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

Welcome to the first "What We've Learned" video! In these videos, Macmillan authors reflect on the insights, lessons, and tricks they've learned through teaching online, and how their teaching pedagogies have adapted to digital instruction. Here, Elizabeth Losh and Jonathan Alexander, authors of Understanding Rhetoric, discuss making spaces for student writers and the opportunities for student interaction in both synchronous and asynchronous online instruction. ... View more

This blog series is written by Julia Domenicucci, an editor at Macmillan Learning, in conjunction with Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl. Today’s blog post will center around podcasts about pronouns, loosely tying into International Pronouns Day, which is celebrated on the third Wednesday of October. This day focuses on personal pronouns, and, according to their website, “seeks to make respecting, sharing, and educating about personal pronouns commonplace.” Learn more about this volunteer-run campaign on their website, pronounsday.org. Podcasts have been around for a while, but their popularity seems to increase every day—and for good reason! They are engaging and creative, and they cover every topic imaginable. They are also great for the classroom: you can use them to maintain student engagement, accommodate different learning styles, and introduce multimodality.   LaunchPad and Achieve products include collections of assignable, ad-free Grammar Girl podcasts, which you can use to support your lessons. You can assign one (or all!) of these suggested podcasts for students to listen to before class. Each podcast also comes with a complete transcript, which is perfect for students who aren’t audio learners or otherwise prefer to read the content. To learn more about digital products and purchasing options, please visit Macmillan's English catalog or speak with your sales representative.  If you are using LaunchPad, refer to the unit “Grammar Girl Podcasts” for instructions on assigning podcasts. You can also find the same information on the support page "Assign Grammar Girl Podcasts." If you are using Achieve, you can find information on assigning Grammar Girl in Achieve on the support page "Add Grammar Girl and shared English content to your course." If your English Achieve product is copyright year 2021 or later, you are able to use a folder of suggested Grammar Girl podcasts in your course; please see “Using Suggested Grammar Girl Podcasts in Achieve for English Products” for more information.   Discussing Personal Pronouns Gender-Neutral Pronouns: Singular They Assignment A - The History of They as Gender-Neutral: Assign students to listen to the podcast. Then, ask students to research the history of they as a gender-neutral pronoun using at least two sources. With their research, have each student write a brief paragraph outlining that history--and don’t forget to have them cite their sources! Either during class or asynchronously, put students into groups of three or four. First, have them evaluate the sources’ credibility. They should then select the two or three most credible sources. Assign them to write a brief podcast script about the history of they as a gender-neutral pronoun. They should use and cite the two or three most credible sources, which can include the Grammar Girl podcast. The podcast script should be about 2-3 minutes long when read aloud, and should cover questions such as: When was they first used as a gender-neutral pronoun? Has they become more or less popular over time, or has that popularity stayed the same? How do people use they as a gender-neutral pronoun today? Assignment B - Respecting Personal Pronouns: Assign students to listen to the podcast. Then, look up a recent article about respecting someone’s personal pronouns, perhaps in relation to “International Pronouns Day” (try searching “International Pronouns Day” in the News section of Google, or checking the official #PronounsDay on social media). Have each student note down one thing they learned from the podcast, and one thing they learned from the article. As a class, discuss what students learned or found interesting. You might also consider discussing ways students can introduce their own pronouns in daily life, or discussing the scope and variety of pronouns people might choose to use for themselves. If your class is too big to do this together, break the students into groups of three to five.   Discussing Other Pronouns Myself Pronouns and Antecedents Pronouns for People and Animals Who versus Whom, Advanced Assignment: Assign students to listen to one or more of the above podcasts. Ask them to take a recent piece of their writing and identify an error they have made in pronoun usage. If they can’t find an error, ask them to identify an area where they questioned which pronoun was correct. This piece of writing could be an essay, but it might also be an email, a Tweet, a text--anything that is school appropriate and that they are comfortable sharing with the class. If your class is synchronous: during class, have students share their examples and discuss. If your class is asynchronous: have students submit their example to you. If you like, you can tally up common areas of difficulty, and assign further resources on pronouns.   More Grammar Girl Activities If you are looking for other activities, be sure to check out the other Grammar Girl posts, especially: Using Grammar Girl Podcasts to Teach about Idioms (with a Halloween Theme!) Using Grammar Girl Podcasts to Start the Semester Using Grammar Girl Podcasts in an Online Classroom Grammar Girl & Ideas for Teaching Online   Credit: Pixabay Image 791596 by kaboompics, used under a Pixaby License ... View more

This post will go up on October 22, the putative day of the final presidential debate of 2020. I will be watching with two friends who have been as cautious as I have been these last 8 months (we will be masked and six feet apart) because I truly can’t face watching it alone. Perhaps next week I will be able to make some coherent comments on the debate and its relationship to the work we are doing in teaching writing and speaking and reading and listening. But for now, I’m practicing some avoidance behavior, looking for things to take my mind off the current campaign and all that is at stake for our country. Which means I am reading—things that are far removed from the current moment. I’ll admit that I’m a bit late to the dance in terms of reading Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, which was published in 2018. In fact, I had never heard of Barker or this book until late this summer when I took to reading classic epics. I was really taken with Emily Watson’s spell-binding translation of The Odyssey (the first translation of the ancient text into English by a woman), which I had meant to read ever since its publication in 2018 but didn’t get to until the pandemic put me in a mood to revisit old tales. And in reading about Watson’s translation I somehow stumbled on a mention of Barker’s book—which tells the story of The Iliad through the eyes of Briseis, a princess who watches Achilles kill her husband and three brothers and who is then given to Achilles as his “prize” and moves from princess to enslaved woman in the clink of a sword. So I decided to re-read The Iliad (in the Alexander Pope translation, which I thought I would like but found very tedious) alongside The Silence of the Girls. What a couple of weeks I had of it too—going back and forth, taking breaks to read other accounts of the decade-long Greek siege of Troy, and then dipping back into the two books. About halfway through the story, though, I gave up going back and forth: I wanted to stay with Briseis and her voice, her vision, her telling of the story. Later I went back to finish up the Pope translation, but found myself reading it differently: Briseis was whispering in my ear on every page. Of course, Pat Barker is not the first woman to take on an ancient tale and tell it from a woman’s point of view, not by a long shot. So next I turned back to Emily Watson’s Odyssey and kept it close by while reading Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad. And I plan to take up David Ferry’s acclaimed translation of The Aeneid and Ursula K. Le Guin’s 2007 retelling from the point of view of Lavinia, whom Aeneas claims and with whom he founds Lavinium. So these are some of the books I’ve read in any spare time I have had the last few months—and doing so has led me to think a lot about reading books about the same subject in pairs, especially if part of that pair takes a feminist or womanist perspective.  (Or perhaps in threes: I had a chance to see Enda Walsh’s tragicomic Penelope when I was in Ireland about ten or twelve years ago and I still remember it vividly; I should have looked for the script when I was reading The Odyssey and The Penelopiad!) In the last couple of weeks I’ve had a chance to speak with a few college students about what they are reading, and as I’ve talked with them about new takes on old tales they have seemed drawn to stories of the past, as I have been. It seems to me that taking this approach could lead to some really fine student research: take an iconic or classic story (from any culture they know or want to know about) and trace its translation history. (I once did this for translations of Sappho’s fragments and came away utterly astonished at how different eras “translated” these texts; on another occasion, I worked with a student to explore the history of Icon, a Black superhero whose stories often echo those of others in transformative ways.) Or just do as I have done and read an epic and a retelling of it and write about the experience of that reading. So far, I have been sticking with traditional print novels, but I expect I wouldn’t have to look far to find not only plays but also graphic narratives (or comics accounts of ancient tales), and it would be very intriguing to see whose point of view such versions gave voice to—and which they choose to silence. For now, though, I’ll get back to Lavinia. I’d love to know what some of you are reading—if and when you have time to read beyond what you are doing to prepare for the next class... and the next, and the next. In any event, I hope you have time for some reading just for yourself: as Emily Dickinson reminds us, “There is no frigate like a book” to take us to new (and better) places. Image Credit: Pixabay Image 1739244 by GregMontani, used under the Pixabay License ... View more

Today’s guest blogger is Kim Haimes-Korn, a Professor of English and Digital Writing at Kennesaw State University. Kim’s teaching philosophy encourages dynamic learning and critical digital literacies and focuses on students’ powers to create their own knowledge through language and various “acts of composition.” She likes to have fun every day, return to nature when things get too crazy, and think deeply about way too many things. She loves teaching. It has helped her understand the value of amazing relationships and boundless creativity. You can reach Kim at khaimesk@kennesaw.edu or visit her website: Acts of Composition.    Overview This assignment provides a fresh approach to a traditional, academic assignment: The Critical Analysis. For this assignment, students are to apply a critical lens by connecting a theme/concept that we have covered in the class to the course readings and to their own lives. Students choose and define the theory/ideas and their important characteristics, discuss relevant passages from our course texts, and finish with their own interpretation and individual relevance.   I took this type of critical response (with length requirements and defined criteria) and extended it to include the multimodal component of the Meme Theme in which students create an original meme – a visual representation-- to expand the ideas from their critical responses.   Background Resources The St. Martin’s Handbook - Ch. 7: Reading Critically; Ch. 18: Communicating in Other Media The Everyday Writer  (also available with Exercises) - Ch. 7h: Critical Reading; Ch. 20: Communicating in Other Media EasyWriter (also available with Exercises) Know your Meme – Internet Meme Database – A Database of meme examples, origins and iterations. Imgflip – Meme Generator – An online meme generator   Steps to the Assignment: Although this assignment can be modified for any themes and class concepts, I have included some themes from my American Literature class to demonstrate an extended example. Part 1 Critical Analysis: Student write a focused critical response in which they apply a theme from American Literature. Emphasize strong, interpretive reading and writing strategies that include: thoughtful interpretation; connections across texts; purposeful passages; and appropriate documentation and citation practices. Choosing a Theme: For this particular course, students can choose from the following examples/possibilities for themes/concepts and 3 of the course reading selections that speak to the ideas, and at least one passage from each the selections: Cultural Mirror Theory Invisibility/Masking Social Darwinism/Naturalism Multiculturalism The American Dream Individualism Southern Gothic Nature/Science Isolation/Alienation Coming of Age Part 2: The Meme Theme: Students create an original meme in which they extend the theme/idea they worked with in Critical Response Question.  They can use an online meme generator such as Imgflip or create their own through original images and any programs of their choosing.  The meme must include a representative image and some text that speaks to their interpretation (or some aspect) of their chosen theme.  Meme Definition: I provide a simple definition of memes that work with both text and image to communicate an idea.  Memes draw upon cultural assumptions and operate through unstated knowledge held by the audience.  We share examples to understand the structure and rhetorical strategies of the genre. Students can just conduct image searches or consult Know your Meme for a database of examples, origins and iterations. Some things to consider: The objective of the memes is to have fun, but one should know where to draw the line. I remind students to create memes that are not derogatory towards any race, culture, gender, or community.  The image and the text that must have some sort of correlation. The image and text when seen together should imply something about the interpretation that is insightful. The meme should focus on a theme and a cultural observation – not an author (although they can refer to particular selections to make their point). Remind students that although they are using images (often viral images) that it is in their unique combination of text and image that makes it original for them. It is important to explain that this is an act of authoring and if they use an existing meme (without generating their own text and/or image) it is considered plagiarism.  I want them to get creative. Create a Google Slide: Each student designs a Google slide that includes their meme and their name. The meme is accompanied by a short description of its purpose and meaning, how it is drawing upon their chosen theme and the unstated assumptions that make it effective. They should discuss their understanding of the theme and how their ideas are manifested in their memes and texts they are referencing.     Share the Show: This is the fun part.  At the beginning of class have each student submit their Meme Themes slide to a collaborative Google slide presentation and ask them to show and explain their memes to the class.  This also works very well in a virtual classroom as it creates an interactive presentation in which students participate. Either delivery method works well and provides an overview of class concepts and can act as an engaging exit activity.  Reflections on the Activity: I was excited about how well this assignment worked and the ways that it took a traditional academic assignment and asked students to create a multimodal version and revise their ideas for a different audience – their classmates (rather than just the professor for evaluation).  It brought new relevance to their ideas and pushed them to situate them in our current context. I created this multimodal extension during our first semester of the COVID crisis and found that some students found connections and themes that gave them insight to this unprecedented cultural shift.  Since I used it at the end of the semester for our final day of class, it provided a reflective review of the class and a closure experience in which every student was able to have a voice and quickly show their work in an engaging format. Click here to view some example meme slides! ... View more

Painting: "Colossus," courtesy of Scott Reamer When COVID-19 hit in February, I was teaching a new version of my introduction to 21st century literature class entitled, “Writing after the End of the World.” The organizing question for this course is/was: “how does writing change when it is produced in the wake of a dying world?” When I started the class in January, of course, COVID wasn’t part of the general discourse, so my opening brainstorming session on the ways in which writing in 2020 could be described as “after the end of the world” didn’t include, “writing after the end of the world that existed pre-COVID.” As it was, we didn’t lack for ways to say that writing in 2020 was writing produced after the end of other worlds: after the pre-9/11 world, the world not fated to be consumed by global warming, the world not defined by endless war, the world guided by Enlightenment thought, the world were Martin Luther King’s dream seemed achievable, the world of gainful employment, the world where students weren’t expendable resources in classroom massacres. We talked about the sense that the clock counting down to human extinction has been irreversibly accelerated by the global reliance on fossil fuels. The discussion of these possibilities served as a prelude to our semester-long project considering creative acts at a time when the prospect of an inviting future seemed all but unimaginable. And this was before classes were suspended and everyone sent home. I know that sounds like a deadly way to begin a course, but talking openly about these things is actually a relief for students and their teacher. Acknowledging how awful things have become during the first two decades of the 21st century is both cathartic and essential for understanding the literatures produced during this time—our time. As planned, my course invites the students to consider the following bind: if you can’t imagine a better future, you can’t work towards creating a better future. To move from cataloguing the catastrophic state of the world to fashioning a way forward into the unknown, I tell the students, we have to reclaim the powers of our imagination, with which we all are endowed by virtue of our humanity. By structuring the course in this way, I mean for it to serve as a sustained engagement with uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, shades of meaning, and the alternate worlds of the future that can be created by our actions in the present. We were halfway through the semester, in the midst of reading Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, when it became clear that the spring semester was going to be disrupted by the global pandemic. What to do? Initially, I was filled with despair when commanded from on high to move the remainder of the course, along with my 90 students, two co-teachers, and two undergraduate course assistants, online. The transition promised to ruin the course, as I’d imagined it, for at least three reasons. First, the course was designed as a face-to-face experience: attendance is required; the lectures are interactive; minds get changed as student participation increases. None of that could happen online. Second, I use persistent assessment, with a quiz at the beginning of each class, to provide a classroom where all students are prepared to respond to the lectures and contribute to the discussion. My course design is premised on my definition of work in the humanities as an embodied experience of contact through language. Online, we’d be disembodied and quizzes at the beginning of each scheduled session would be rendered meaningless by the fact that they occurred in an unmonitored virtual space. Finally, I disallow technology in all of my classes to give my students a space to reclaim the ability to pay attention, to experience what becomes possible when the myth of multitasking is set aside and in its place there is the struggle to concentrate, to stay focused, to think, perhaps for the first time. Online, the discussions, the lectures, and the readings themselves would all be contending with all the distractions that arise the moment one opens one’s browser. For these reasons, and more, I figured the students and I were simply going to have to pretend that the course still existed, when circumstances had, in fact, transformed it into a shadow of its former self. This is part of my own creative process, alas. I rage; I rail; I shake my puny fist at the heavens. And then, remembering finally that every disaster is also an opportunity to create anew, I settle in and begin imagining a way forward. In this instance, I decided, after reflecting on a student’s response to my draft replacement syllabus, that the class would try to take advantage of this unanticipated calamity. We’d continue reading and discussing examples of writers experimenting with ways to end their stories in times where the future seems both unknown and threatening. But we’d shift, in the final three weeks of the course, from being readers to being writers. In the process, we’d build a Digital Decameron for the 21st century, collecting a range of ways people living through a pandemic were responding to the situation–with stories, songs, videos, research papers, advice, poetry, and more. In this series of blog posts, I want to reflect on what my students produced over those three weeks as they assumed the responsibility for writing after the end of the world. The central paradox that interests me is this: how was it that students in a gen ed lecture class focused on reading ended up producing some of the best writing I’ve received in twenty-eight years (nearly all spent teaching writing!)? The website where all this work is collected is: https://www.digitaldecameron.com/ (Readers who want to learn more about the course and what decisions I made along the way while teaching it should proceed to the Teaching in Public section of the Digital Decameron website.) ... View more

The information that we are bombarded with daily through twenty-four-hour news, the internet, and social media these days can be overwhelming. We know that in addition to information from legitimate sites and real, well-meaning people, we are exposed to misinformation from foreign bots and trolls. In their enthusiasm for their beliefs, those well-meaning people also often indiscriminately pass along misinformation. The tension between liberals and conservatives is exacerbated by the fact that some logical fallacies that are floated as truth would be laughable if the stakes weren’t so high. The clash makes common ground and reasoned debate between opposing sides almost impossible.  https://flic.kr/p/8gk72r One of the easiest errors to fall into is the hasty generalization. These overstatements are rampant every day in the news and on social media. The most basic error is assuming all members of a political party or other group are the same: “Conservatives believe . . . .” “Protestors are trying to . . . .” “Democrats are baby killers.” These overgeneralizations lead those attacked to feel that they must defend themselves against a charge that is false instead of against a valid criticism. Maybe that Democrat who was called a baby killer believes that in the case where a pregnancy is not viable, even in the final trimester, the medically induced aborting of the fetus is permissible, but hardly supports the murder of newborn babies. This is the straw man fallacy—tricking your opponent into defending himself against a charge that is much more serious than what he really believes. Examples of the either/or fallacy also hamper communication and reasoned argument. You believe this, or you believe that, with no options in between. One candidate will destroy our democracy; the other will save the American way of life. If you are a patriot, you will not take away my freedom by forcing me to wear a mask. Our country has not been so divided since the Civil War. It is the extremity of the views that each party holds of the other that makes communication difficult. All three of the fallacies mentioned here are fallacies because they carry an idea to the extreme. The ad hominem attacks that one candidate makes on the other only add fuel to the fire. We are learning once again the sad truth that when reason fails—when words fail—the next step too readily becomes violence. Image courtesy of Adam Sporka, via Flickr ... View more

The continued damage that the COVID-19 pandemic is doing to the traditional movie theater industry has gotten me thinking about, well, the traditional movie theater industry and those days when seeing a movie meant "going to the movies," because that was the only way for an ordinary person to see one. My thoughts on the subject are neither personal nor nostalgic, but are, rather, of a more scholarly kind, causing me to reflect upon the truly seminal work of the Frankfurt School that—along with the semiological experiments of Roland Barthes and the collective work of The Birmingham School of Cultural Studies—pioneered the study of popular culture as a serious subject for cultural critique in the middle part of the last century. Since contemporary cultural semiotics would not be what it is today without them, I think that a brief refresher course on their attitude towards what they called "the culture industry" (with the movies especially in mind) would be useful in a blog devoted to teaching popular cultural semiotic analysis.  To get right to the point, that attitude could be best described as "mixed." For their part, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno were decidedly hostile to what they viewed as the counter-revolutionary effect of the culture industry as a whole, and the movie industry in particular, setting out their views most famously in their classic work of cultural-historical philosophy, Dialectic of Enlightenment, whose most pertinent chapter on the subject, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception," pretty much says it all. A sophisticated update of the old "bread and circus" critique of popular entertainment, Horkheimer and Adorno's thesis essentially holds that the culture industry pours out well-constructed pseudo-works of art designed to keep the masses happy and docile by distracting them from the realities of their lives under capitalism. On top of that, Horkheimer and Adorno especially deplored the way that the Nazis had successfully used film for propagandistic purposes. One imagines, then, that both of them would hail the current financial troubles in the movie industry as one of the few bright spots on a horizon that they argue is constantly being thrown back into dialectical darkness. But then there is Walter Benjamin, the tragic associate-without-professional portfolio of the Frankfurt School, whose equally seminal essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," argues that the fascists' use of the movies could be turned against them by a communist cinema. More subtly, Benjamin argues that film, by its very nature, is revolutionary, assaulting viewers with a barrage of rapid-fire images that discourages quiescent (or quietist) contemplation and shocks them into new ways of thinking—much as Dadaist art is designed to shock the viewer into new ways of seeing. Frankly (Frankfurtly?), I've never been persuaded by Benjamin's argument (if anything, I've always been more attuned to the way that the substance of his essay is undermined by its tone, which is plainly nostalgic for the lost "aura" of the days before mechanical reproduction), and have tended to lean more towards Horkheimer's and Adorno's, with the qualification that I think that the main goal of the culture industry has always been making money, not counter-revolutionary propaganda. Indeed, with a nod here to Thomas Frank, the culture industry will commodify anything, even social revolution, if it looks profitable to do so. But whatever one's views on the political effect of the movies, their cultural effect has been profound, having arguably done more to upend the traditional relationship between high and low culture than any other art form. At a time when movies like the Batman and Avengers franchises more effectively mediate (to use another Frankfurt School term and concept) the social conflicts and concerns of our country than anything to be found in the vanishing world of high art (which has become what I call a "museum culture" in an era dominated by entertainment and entertainers), any change in the cinematic medium in itself is something to pay attention to. So, it will be interesting to see whether the days of the movie theater—already under assault by a myriad of new technologies—are coming to an end in the face of a virus over which we have yet no control, partly due to the policies of a president who rose to political prominence in good part because of the culture industry. Photo Credit: Pixabay Image 1861459 by GDJ, used under Pixabay License ... View more

Last week, I wrote about ways many of us are finding to keep our wits about us during this time of pandemic pandemonium. This week, the numbers of COVID-positive tests and hospitalizations across the country are getting worse and worse; the government seems to be embracing the concept of “herd immunity,” which will not help; and most people I know are counting down the days until the election, though the end result may not be clear for some time. Meanwhile (or “quarantinewhile,” as Stephen Colbert says), reports of widespread depression and other mental health problems indicate that the pressures of these times are really getting to us—to all of us—in ways we may not even be able to see. (When a five-year-old friend of mine comforts his sister by saying, “It’s OK to be sad; these are dark times,” I know we’re in trouble.) Yet even in such dark times, tens of thousands of young people across the country are volunteering to serve at the polls. And they are volunteering at food banks and other community resource centers in record numbers. So I think of them, with deep gratitude, when I need cheering up. Just a few days ago, I had a chance to sit in on a meeting with high school and college students from several different parts of the country as they talked and wrote about what they are feeling in these times. Toward the end of the meeting, the leader asked that everyone write for a few minutes about what they see beyond the portal of the coronavirus, what they would fight for, and what they hope for. As always, these students were eloquent in the simplicity and clarity of their messages. They wrote of love, of family, of safe havens and clean air and water. One young man summed up by saying he hoped for a “world in which a virus cannot tear apart what we value most: each other.” If you are teaching right now, giving your students a chance to respond to this prompt would, I believe, bring forth other equally inspiring and eloquent hopes, as well as help students put their hopes and goals into perspective for themselves. Though it is a cliché to say, these young people are our best hope. Image Credit: Pixabay Image 2565722 by StockSnap, used under the Pixabay License ... View more