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

Like many during this pandemic autumn, I have been doing a lot of reading. For some reason, staying close to home over the summer brought me back to classic texts, and I reread The Odyssey and Beowulf, often comparing translations. More recently, I’ve been reading Alexander Pope’s translation of The Iliad alongside Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, the Iliad’s story told from the point of view of Briseis: Meet a new and not so appealing Achilles! These ancient stories feature men’s violent ways of life and constant struggles for power and supremacy, with winners and very decided losers—often enslaved peoples. So it has been interesting (to say the least) to revisit these stories alongside contemporary works examining the current state of justice in the United States, particularly for African Americans. Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist, Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, Carmen Kynard’s Vernacular Insurrections, April Baker-Bell’s Linguistic Justice, Erec Smith’s A Critique of Anti-Racism in Rhetoric and Composition are all on my desk as I write, along with a manifesto from the 2020 CCCC Special Committee on Composing a CCCC Statement on Anti-Black Racism and Black Linguistic Justice. These works all have great resonance in a time of extremist groups—including those devoted to white supremacy and inciting violence—of the killing of unarmed African American men and women, and of growing recognition of the depth and effects of systemic racism in this country. Teachers of writing everywhere need to engage this conversation, need to listen like never before, and need to look hard at our practices and policies, and to ask whether the teaching we do helps to liberate, or to oppress. Like many in my generation, I grew up believing in the liberatory power of literacy. I was inspired by Malcolm X’s story, was enthralled by the power of Martin Luther King’s words, was riveted by the poetry of Audre Lorde and June Jordan. On a personal level, my own pursuit of higher education, of advanced literacies, helped me establish a sense of myself as having some agency in the world. And I wanted to share that with all my students. I advocated for open admissions and carried out research that showed students deemed “basic” succeeding. I was on the floor when CCCC voted to pass and to publish Students’ Right to Their Own Language. I argued ceaselessly for changing attitudes toward language, recognizing that all languages are legitimate and powerful and worthy of study. I wrote my first composition reference text, which was also the first, as far as I know, to put this position on language forward—in this case in a chapter on language diversity and variety. But this faith in the liberatory potential of literacy needed to be tested, examined, and interrogated, and for me that examination began in earnest in the 1980s, as I was writing that textbook and becoming ever more aware of the inequities inscribed in higher education in general and in departments of English in particular. I had read Geneva Smitherman’s Talkin and Testifyin in 1977, a book that taught me so much (and that made me a devotee of Dr. G from that day to this). Then in the late 80s, her work still gave me faith in the power of literacy, albeit a broadly expanded notion of just what constitutes and counts as literacy. And then I read Elspeth Stuckey’s The Violence of Literacy. Stuckey, a white woman working in rural South Carolina, mounted a scathing, truly fierce argument describing, in graphic detail, what literacy instruction had done and continued to do to generations of the poor, the disenfranchised, and the non-elite (which reminds me of another book I read recently, Isabel Wilkerson’s magnificent Caste). The violence of literacy. Those words stung; they still sting. I see Stuckey’s book as an important precursor to the current work on linguistic injustice, and a helpful one because it challenges us to examine the injustices done in the name of literacy to many, many groups in this country. Certainly it has been important to me during the last 30 years as I’ve tried to find ways to combat such injustices in my own classrooms and in the programs and writing centers I’ve worked in. The books I’ve read this summer—and particularly April Baker-Bell’s—have taken me back to the drawing board again, challenging me to look closer, and harder, at my teaching and to ask, yet again, whether that teaching really helps students achieve a sense of linguistic agency and helps them come to voice. When I look at the central demands of the recent CCCC statement on Black Linguistic Justice, I am challenged yet again. I understand the history of “standardized English” (think here of James Slevin’s extremely powerful book Introducing English, which describes the violence wrought by the language in a new land). I view “standardized English” as AN accepted communicative norm, not THE norm. I agree that we should all be teaching this history of linguistic violence and supremacy—and examining its legacy today. And I am deeply grateful to the scholars whose work I am reading now for helping me understand how I may better live up to and embody these principles. But I need more help still. I especially need help in figuring out how to put these principles to practice with students of every racial and linguistic background. How, in concrete and practical terms, can I not only teach all students about the violence of literacy and the history of linguistic injustice, but also go beyond that to help them gain linguistic and rhetorical agency—agency that will give them power and give them voice. This is the question I am still struggling with and the question I hope our field can focus on relentlessly in the coming year. I am thankful for the recent books on linguistic injustice—very, very thankful. And I am thankful that I can read them in the context of work like that of Stuckey and Slevin. What is the alternative not only to violent white linguistic injustice but to the injustice of literacy itself? Surely one of the most vexing questions we face today. Image Credit: Pixabay Image 462579 by Hermann, used under the Pixabay License ... View more

L. Corinne Jones(recommended by Lissa Pompous Mansfield) is completing her PhD in Texts and Technology with an emphasis in Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Central Florida (UCF), where she expects to finish in Spring 2021. She currently teaches Composition II (Writing about Writing and Research Writing); in Fall 2020, she anticipates teaching Business and Technical Communication. She also works as a legal writing adjunct at Barry University (Law School). Previously, she has taught Composition I (introductory writing) at UCF, as well as First-Year composition for conditionally admitted students at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Additionally, she has worked extensively in writing centers. Her research interests include digital rhetoric; circulation studies; digital, qualitative, mixed methods and methodologies; and feminist and queer studies.   How does the next generation of students inspire you? The next generation of students inspire me in so many ways. While I have only had the pleasure to teach this next generation of students for a few years now, I am particularly impressed with not only how resilient and determined my students are, but also how civic-minded and socially and politically active they are. My own students have faced incredible challenges both before and during the transition to online learning, and they have all overcome those challenges with both grace and tenacity. However, my own students and the next generation of students generally have consistently not let their challenges define them; instead they have turned these challenges into rhetorically and civically productive spaces for change. In my limited experience, this next generation of students is concerned with not only earning a passing grade, but with developing skills to use as they become agents of larger systemic changes.    How do you hope higher education will change in the next ten years? Relatedly, I hope that higher education responds to this next generation of students and their needs, both at their local institutions and more systemically. Though my students have proven that they can overcome challenges, I recognize that suggesting that success is achieved solely through individual will and hard work overlooks the neoliberal ideologies about individualism and the white supremacist systems that undergird higher education. So, I hope that higher education will respond to students’ stated needs, and I hope that higher education will work to actively change policies that negatively impact current students, prospective students, and the communities in which colleges and universities are embedded. This might include rethinking things like standardized tests, as we are already seeing some universities do. Ultimately, I hope that higher education both reflects and serves the larger community.  For those who work in higher education, I would also like to see higher education shift to recognize and value different types of labor and to compensate non-tenure track faculty and graduate student workers fairly and according to this unrecognized labor. Part of this change might also include shifting to valuing interdisciplinary work that traverses traditional disciplinary boundaries and expectations.    What is it like to be a part of the Bedford New Scholars program? Being part of the Bedford New Scholars program was an enlightening experience; first, I had the opportunity to learn about other programs and approaches to teaching writing. I loved having the opportunity to learn about the other scholars’ creative and smart assignments that they created to address their particular institutional contexts and students. Just as importantly, I appreciated hearing their rationales and reasoning behind their design choices as their explanations sparked new ideas for me and my own classroom assignments and practices. They all challenged me to rethink and reevaluate my own practices to try to better meet the needs of my own students.  Second, I appreciated learning about the publishing process. I found it helpful to learn about the layered decisions that publishers make when choosing a topic for a textbook, as well as when deciding on the content, chapters, and skills covered in those textbooks. It helps me to know more about the decisions, affordances, and constraints, which educational publishing companies face in developing new materials because now I have a better understanding of what to expect.    How will the Bedford New Scholars program affect your professional development or your classroom practice? The Bedford New Scholars Program has affected my professional development and classroom practices in a number of ways. First, and most obviously, it has given me a lot of new ideas and things to think about as I move forward on my own pedagogical path. As I noted above, I was very impressed with the fellow scholars’ assignments, as well as their thoughtful approaches to classroom practices more generally. Moving forward, I would like to adopt some of their practices in my own classrooms, and I hope to draw from some of their ideas presented in the institute and posted here on the Macmillan English Community (with credit, of course!).  Second, while I have been interested in the challenges of online pedagogy and been an online student myself, participating in the Bedford New Scholars program online has made me think more critically about how to approach online pedagogy in the fall semester. I now know more about the work and the cognitive load (switching between screens, etc.) from a student perspective. The experience reinforced my belief that students will need grace and understanding from teachers in the upcoming semester.     Corinne’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 Corinne's assignment. For the full activity, see Rhetorical Velocity: A Game of Strategy and Chance. At my university, GTAs use Writing about Writing, which uses complex writing studies texts to get students thinking metacognitively about their rhetorical choices. Sometimes, students struggle with the readings, so I try to ground some of the dense readings in in-class games. For this assignment, students read about the concept of “rhetorical velocity,” which broadly refers to how online rhetors strategically compose texts for rapid Internet spread and re-appropriation (Ridolfo & DeVoss, 2009). Importantly, rhetorical velocity is beyond the control of the rhetor, thereby disturbing the concept of the singular author. After a scaffolded discussion defining terms, students put the concept to use in a game. In the game, students get onto teams and select attributes which can add to the rhetorical velocity of their online compositions in fictive scenarios. However, when selecting these attributes, students are unaware of consequences of their online compositions, some of which lose their team points. After the game, students discuss the rhetorical velocity of their texts and the extent to which they had control (and responsibility) over those texts and their consequences. Once students understand the concept of rhetorical velocity, they can use it in their own literacy narratives or profiles of other authors. ... View more

In a recent meeting with instructors teaching gateway/corequisite pairs (both math and English) in a range of hybrid formats (with as little as 10% to as much as 75% online), I heard my colleagues talk about the difficulties students were having in navigating their courses—not just our corequisite or “learning support” courses, but their psychology, history, sociology, and science courses as well. In some cases, corequisite instructors reported serving in the role of scheduling advisors; they are helping students figure out when to go to class, when to log into a Zoom meeting, where to find assignments, where to submit assignments, and how to navigate staggering variations in online course layouts. In short, for many of our students, managing logistics has trumped learning for this term.  What can I do to address the situation? Obviously, I cannot adjust anything outside of my own class, and within my class—an IRW corequisite paired with an FYC course, each with its own online course shell—I must still work within constraints. What I want my students to do, in truth, is approach my course like a text and “read” it—actively, carefully, and critically. I want my students to find dialogue in the structure of the course, just as I want them to talk to and with a text: dialogue with me, with the texts we are reading, with the media we use, with other students, and with the content as a whole. I wouldn’t want them to spend hours finding the right page in an assigned text, and I certainly don’t want them spending hours just figuring out how to locate course content. When I assign a difficult text to first-year writers, especially those in my corequisite courses, I provide scaffolding—background information, strategies for handling content or vocabulary, questions to consider, annotations, and opportunities to revisit the text and consider it in light of other texts or experiences.  And that’s exactly what I need to do for my “pandemic-hybrid” course: provide the kind of scaffolding that will encourage students to read it actively, carefully, and critically.  How? By deploying the tools available to me: The delete key on my laptop: I have been cutting away some of my oh-so-carefully designed activities and significantly rewording instructions on others.   Students need to spend less time on figuring out what to do, how to find the resources, and where to submit their work… and more time on reading, writing, and thinking. To that end, I have a second tool: Active use of the in-person space, while we have it. I have half of my class for 125 minutes on Tuesday, and the other half for 125 minutes on Thursday.  My goal is to keep my talk to no more than 30 minutes of that allotted time, and to break up those 30 minutes into increments of about 10 minutes. Less of my voice, more of theirs. “Zoom-alongs.” I am creating spaces for students to do some assignments with me working alongside.  I think students find encouragement in just talking through their work with some immediate feedback—rather than submitting what they are unsure about and waiting a few days for me to respond. Normally I schedule three conferences each semester, but this term I am also adding more opportunities for these sessions I’m calling “Zoom-alongs,” which allow students to take a more active role: they initiate the sessions and determine the focus. The sessions may end up being “write-alongs,” “read-alongs,” or “do-some-grammar-alongs,” or even “figure-out-who-my-advisor-is-alongs.” “Reflect and Plan.” These are weekly check-ins that students can submit via a Google Form. I ask students some very basic but important questions: which assignments took the longest? What did you take away from those assignments?  What questions do you have? They can submit these with the click of a button, and I get good information about how students are “reading the course”–where they are focusing attention and time. The first three weeks of these assignments have helped me frame the mid-course correction I am implementing now. How are you adjusting your FYC, IRW developmental, or corequisite courses this fall?  What unforeseen challenges have come up? How have you handled these? I’d love to hear your strategies. ... 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.   There’s never a bad time to use Grammar Girl podcasts in your classes, and they can be especially fun early on in the semester. Since fall 2020 is proving to be one of the most unusual semesters for both instructors and students, today we have some low-stakes assignments using thought-provoking Grammar Girl podcasts. 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.   Exploring Early Language with Grammar Girl The Proto-Indo-European Language Assignment: Assign students to listen to the podcast. Ask them to note one thing they learn, and one question or something they would like to learn more about. If you have synchronous classes: Put students into small groups and ask them to discuss their findings. Then, ask them to choose one group member’s question and research it. Later, come together as a group and present the findings. If you have asynchronous classes: Put students into small groups and ask them to use Google Docs or another system to discuss their notes. Then, ask them to choose one group member’s question and research it. Have each group create a short lecture slide presentation of 3-5 slides that can be emailed out to the class. It should include the group members’ names, the question they were exploring, their discoveries or conclusions, and their sources.   Exploring Marketing Language with Grammar Girl Is "I'm Loving It" Proper Grammar? Assignment: Assign students to listen to the podcast. Ask each student to choose their own favorite brand slogan, jingle, or catch phrase. Before class, each student should analyze their choice and write a short paragraph about if their selection has a grammar error or not, and why. As a class, have students present on their choice and if it is grammatical or not, and why. Record the brands, the slogans, and if the slogans are grammatical in a spreadsheet. Then, discuss your findings. Do most of the slogans use proper grammar or not? Are there any trends in what industries the slogans are from, or who the audience for the slogans is? If your class is too big to do this together, break the students into groups of three to five.   Exploring Grammar Myths with Grammar Girl Top Ten Grammar Myths Assignment: Assign students to listen to the podcast. Ask students to write down which myths they thought were true, and which they already knew were false.  As a class, have students vote on which myths they had thought were true. Then, discuss the top ranking myth or two. Where have students seen this myth used? Have they ever seen anyone correct another person for using this myth? Where did they first hear this was a myth?   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 Start the Semester Using Grammar Girl Podcasts in an Online Classroom Grammar Girl & Ideas for Teaching Online   Credit: Pixabay Image 3653430 by geralt, used under a Pixaby License ... View more

As I write this post on September 20, it’s been two days since the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and in that time I’ve thought of little else: I’ve found myself putting aside my ordinary routine to search out every tribute I can find and to go back to read earlier profiles of her. I’ve re-watched the film and documentary about her. I’ve spent time listing the ways my life as a woman and as a citizen of this country is better because of the work she did to guarantee justice under the law. And I’ve wept. A lot. I’ve thought of the challenges she faced early on, the struggle to get into law school, to earn her degree, to find a job. Born in the decade after Ginsburg, I have my own stories to tell of being kept or left out, of being told to stay in my place, that I was “just a woman” and hence couldn’t do x, y, or z—stories that almost all women of my generation can echo (and doubly or triply so if they are women of color). In 2012, I was reminded of this as I sailed around the world with 600 students on Semester at Sea, and our group was joined by former Senator Charles Robb and his wife, Lynda Johnson Robb. One evening, we gathered around while Lynda Robb (who is just about my age) told some stories of her own—such as the time when she was working to support her husband as he earned a law degree, when she was the bread winner in the family, and when her attempt to write a check at a grocery store was rejected unless she “had her husband’s signature.” During these same years, Ginsburg was asked to take a lower salary as a professor because her husband had a good-paying job—and concealing her pregnancy because she feared she would not be reappointed if it were discovered. I find that many young women today are amazed to learn of these everyday injustices—or to understand the role that Ruth Bader Ginsburg played in changing these stories, in leveling the playing field, in arguing for equal protection and equal opportunity and equal justice under the law—for all. As I’ve thought about her life-long commitment to equal justice, I’ve also thought of the ironic title of Claudia Rankine’s recent collection of poems, essays, photographs, Just Us. The title comes from one of Richard Pryor’s standup sketches on the criminal justice system, when he says, “You go down there looking for justice.,. That’s what you find: just us.” And I’ve thought of how much incredibly hard work remains to be done if we hope to keep Ginsburg’s legacy of advancing justice alive and if we hope to keep that legacy from being eroded and turned back. We have no choice but to try, through our teaching and our writing, to live up to the standard set for us by RBG. If we stop to think a moment, we’ll see that much of that legacy comes to us IN WRITING, in all those opinions and dissents she penned during her 27 years on the Supreme Court and in many decisions written before that time. She was a careful and precise writer, meticulous in attention to detail and tenacious in establishing unassailable chains of reasoning—the “steel-trap mind” so many refer to. So as teachers of writing, we could do a lot worse than to focus attention in the coming months to some of her writing, introducing it to students, and asking them to learn more about this tiny woman with a huge intellect, and about how she and her work affect their lives today. Yesterday I had a chance to speak with my teenage grandnieces, and while they both knew that Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a justice of the Supreme Court, that she “stood up for women” and that she was “really cool,” cool enough to have movies made about her, their knowledge didn’t go much deeper than that. So it’s been fun to share some stories with them, to send them some articles to read, and to ask them to write to me about what they have learned from reading about her and what more they would like to learn. Why, for instance, was she called “Notorious RBG”? What was the reference to Notorious B.I.G. about? If she was the second woman to serve on the Supreme Court, who was the first—and what did they have in common? What advice would she have for young women today? All good questions—now how about students doing some research in order to answer them and then writing about what they found out. I can imagine starting a first-year writing class with such everyday questions and then moving on to a careful analysis of key RBG opinions, identifying the rhetorical strategies at work, tracing the lines of reasoning, and reading them aloud to feel the compact and powerful rhythms of her prose. And I can imagine talking about what in her prose, as well as in her life, we would like to emulate, leading us to conversations about what it means to a life committed to certain principles. And what those principles might be for each of us. Such questions, such analyses and writings, such conversations are one way of honoring and extending the legacy of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In these terrible times of loss and pain and suffering, of lies and deception, of fear mongering and hate, she holds aloft the light of truth and justice for us to follow. The glorious, notorious RBG. Image Credit: Supreme Court of the United States (Public Domain) via Wikimedia Commons ... View more

While it is not true that American popular culture disappeared over the summer that is just coming to an end, it often felt that way, what with the pandemic's effect on sporting events, live entertainment, and the movies—not to mention the ways in which the shutdown has revealed the peculiarly shared nature of pop culture, the interpersonal connections that no amount of virtual "happy hours" and celebrity YouTube collaborations can entirely replace. But far more important has been the dark cloud cast by the pandemic itself and by the ongoing revelations of an America so politically divided that the simple question of whether to mask or not to mask has emerged as a signifier of party affiliation and personal ideology as well as an incitement to occasional violence. Add to all this the shooting war that has recently erupted on the streets of Portland, and the stark image of a country increasingly at war with itself has come to overshadow just about everything else that is happening in the U.S. today. All of which lends particular urgency to the upcoming election, an election that, no matter how it turns out (and there are very real concerns that it will not be decided on November 3 or any time soon thereafter), is not going to resolve the underlying conflict that is tearing at the very fabric of the republic. Given the considerable attention paid to the fundamental contradictions and conflicts that divide us today—especially as they are reflected in our popular culture—in the soon-to-appear 10th edition of Signs of Life in the U.S.A. I would have liked to have known the outcome of the election as I worked on the text, but I knew that the semiotics of the situation would be the same regardless of the ballot results. This is why, as a kind of sequel to the analysis of such films as Captain America: Civil War that appeared in the 9th edition of Signs of Life, I turned to Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame in the 10th, movies that envision an "infinity war" indeed, whereby no victory is ever truly final and implacable opponents can always reappear to fight it out again. . . and again: a fitting reflection of electoral seasons focused less on partisan politics than on out-and-out regime change. No one should have any difficulty persuading one's students that America is caught in a cross-fire these days, and using popular culture in the classroom, more than ever before, can be a way of mediating the current crises in a manner that can raise the critical issues you want to cover in your classes without raising the temperature too severely. At the same time, a focus on popular culture can help you make that connection between learning and personal experience that has come to be regarded as a pedagogical best practice in the era of COVID-19. This is not to say that the picture is entirely negative. For as a new chapter in the 10th edition of Signs of Life on the "Tangled Roots" and "Cultural Politics" of popular music in America reveals, the often racist history of American music has been turned around by the triumph of the Black musical tradition in the emergence of hip hop and rhythm-and-blues as the nation's most popular musical genres. Similar signs of our times are to be found in the blockbuster success of the Black Panther cinematic franchise, along with the Oscar winning breakthrough of Parasite. All in all (with a nod here to Paul Simon), it's all happening in pop culture, and I'll be updating my analyses of what we can learn from it in my blogs to follow in the coming months. Photo Credit: Pixabay Image 3594094 by Mohamed Hassan, used under Pixabay License ... View more

Since its inception, I have had the great good fortune to be associated with La Casa Roja, and I have learned many, many lessons from attending meetings with the Navajo leaders and youth who make up the group. Here’s how they describe La Casa Roja: La Casa Roja is a non-profit organization founded by Bread Loaf Teacher Network Members Carissa Brownotter, Rex Lee Jim, and Ceci Lewis. The purpose of La Casa Roja Youth Advocacy Team is to promote healthy, sustainable solutions to problems that indigenous youth face. Founded in 2014, La Casa Roja has its roots in Navajo country, its heritage, traditions, culture, values, songs, prayers, and stories, which informs its work with other partners like the Bread Loaf Teacher Network, Andover Bread Loaf, and the Navajo Community Health Outreach. Recognizing that youth are the answer to the current problems that plague the world, La Casa Roja is invested in providing leadership opportunities for indigenous youth globally. I have known Rex Lee Jim, former Vice President of the Navajo Nation and a distinguished poet, playwright, and activist, for decades. His wisdom, intelligence, and insight run deep, as does his faith in and commitment to youth leadership. It’s from Rex and Navajo young people that I have learned how to be a better listener, as I’ve sat in a roundhouse observing how Rex attends to others, how he more than leans in, how he radiates receptiveness and encouragement. And how he is so very quiet, silent, waiting for words and actions to be fully absorbed and comprehended before speaking. I’ve learned to recognize and to appreciate the rhythms of conversation in such a setting, and to listen and learn. Recently, I had the chance to join a La Casa Roja discussion on research (via Zoom of course). A grant is supporting a project for young people to gather stories from their elders about how they have managed in hard times (such as the current pandemic), and they were discussing how they would go about carrying out this work. At the beginning of the session, they were talking about “interviews” as the method they would use to gather the stories. But as the discussion progressed, the word didn’t seem to fit well with their goals or with their interpersonal relationships. Indeed, “interview” is a word associated with white Western ways of gathering data: it just didn’t fit well with what these young researchers wanted to do, or to know. Rex Lee Jim had been listening intently, as he always does, to this discussion. After a long pause, he began to speak about Navajo ways of storytelling and story sharing, about Navajo ways of showing that you are paying close attention, and that you understand and empathize. And more. Much more. It’s not always easy to listen on Zoom—the little Hollywood Squares boxes, with their varying backgrounds, can be distracting, and sound quality is often not good. But none of that mattered on this Zoom meeting: everyone there was laser focused on what we were learning about how to carry out culturally appropriate and respectful research. As the discussion continued and the youth began to describe situations in which they might carry out this research project, they decided that “conversations” captured what they wanted and needed to do much better than “interviews.” I said very little during this two-hour session and was reminded once again not to imagine that students who sit silently in my classes are somehow not engaged or participating—because I was participating to the hilt! I was hanging on every word and thinking hard about how limiting, how restrictive, traditional Western “research methods” can be. This two-hour discussion left me with much food for thought about listening, and about ways of interrogating the biases inherent in the methods I bring to any research task. It also left me looking forward to my next opportunity to learn La Casa Roja lessons, which I will certainly continue to pass on. Please stay safe. Image Credit: Pixabay Image 1868612 by Pexels, used under the Pixabay License ... View more

In August, as I was still revising my Fall 2020 syllabi, a former student shared a Reddit post on social media that stopped me cold: “If teachers go back to school without a plan to talk to their students about Black Lives Matter, Police Brutality, and COVID-19, it will be the gaslighting of a generation.” “The gaslighting of a generation.” Wow. I needed that reminder. I admit I’d been struggling—like many of us—with a desire to re-assert some “normalcy” in the classroom, er, Zoomroom, while recognizing that Fall 2020 is an anything-but-normal semester. Pandemic fatigue has set in, and students have said they’re irritated by instructors who repeatedly apologize for the necessity of remote learning (e.g. “In a normal semester, we’d be doing X, but because we’re not in-person, we’ll be doing Y”). However, that Reddit post reminded me to direct my energy to the educational potential of our complicated present. What writing teachers do best is invite students to use tools to better understand our world. That means including BLM and COVID-19 in my materials. Absolutely. In fact, I opened class by asking students to grapple with poet Caroline Randall Williams’s challenging New York Times column, “You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body is a Confederate Monument.” This tour de force essay could be used to teach the power of defining and re-defining. Ask students to highlight all of Williams’s definitions of “monument” and you’ll find that the conversation takes off. Or, you could use the text to launch a discussion of ethos, pathos, and logos, or the value of multiple disciplinary lenses, or an examination of proof and evidence. Williams’s essay is also an invitation to engage—seriously engage—with the impact of generations of racism and the meanings of that history, both politically and personally. This is a text a class could return to many times over the semester as you introduce additional writing skills and engage students with big ideas from other readings or news stories, including police brutality. This is an essay that says to students: I will not gaslight you in this Fall 2020 classroom. Even if we are “remote,” these issues are present and pressing. The writing skills in this course will help you understand these issues with insight and enter these conversations with nuance. The other part of that Reddit post, identifying COVID-19 as a second theme we must be talking about, could spark classroom conversations about visual literacy—as I began discussing in this March post. Or, you might invite students to examine the layers of meaning in national or university COVID dashboards in relation to your campus dashboard or those of your state or county. I would love to hear how you are using these sources. Really, I’d like to hear all the ways you are not gaslighting your students in this momentous time. Are you using the 1619 Project or other collections of voices from this moment? I’m ready to learn from you all in this semester like no other. ... View more