can only guess they thought that not mentioning the threat might make it go away. Every time the door opened, heads whipped around to check who was coming in. Normally, we leave the door propped open so latecomers can slip in quietly. That day, they wanted the classroom door locked. One student even went outside the back door to double-check that it was locked too. The class seemed to relax a little after the doors were locked. We were busy with project presentations, and students appeared to be paying attention. I admit, though, that I watched the hallway through the window in the door just in case, and I mentally rehearsed what I would say and where I would tell students to hide if something did happen. After class was over, I told students to stay safe, and most of them left. A handful remained since their next class is in the same classroom. Their conversations about the threat started up again. When I left the classroom, they wanted me to leave the doors locked. They said they would let people in as they saw them. Later that afternoon, we received a new Crime Alert that told us the police arrested a student who turned himself in. By Friday, class was back to normal. At the beginning of class, I asked if they wanted the door locked. They answered no, and we went on with class. I have many goals as a teacher. I want to help students become stronger writers and more effective communicators. I hope to help them become more confident about their abilities. Rarely do I think about keeping them safe and calm in times of danger. Last week’s events reminded me that, too, is part of my job. Looking back, I’ve realized that I was trying to give them control. I let them decide about the doors. I asked two students to let people into the classroom who arrived late. Students secured the back door. They decided to keep the door locked after class was over. I wish I could say I made conscious decisions, but I was just going with what felt right in the moment. I’ve always believed that student choice is crucial to good writing assignments. Apparently giving students some choice and control matters when there are scary times in the classroom, too. ... View more

This was originally posted on April 15, 2014. At CCCC last month, I found myself in my room one night, reflecting on all the wonderful sessions I’d attended and ideas I’d heard. In one session, Elisabeth Kramer-Simpson from New Mexico Tech and Elizabeth Tomlinson from West Virginia University inspired me with their discussion of internships and open writing assignments in the technical writing classroom. As I thought about their presentations, I realized that I wasn’t content with the project I was planning to introduce the Monday after I returned from the convention. I had an odd desire to go into the classroom and say, “Let’s scrap the plan for the rest of the term. What do you want to know about technical writing this term?” I knew it wouldn’t be the most responsible plan, but I was tempted. If students would engage, it could lead to a great series of activities. I wasn’t sure that they would engage though, and I feared that the more structured activities we had completed before I went off to CCCC would clash with such a completely open plan. I found myself searching for a middle ground. The next project was to be job-application materials. The assignment I had always used was to ask students to find a job posting and write a cover letter and resume to apply for the job. I wondered, though, what would happen if I asked them all to write their own assignment for the project. I began wondering how opening the assignment to more choice would customize it to what the student truly needed or wanted. If the student was trying to get a summer job, she could write the application materials the job asked for. If she wanted to establish an online portfolio, she could write the texts for that. If she was trying to network with people interested in the same discipline, she could write the documents that would help her do that. I imagined that the deliverables for the assignment could include all of the following: a traditional resume and cover letter an application essay a personal website a cleaned up public Facebook profile a Linked In profile a GitHub repository and profile an Academia.edu profile The more that I thought about the options, the more I found myself wondering why I should be the one to define what they need as job application materials. Why not let them tell me what they needed? So I scrapped my original plans and created a new, open assignment that let students choose the project they would work on. The result? Students actually smiled when I explained that they could do whatever job application materials were appropriate for what they wanted to do in the near future. I had students who excitedly told me they never had time to work on GitHub, and that they were so glad that they could do so as homework now.  Other students told me that their academic advisors had been urging them to set up a LinkedIn profile but they hadn’t gotten to it. Now they could. We wrapped up the project last week, and it has been one of the best activities I’ve taught. There was enough overlap in what the different tasks they chose called for that we had plenty to talk about and work on in class. At the same time, they have all had the chance to work on documents they needed and wanted to work on. Why didn’t I choose this option before? [Photo: Jobs Help Wanted by photologue_np, on Flickr] ... View more

If you’ve been teaching for some time, I wonder if you’ve seen some of your favorite assignments evolve or change over time. I’m realizing that a number of mine have, almost without my noticing. Right now I’m thinking of my much loved “long sentence assignment.” I started giving this assignment to break up the lengthy research project my students all do, and in particular to focus for a bit on syntax and style. It’s a low stakes assignment, much like finger exercises on the piano, meant for fun and practice, though I do assign a few points to it. Here’s how it started out: I asked students to write a “perfectly punctuated, 250-word sentence,” providing some models for them from Martin Luther King, Dylan Thomas, Will and Ariel Durant, and others over the years. We spent some time analyzing the structure of the model long sentences—King’s sentence, for instance, is a periodic sentence, built up of a series of dependent clauses and holding the main clause, “Then you will know why we can’t wait,” until the very end. That gave me a chance to introduce the concepts of paratactic and hypotactic structures and give a brief history of English syntax. Students were horrified at the assignment, saying that it can’t be done. But of course then they found that it can be done and were quite proud of their results, which we also analyzed in class. Then we returned to the research project, looking at some individual sentences and seeing how they could be made more effective. After some years of working with this assignment, I went a step further and asked students to rewrite the 250-word sentence into precisely 25 words. That turned out to be quite a challenge, but fun too, and we worked together to analyze those shorter sentences and to debate which was most effective—and why. Then came Twitter, and I decided to ask students to take another step and turn their sentences into Tweets. Now we had three sentences on the same subject matter but with radical differences that we could explore together. Most interesting to me were discussions about when and where each sentence might be most appropriate: students had strong opinions about that! Best of all, I could see them paying closer attention to all their sentences, realizing that their rhetorical choices mattered and that their sentences were definitely connected to how an audience received their work. And today? I now add a fourth challenge: take either the 25-word sentence or the Tweet and illustrate it. I was inspired to make this addition by the animated sentences on Electric Literature. Some of my students do indeed have the skill to animate their sentences, but those who don’t or who don’t want to do so can illustrate in any other way, using crayons or colored pencils, cutting and pasting, or creating digital illustrations. Now we have an added layer of visual rhetoric to analyze and think about, and I find that students especially like rising to this challenge. So that’s how one of my tried-and-true assignments has morphed over the years, one layer at a time. I’d love to hear how some of your assignments may have changed! ... View more

In my last blog post I wrote about Mad Men, a pop cultural sensation that is now winding down.  This time I want to reflect a bit on the Star Wars franchise, a pop culture phenomenon for which the word “sensation” is wholly inadequate, and which, far from winding down, is instead winding up in preparation for the release of its seventh installment (The Force Awakens), with at least two more “episodes” in the works.                                                                               The cultural significance of the Star Wars films cannot be overestimated.  I say this not as a fan (in fact, I more or less share the opinion of Alex Guinness, who, interestingly enough, was no fan of the films that made him very rich for playing the original Obi-Wan Kenobi) but as a cultural semiotician.  Because in the extraordinary success of 1977’s inaugural installment of the Star Wars saga we may find a precise marker of America’s turn to fantasy as its favorite cinematic form and all that that would portend. Of course before Lucas, there was Tolkien and Roddenberry, whose Lord of the Rings and Star Trek paved the way for the transformation of fantasy from a children’s genre to a preferred form of entertainment for adults as well. But Star Wars went much further.  A survey of top box office hits over the years will show that prior to 1977 fantasy filmmaking wasn’t even in the running.   After 1977, between a host of sword-and-sorcery, tossed-in-space, superhero, and general sci-fi scenarios, the situation was reversed, such that the top ten films in any year since 2000 have been overwhelmingly in the fantasy sector (I’m using the term “fantasy” in the broadest sense). So dominant is fantasy today that it is all too easy to take the matter for granted; but it is that crucial difference that a little research can reveal which points to the significance of the current paradigm.  The question becomes, what does that difference signify? Given the historical identification of fantasy with children’s storytelling, we can abductively suggest that the turn to fantasy is, at least in part, a signifier of a fully developed youth culture, one in which youth—rather than age, as in most traditional societies—is the most valued life stage.  Beyond that, there are indications that the appeal of fantasy is especially strong in a drab postindustrial era wherein the realities of everyday life are so unsatisfying that the fantastic landscapes of Pandora, or even the dystopian labyrinths of the Matrix, are desirable distractions from the era of the Cubicle.  And one can’t help but think of Neil Postman’s famous jeremiad Amusing Ourselves to Death in this context either—that is, in an entertainment culture, rational discourse doesn’t really have a chance. These may be fighting words (Postman’s particularly) for some of your students, but rather than presenting the significance of the fantasy era as a given to them, you would do well to explore what they think its significance might be.  (The 8th edition of Signs of Life in the USA provides a lot of material for this.)  The first step is to point out the phenomenon to them, because it is one of those things that are hiding in plain sight even as they loom over us.  After all, Buck Rogers was once kid’s stuff; thanks toStar Wars, fantasy is the dominant discourse of our time. ... View more

When Susan Miera—who did her MA degree at the Bread Loaf School of English and is a leader in the Bread Loaf Teacher Network—invited me to join her and colleagues and students in Santa Fe, I jumped at the chance.  I’ve known “Ms. Miera,” as she is lovingly known by legions of high schoolers, for many years, and I’ve worked with a number of Native American students she has mentored—and sent to Stanford.  She’s a whirlwind of energy, and I know that I will always learn something new from her.  This visit was no exception. With support from Santa Fe Indian School (SFIS), the Bread Loaf School of English, and Write to Change, Susan, who directs the writing center at SFIS, and her colleague Alicia Fritz put together a day-long workshop on Writing and Teaching Writing in the Digital Age.  The workshop brought together middle and high school students and teachers from SFIS as well as from Pecos (public) and Monte del Sol (charter) high schools, so bright and early on Friday morning about 30 of us gathered on the gorgeous SFIS campus to begin our day. This eight-and-a-half foot bronze statue, by artist Estella Loretto, welcomed us to SFIS Colleagues at SFIS describe it as a “grant” school, meaning that they receive some federal funds.  But they are also supported by the nineteen pueblos of New Mexico, along with other local and state sources.  What I sensed immediately was a strong sense of ownership among the students and faculty at SFIS, captured in what they said about their relationship to the school as well as in many posters and art works throughout the school that stressed commitment and pride: After introductions and greetings, I talked about the necessity of collaboration for learning and for writing, enumerating four challenges I think we need to address:  the individualistic premises on which most institutions of education rest; the fact that our classrooms are now public spaces; alternatives to the “lecture mode” still common in many schools; and the need to retain the best of the “old literacy” while embracing the best parts of the “new literacies.”  Then we divided into groups, making sure to have students and teachers from all three schools in each group, and we got to work designing activities and assignments and policies we thought could address these issues. The day went by in a flash, as groups presented their ideas and plans:  everything from designing a Think-a-Tron machine that would allow people working in groups to immediately access each other’s thoughts (!), to presenting PARCC (State test) WARS, in which the students designed a movie trailer to parody the test, to designing a unit on Romeo and Juliet that is thoroughly interactive, participatory, and performative—and a whole lot more.  Watchword for the day came from Steven Johnson, who in his “Where Good Ideas Come From” talk says “chance favors the connectedmind.”  Once again, I had the privilege of spending a day with insightful, thoughtful, witty, and wise young people.  And once again I came away convinced that today’s youth are prepared to use literacy—together—to reimagine classrooms, schools, and themselves. Susan, Alicia, and me ... View more

I spent the weekend in wonderful Savannah, Georgia, at the Student Success in Writing Conference. The wonderful event led me to conversations with teachers from high schools, two-year colleges, and four-year colleges. I got to meet Bits guest bloggers Kim Haimes-Korn and Jeanne Bohannon, who presented on “Transcending Tech-Tools: Engaging Students through Critical Digital Pedagogies.” Jeanne shared a video animation project that focused on “A Day in the Life” stories that developed students’ critical thinking skills by requiring them to consider another point of view, and Kim talked about an assignment that asks students to use digital timeline tools to publish literacy narratives. I’m hopeful that they will share more details in a future post. Sarah Domet and Margaret Sullivan discussed “Practical Approaches to Multimodal Composition.” Their themed blog assignment transforms their first-year writing course into a semester-long writing and research project that students publish on WordPress.com blogs or Weebly.com websites. I loved their historicization web essay, which asked students to trace the development of their topic from past to current events. Their student examples showed students deeply engaged with their research. Students read and engage with one another’s blogs, culminating in bloggy awards at the end of the semester for categories like best overall blog and best home page. I’m not quite sure how to fit the activities into my own classes right now, but I’m certainly working on it. I regret that I missed Natalie James’s presentation on “Teaching Tumblr: Blogging towards Critical Discourse,” but I had a nice conversation with her between sessions. Her presentation focused on the ways that “Tumblr can give students tools for practicing critical discourse in a relevant and engaging online environment.” I cannot wait to find her materials in the conference’s Digital Commons archive. My own presentation focused on “Ten Ways to Use Digital Tools in the Writing Classroom.” I shared a collection of assignments and activities that I have used in the writing classroom to engage students. Some of the ideas I have already talked about in Bits posts, like my Pinterest Assignments and my Digital Identity Mapping Activity, but you will find some new ideas and student examples in the presentation resources as well. Overall, I had a grand time in Savannah. The conference is a perfect size, allowing you to connect with colleagues and meet new collaborators, and because of the focus on practical writing strategies, I left every session with a list of ideas for my own classes. I recommend that you check out the Call for Proposals for the 2016 Conference, and submit your proposal beginning June 15. You’ll be glad you did, and you’ll have a grand time too. ... View more

Today’s guest blogger is Monica Miller, a Marion L Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow in the school of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech, specializing in digital pedagogies and multimodal composition. She received her Ph.D. from Louisiana State University in 2014, where she studied American literature, with concentrations in Southern Literature and Women’s and Gender Studies. Her work focuses on the intersections of region and gender. Her current book project, Don’t Be Ugly: The Ugly Plot in the Work of Southern Women Writers, examines the ways in which ugliness marks fictional characters who are excluded from traditional gender roles of marriage and motherhood. “My friend said that his 1101 class was the best, because they watch videos all day—but he doesn’t get to play with Play-doh like we do!” –Overheard in my first year, multimodal, “maker culture”-themed composition classroom. The students in my class were to some extent open to the idea of playing in the classroom, as the course theme of “Maker Culture” was one which encouraged play, seeing it as a key to innovation. “Play” is actually one of the guiding principles of Mark Hatch’s Maker Movement Manifesto, as important to his philosophy as other guiding principles such as “Share,” “Learn,” and “Tool Up.” Hatch encourages makers to “Be playful with what you are making, and you will be surprised, excited, and proud of what you discover” (2). Although there is much less awareness of maker culture in FYC pedagogy than there is in STEM classrooms, I have found that maker culture’s emphasis on digital tools, play, and collaborative learning make it an ideal approach to the multimodal composition classroom. Let me clarify, however, that this kind of “play day” is not the same as the “safe space” featured in a recent New York Times article which has been subject to much debate. While students in such safe spaces play with Play-doh, crayons, and bubbles in order to find emotional security, in my classroom, these craft supplies served very specific pedagogical purposes. Goals To learn and reflect upon collaboration. To introduce the concept of affordances. Background reading before class Ask students to plan for the presentation by reading relevant content from your handbook or rhetoric: The St. Martin’s Handbook, section 4m, “Reflecting” The Everyday Writer, section 11b, “Reflect” Writing in Action, section 5i, “Reflect” EasyWriter, section 2j, “Reflecting” The Activity In small groups, construct “creatures” from Play-doh and other “play” materials. The students worked hard on their presentations, and many of them had been terrified by the public speaking. To reward their efforts, the class period following their presentations, we had a “play day.” I gave students Play-doh, construction paper, yarn, glue sticks, and scissors, with the vague instruction to “make a creature.” The only parameters I set were these: each group was to collaborate on one creature; the creature had to be finished by the end of class; and they couldn’t mix the Play-doh colors, because other students would be using them. When asked why we were playing with Play-doh in class, I said that I did have some pedagogical motivations for the day, which I would reveal on Thursday, but I asked that they trust that there was a pedagogical foundation to the exercise and try to immerse themselves in the play. As the photographs throughout this post show, it was generally a fun day—something about the smells and textures from childhood coupled with relief from having a big project behind them allowed most of them to really let go and enjoy themselves. (Also, engineers have some skills with craft materials!) Reflecting on the Activity The class period after our play day, I began by focusing on the collaborative learning aspect of the exercise. My students were used to frequent collaboration in their assignments, whether brainstorming, peer review workshops on drafts, or more formal group projects. That day, I started class with a writing assignment, in which I asked students to reflect upon the following: The nature of their group dynamics while making the creature, comparing the experience to their group presentation project as well as the other group work they’ve done, both in English 1101 as well as other situations. How the nature of the project affected how they worked as a group. How their group dynamics had changed over the course of the larger project. We then looked at the photographs I took of the different creatures. Each group explained their process, what media they used for the different parts, and how their vision changed over the course of the construction. As we looked at the pictures, I asked students to think about what different purposes were served by different media. Yarn works well for hair as well as for being crocheted or knitted into clothes; Play-doh is good for larger body parts; construction paper can be used not only for details, such as eyes, but also for construction–several groups used it to make tabs to attach tails to bodies, for example. Moving Forward These observations allowed me to introduce the concept of “affordances” to the class. By first talking about the affordances of Play-doh in creature creation, I could then transition to a lesson in digital tools: a discussion of the affordances of different media—whether photos, video, or written text—in website design, which was their final project in the class. I was quite pleased with the results of our play day. Maker culture is on to something—play encourages not only innovation, but also an atmosphere of openness which helps bring about the kind of community I strive for in my classroom. Playing in the classroom not only gives students a chance to catch their breath but fosters an environment of trust and (dare I say?) fun which I believe ultimately produces happier, more engaged students. Want to collaborate with Andrea on a Multimodal Mondays assignment? Send ideas to leah.rang@macmillan.com for possible inclusion in a future post. ... View more