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

Sierra Mendez (recommended by Diane Davis) is pursuing a PhD in Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. She expects to finish in May 2022. Sierra currently teaches a custom RHE 309K course entitled "Rhetoric of Texas" and serves as Assistant Director for the D.R.W.'s Digital Writing and Research Lab. In the past, she has taught "Introduction to Rhetoric and Composition" and served on the Lower Division Curriculum Committee. Before beginning her doctoral program, Sierra worked for three years for a museum branch of the San Antonio Public Library, creating educational community-based resources, installations, and programming. Her research interests concern border, material, visual, and memory rhetorics: specifically, the historical and ongoing constitution of Mexicanx bodies via narratives held both tenuously and powerfully across San Antonio’s urban space.   How will online or remote learning affect your teaching? The sudden and total switch to online instruction in the last year has been an enormous challenge for students and teachers. Luckily, I have worked at U.T.’s Digital Writing & Research Lab for four years, so I have spent time thinking about engaging, accessible online content and learning about necessary equipment and softwares. This shift is still an enormous challenge for me. I like to create malleable classrooms that respond to what is happening in the news, in student’s lives, and in our classroom in real time. In a traditional setting, I depend on face-to-face interaction with and between my students to know their struggles and interests. Moving online, however, requires content be produced ahead of time. In some ways, this is good because I am learning to be more structured and methodical (a hilarious notion, if you know me). It also means I hear more from students who are not as comfortable speaking aloud in class. In other ways, this is not good because it means my pre-recorded lectures have less room to respond to the news, to students’ lives, and to what our classroom is being. This fall, particularly, will be an enormous challenge because I’m teaching Intro to Visual Rhetoric: #2020PresidentialElection — topics that require response. How does the next generation of students inspire you? This generation of students faces enormous challenges. I am constantly moved by their willingness to engage in spite of the upheaval that surrounds them. This past spring, I fully expected after Spring Break this past year for most of my class to just say “eff this” and quit turning work in or turn in shoddy work; I wouldn’t have blamed any of them for doing so. But none of them did. They continued to participate in class activities and small group discussions via Zoom; they continued to respond thoughtfully to writing assignments, many of them turning in better work than they had previously; and they continued to seek out help through office hours and meetings. This generation of students, perhaps because of their exposure to social media and constant political chaos, seems much more willing and able than my generation to engage with complexity and to engage with humanity’s multiplicities. What have you learned from other Bedford New Scholars? I deeply appreciated learning from other instructors at Bedford New Scholars. I wish we had been able to spend more time talking one-on-one, but I know that is an experience not easily replicable online. I appreciated the group’s commitment to students as individuals. There was very real concern for who each student is and where they come from and what they need. There was very real attention to socio-economic backgrounds and issues of race, gender, and sexual orientation that produce often unchecked inequity in the classroom. Also, our guest speakers Kendra N. Bryant and Shelley Reid, were both incredible to listen to. What is exciting to you about Achieve and why? I am very excited about the feedback process enabled by Achieve. Most commonly-implemented online learning systems seem to conceive of paper feedback as an afterthought, but Achieve implements the paper into its design as an ongoing process. I am interested in how Achieve could help support portfolio-style and other nontraditional grading systems that don’t insist on the assignment of an opaque yet completely subjective letter grade.   Sierra’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 Sierra's assignment. For the full activity, see Drawing Arguments (Prewriting Activity). I like to do this pre-writing class activity in the final unit of class. It’s fun and it helps students generate ideas and structure for their final argumentative essay and accompanying argumentative infographic. Prior to this activity, students should generally know what they want to write/argue about. In this activity, to loosen up their brains, students start by drawing an object (a unicorn, Batman, whatever) for increasingly shorter increments of time. At the end of this first part, they will have four versions of the object with different degrees of detail and, somewhere in there, something recognizable as the essence of the object. I always let them talk to each other about what they’ve made/discovered and share with the class if they want. This kind of drawing and forced quick thinking gets their brains moving and raises room energy. It also helps them think about the pieces that make a thing. The activity then asks students to go through the same steps again but, this time, writing about their argument for increasingly shorter periods of time. When they are done, they will have their topic, something like a thesis, primary paragraph claims, and key details and evidence. I’ve done this activity with undergraduate and graduate students. It seems to help most people think more creatively and openly about their argument. ... View more

The following interview with Peter Adams, author of The Hub, was conducted via email in July and August of 2020. This is the second of four parts. * David Starkey: Teaching has changed dramatically with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. Over the past summer, you and I were part of a Macmillan workshop on teaching corequisite composition. One of the biggest challenges many instructors seemed to be facing was teaching the corequisite online. I realize you’ve been retired for a few years, but we heard a lot of interesting suggestions from faculty participants. What’s your thinking right now about how best to teach the coreq in a distance learning format?   Peter Adams: Let’s start with the admission that most of us are working hard to figure out how best to teach a coreq in a virtual environment. I know I am, and that I have learned a lot from listening to others’ efforts to figure this out . . . and, as you say, I learned a lot from the folks who attended our Macmillan workshop in June.   One issue I found fascinating was the bifurcated attitudes toward synchronous and asynchronous approaches. Some instructors argue that the only way to create the sense of belonging, of engagement, is to spend at least some time with everyone meeting at one time in some kind of on-line space like Zoom or Google Hangouts. Other instructors pointed out that requiring everyone to be signed on at the same time would be impossible for many students who have limited computer and Wi-Fi access.   DS: I’ve found myself in the asynchronous camp for reasons of both practicality and equity. Still, there are times when I sorely miss the back-and-forth exchange between students and teacher that only a classroom—even a virtual one—can provide. PA: Lots of instructors have reached that same conclusion, David, but I have ended up with a wanting to find just the right balance between synchronous and asynchronous approaches. It does seem to me that if we are going to hold synchronous sessions, we will have to be flexible with our attendance requirements at these, and whenever possible, we should make video recordings available for those students who were unable to attend.   Another promising approach I learned about when visiting a college just before the pandemic was to organize the class into groups of three or four students and to have each group settle on a time they can meet online. Instructors could then assign these groups tasks to work on as a group—tasks like revising an essay, making a list of the evidence to support the thesis in a text, or analyzing the rhetorical situation in a writing assignment. This approach would seem to help with creating the kinds of bonds, or relationships, the sense of belonging that is so important to keeping students in school . . . especially in these times of isolation, without requiring that everyone be online at the same time.   DS: I agree that’s an excellent idea. The accelerated courses I’ve taught that have been most successful have been those where students feel that other students care about their progress and have their backs when things get tough.   PA: In addition, of course, lots of instructors are preparing video presentations that their students can view whenever they have access to the internet. My sense is that long videos are not so successful. A more productive approach is a short video, ten minutes at most, and then some kind of activity to apply or respond to the material from the video. These activities could be carried out individually or in the small groups.   DS: At my college, Santa Barbara City College—and across the nation, too, I assume—we’ve been finding one hidden workload issue for those not used to teaching online is the requirement that all video and audio presentations must be captioned. Obviously, we want to offer equal access to all students, but I know some of my colleagues have been rethinking their more ambitious plans in the audio-visual arena.   PA: I’ve been lucky in this regard. All the videos in my text, The Hub, have captions. Bedford has the resources to have these done professionally.   DS: Workload aside, I’ve always felt that the combination of text, image and sound has the biggest potential to make an impact on student learning. I hope we can figure out ways to make this appeal to three of the four main learning styles a more central part of our teaching.   Part 3 of this conversation will appear next month. ... View more

Teaching Introduction to Literature, and wondering how to get your students excited about poetry? Today, we're highlighting a podcast that might help: Poetry for All, a podcast hosted by Joanne Diaz and her colleague Abram Van Engen. Perfect both for those who already love poetry, and those who are just beginning to explore the genre, the podcasts helps students get their bearings with a poem, giving them insight into working with and analyzing poetry. Joanne and Abram devote each 15-minute episode to reading a poem, discussing it, and then reading it again. Thus far, they have discussed poems by Seamus Heaney, Emily Dickinson, Phillis Wheatley, William Shakespeare, Claude McKay, and Jen Bervin. Upcoming episodes will focus on poems by Anne Bradstreet, John Donne, Honorée Fannone Jeffers, and Toi Derricotte.  Joanne Diaz is a Professor of English at Illinois Wesleyan University, and one of the authors of Literature: A Portable Anthology, Reading and Writing about Literature, and 40 Short Stories: A Portable Anthology.   ... View more

  The last couple of weeks I’ve been asking this question to almost everyone I talk to. Particularly after the first presidential “debate,” as I felt myself losing my grip, feeling as though I were somewhere deep inside John Barth’s not-so-funny Funhouse, and as I continued to shelter in place, wear my mask, social distance, and otherwise spend most of my time alone—I began to pay attention to what was keeping me from truly going off the proverbial deep end. So I started asking around. My beloved grandnieces, now teenagers, reported being bored and cranky, tired of online sessions and “being stuck at home—yuck.” Their answer to my question was a new puppy, four-pound dachshund Maeve. They sent funny, adorable videos of Maeve (yes, they knew about Queen Mab and had her in mind, they told me) in her new home, happily chewing on everything in sight, playing, and—especially—cuddling. Good answer. Two of my best friends responded by saying “exercise, exercise, exercise.” They are both relentless walkers, and they are lucky to live where they can walk out in the open air without encountering many (or any) others. In addition, both are doing weightlifting and stretching classes via Zoom. “Just work out those frustrations,” they say. Another good answer. For me, the answers to my own question have been several. First, doing work that I love, such as writing this blog post, revising two of my textbooks, and working on two new projects. Second, reading for pleasure—more than I’ve been able to do in years. Right now, I am deep in to Alexander Pope’s translation of The Iliad, which I’m reading alongside Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, which tells the Iliad from the point of view of Briseis, one of the few women mentioned in the saga. So for hours, I am back there on the plains outside Troy, at sea with Agamemnon, or—mostly—in the “women’s hut” with Briseis and the other enslaved women. And finally, I too turn to exercise to stay sane. I am lucky to live on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and I can walk the bluff trails and the little roads of my neighborhood daily (though wildfire smoke has kept me inside some of the time, we’ve been remarkably lucky so far this fire season). And then there’s the garden: Posh Squash, an all-organic community garden, with row upon row of vegetables and fruit, where I work on a team once a week. I love attending to the strawberry beds—snipping away dead leaves and stems, pulling weeds, making room for sun to ripen the berries. And I do think that pulling weeds is about the best therapy I know of: “Take that, you dandelion devil!” Now I would like to ask my question to a lot of students: what are they doing to stay sane? This would make an outstanding writing prompt. I’m not teaching right now, but I’m hoping to pose the question to students as I have time to contact them. And I hope someone out there will ask the question of students—and report their responses. We need all the tips we can get on how to stay sane, especially for the next few months. In the meantime, above is a photo of last week’s garden harvest. Stay safe, and stay sane! Image Credit: Andrea Lunsford ... View more

    James Meredith in 1962 For photo permissions, see here. This year, the students in my first-year writing classes and I opened our all-Zoom semester with an excerpt from the Paris Review’s 1984 interview with James Baldwin. In this interview, Baldwin suggests that, “When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.” Students at first were puzzled by Baldwin’s approach to writing. How could you begin to write if you did not know and did not want to find out?  What, besides a pending assignment due date, could force anyone to write? As we worked our way from the interview through Baldwin’s lecture, “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity,” we focused on themes addressed by students in face-to-face classes in previous years, such as “the conditions of human suffering, and the audience of the artist’s responsibility to pay attention to and to alleviate human suffering.” But this year, we are convening on Zoom in the midst of a pandemic and ongoing demonstrations for ending police violence against Black Lives. How can we make sense of our current contexts for writing, teaching, and learning? Baldwin’s writing contexts remained unwavering. In Baldwin’s time and in our own, “finding out what you don’t want to know” means confronting white supremacist violence. As  April Baker-Bell, Tamara Butler, and Lamar Johnson state in “The Pain and the Wounds: A Call for Critical Race English Education in the Wake of Racial Violence,” that context is “Young Black and Brown lives lost within the streets, buildings, communities, and country they called home.” “Finding out” also means centering Blackness, as April Baker-Bell, Bonnie J. Williams-Farrier, Davena Jackson, Lamar Johnson, Carmen Kynard, Teaira McMurty affirm in “This Ain’t Another Statement: This is a DEMAND for Black Linguistic Justice”: We encourage, utilize, and elevate the beauty and brilliance in Blackness and Black Language. For our first writing assignment, I asked students to discuss the relevance of “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity,” for our own time, an assignment I often used in face-to-face classrooms. As a white woman teaching inside a Zoom box from an apartment in Queens, NY,  my ongoing concern for teaching Black lives and Black writing is to create a sense of history as well as a sense of urgency.  These concerns are not unique to 2020. The new wrinkle is that I will never see the faces or hear the voices of far too many students. Without faces and voices, without the ability to build on what Baldwin calls the  “give-and-take” of the people in the room, it is difficult to know what to build on and what does or does not need repetition. I reflected on this problem, even as I watched the yeses pile up in the chat box in response to my frequent question, “Does this make sense?”  The solutions I have arrived at so far are partial and still in process. To convey a sense of history for Baldwin’s lecture, we focused on James Meredith’s struggle to enroll at the University of Mississippi in 1962. The white power structure, students and state government alike, resisted Meredith’s enrollment as the first Black student at the University. At every turn, the white power structure confronted Meredith with demonstrations and insurrections. Two people died, and the violence stopped and Meredith began classes only after President Kennedy called in the US military. Baldwin references this catastrophe in his lecture, and  documentary footage is available in the video  "Fighting Back (1957–1962)," from the Civil Rights Movement series, Eyes on the Prize.  We discussed the video on Zoom, in chat and with our voices. This aspect of Civil Rights Movement history was new to almost all of the students, and they were amazed to learn that I was alive in 1962, four years old, not yet in Kindergarten, and living in a redlined suburb in the midwest. After class, students wrote in their online journals, collecting their thoughts on the relevance of Baldwin and Meredith’s Civil Rights work for 2020.  Using online affordances is not new, but adapting these affordances for Zoom is certainly an adjustment. Our collective struggle to write, teach, and learn is inseparable from the history of this pandemic. Grounded in history and struggle, Baldwin’s contexts for writing become more concrete. The need to center Black lives, in Baldwin’s lifetime and in ours, has never lost its urgency. ... View more

Here in Indiana, scarlet and bronze are glazing the treetops, and I’m finding some pedagogical rhythm in this unusual semester. I miss whole-body teaching. I’m a pacer and gesticulator, and I relish the tactile clack and sweep of chalk on a chalkboard.  I have, however, discovered quieter delights in teaching by Zoom. This semester, I encourage generous use of the applause and thumbs up “reactions” and smile at the visual waves of support that students offer one another when they work through a difficult idea or read a challenging passage aloud. Like L. Corinne Jones, I am inspired by the community spirit of the incoming class of students, who seem to grasp as fully as I do that being unable to read one another’s non-verbal cues means the quality of our conversation really matters. Zoom’s “chat” function is useful for fostering those rich conversations. It offers a safe space for quieter students to share questions and ideas. A class discussion can be jump-started by asking each student to post in the chat space a key quotation from a text, or a discussion question, or the working thesis of their current drafts. Students can then call on one another to say more about one another’s ideas. When the class is engaged in a dynamic conversation, I often tell them I’ll be taking notes on their ideas in the chat space, giving them the opportunity to develop moderating (and self-moderating) skills. Sometimes, I ask students to take turns as class note-takers in the chat space, and they can learn in a new way why precision matters when quoting another person’s ideas. After every class, I share out that chat transcript, modeling for students how to take notes in a discussion course. This is also a way for all students to be democratically “seen” and heard, which doesn’t always happen in an in-person classroom. The nuances of these conversations make me all the more excited to invite students to discuss the new readings in the 5th edition of From Inquiry to Academic Writing, ready for Spring 2021 courses. Stuart Greene and I gathered readings designed to inspire rich discussions about urgent issues. As I write this on the morning after the first “presidential” “debate” (I feel the need to place both words in scare quotes), I regret asking my students to spend 9o minutes witnessing rhetorical failures on so many levels. In marked contrast, our 5th edition introduces students to writers who model engaged listening and empathy, such as Andrew J. Hoffman, who demonstrates how to talk about climate change with people who don't yet understand the science. Also timely are selections from Nikole Hannah-Jones, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Ibram X Kendi, and Robin DiAngelo, among many other writers sparking complex and nuanced national conversations right now. Just as I relish autumn’s kaleidoscope foliage while preparing my garden beds for springtime growth, I draw comfort from my students’ kind conversations now, while anticipating the richness of their thoughts on new readings. Planting those hopeful seeds is one of my favorite aspects of teaching. As a very worried citizen, it is also helping me to keep moving forward. ... View more

It occurred to me while writing my last blog and thinking of quite something else, just how much the experience of popular culture is a shared one. Since I didn't want to go off on a tangent—especially within the confines of a 500-word or so mini-essay—I decided to mention the fact but to save it for another time. And this blog seems as good a time as any. So, here goes. One of the more, one might say, notorious illustrations of the shared nature of popular culture is the laugh track. Developed in the early years of television, the laugh track was created to compensate for the physically unshared nature of solitary TV viewing. Until the advent of electronic technology, comedy had always been something that was performed live, and so was able to take advantage of the way that laughter, by and large, is a social phenomenon. Yes, one can laugh out loud, as they say, all by oneself, but generally we don't. Just consider the difference between seeing someone alone on a sidewalk laughing hilariously, and seeing a group of people laughing together. You know which instance looks like fun and which looks like something to avoid. And so did the pioneers of television comedy, especially situation comedy, who accordingly threw in all those annoying laugh tracks to get TV viewers laughing along. Then there is what I'll call the "water cooler" dimension of a shared popular culture, the gathering together of office workers—and non-office workers, too—to talk about last night's prime-time favorites or the latest "must see" movie. At this level, sharing goes beyond, well, mere sharing, to something rather less benign—to something, in fact, a lot more like keeping up with the Joneses (or Kardashians?!). For being able to join the talk about whatever is hot in popular culture promotes one's own personal status in the group, while being at a loss constitutes a certain loss of face. In this respect, the status-conserving effect of the water cooler conversation echoes the purpose of what Pierre Bourdieu called "cultural capital," but in a completely different direction. Because for Bourdieu, cultural capital constituted the knowledge of the high arts that high status individuals could display in order to demonstrate their high status in public—as the sons (but not daughters) of the English upper classes were once taught Latin and Greek in their childhoods, enabling them to pull out a volume of Homer in a carriage or on a train and thus distinguish themselves from the, um, hoi polloi. Of course, with the explosive rise of social media, no one really needs a water cooler anymore to share the latest in pop cultural capital (what would Game of Thrones have been without social media, or American Idol?). Indeed, with the well-nigh infinite number of possibilities for sharing that the Internet provides, it is hardly surprising that experience itself has become something that must be shared in order to be fully experienced. Facebook can probably be given the credit for inaugurating this ultimate turn away from American self-reliance to full-on social heterodirectedness (well, maybe MySpace, but who remembers MySpace?), but, as I have written in an earlier blog, we now have Instagram (yes, bought by Facebook a long time ago), which impels people to do all sorts of things (some of them rather deadly) just to share them with others (pics or it didn't happen!). Which takes me to the point of this blog, which is that popular culture is forever shaping the way we live, think, and even speak. Just consider how the shared nature of popular culture has become so intense in the digital era that it has come to affect our language in environments that would not seem to have anything to do with popular culture at all. For example, when I read the minutes of various committees at my university, I note that no one ever "reports" anything anymore, or "presents," or even "says." Everyone "shares"—a linguistic turn that is related to the replacement of the verb "contact" by the much more emotionally intimate expression "reach out," as in "I'll reach out to the chair of the English department to see whether their assessment report has been sent to my office yet." Or should I have said "shared"? Photo Credit: Pixabay Image 4111586 by geralt, used under Pixabay License ... View more