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

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

  Image description: With a welcome bubble of words over her head, Prof. Susan ruminates at the Godwin-Ternbach Museum at Queens College in NYC on Halloween 2019. NOTE: There is a content alert for the post and the links, some of which include graphic and often violent depictions of struggles for racial and economic justice, including violent language and epistemic violence. Encounters with these texts|videos might demand disproportionate emotional labor or exacerbate trauma. * About a week before school began, I asked students in my new courses to send me their favorite music video for a class playlist. This project helped me to focus on the hard work of preparing new online classes, and gave me a chance to learn what mattered to the students. Through this activity, we created an archive of the music that shapes our community of writers in the fall of 2020. The idea for the playlist evolved from a question my online training could not answer:   As someone who values the emotions, as well as the faces and voices and body language in the room, how would I facilitate the growth of a new community of writers?   This question was especially troubling because most of us, students and teachers, left face-to-face education in March as our city became the global center of the pandemic. In light of these events, reading the emotions behind the screen became even more critical. On the first day of classes, I shared my gratitude in a welcome letter to the students. Here is an excerpt from the letter:   Here is the Fall 2020 Playlist. Thank you for sending your music! With each new link, I unwrap unexpected gifts, postcards of our future together as a writing community. The videos for the playlist begin with Kendrick Lamar’s “i”, my favorite video at this current moment in history.  I thought of my first term as a first-year student in college, Fall of 1976. The song I would have chosen that year was Freddie Mercury’s (and Queens’s) “Bohemian Rhapsody”, and I have added it to our playlist, the official remastered video with Freddie in his white jumpsuit. For me Freddie and Kendrick are connected in their concerns with searching for their own humanity in struggles with everyday life and in the larger world around them. Kendrick Lamar’s “i,” I think, is a good introduction to our first reading, “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity,” by James Baldwin. Lamar and Baldwin share a deep concern with Black life and Black love. These two sources, Baldwin and Lamar, placed together, introduce us to a Beloved Community and Civil Rights writing. This writing is a core theme of our course.   With class preparation completed, I didn’t expect to feel butterflies returning to my stomach on the first day of school. The sensation reminded me of all that preceded the preparation. After spending 90 days, an entire season, inside in social isolation with my partner and my cat, after turning the bedroom of our 1-bedroom apartment into a Zoom-casting studio, after hearing day after day and night after night the sirens and the helicopters because we live 3 miles away from the hospital that was at the center of the pandemic in April and a half block away from refrigerator trucks serving as morgues at another hospital, after weeping when the curfew warning erupted from my phone for several nights at the end of May and the beginning of June (the same siren sound I remember from tornado and dust storm warnings), after applause for essential workers at our window every night at 7 pm and waving at our neighbors a block away, after reading journals written at 2 am, emails and essays about struggle and loss and grief and James Baldwin and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis and Black Panther and Beloved Community, after (and during and still) the catastrophic loss of Black lives to police violence and to the violence of the virus—after all of this, still the butterflies came even before I hit Zoom’s “start meeting” link. Welcome to this new term. In grappling with my own white privilege and the privilege of having a job that allows me to teach online at home, I struggle with anxiety as well. Yet, I welcome the new discomforts that inform my work now, and I welcome the chance to learn from the new community of writers on the other side of the screen. In memory of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, John Lewis, Chadwick Boseman, and the many thousands gone. ... 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 first of four parts. * David Starkey: Peter, in my opinion, you are the leading expert on accelerated composition, so I’m very happy to have the opportunity to share this conversation with Bedford Bits readers. You’ve conducted more than 200 workshops on accelerated learning around the country. What issues do instructors ask you about most often?   Peter Adams: At almost every school I’ve visited, instructors ask me how to structure the two courses in a 101/coreq pair or, as the question is usually worded, “What do we do in the coreq section?”   DS: And what’s your response?   PA: I begin by pointing out that the goal of a corequisite course is entirely different from the goal of a traditional developmental writing course. Traditional courses viewed students through the lens a deficit model—students were missing knowledge and skills they should have developed back in high school or, perhaps, middle school. And that knowledge and those skills were what we needed to teach. As a result, to students, traditional developmental courses felt a lot like seventh grade all over again . . . exacerbating many students’ fears that they didn’t really belong in college.   DS: And we know from experience that when students don’t feel they are “college material,” it’s sadly not too long before many of them depart college altogether.   PA: Very true, David, and an important goal of corequisite courses is to address and this the many other non-cognitive issues that can derail students.     To avoid the deficit approach, corequisite courses no longer see their goal as reteaching what students seem to have missed in middle or high school; instead it is to provide whatever support students need to succeed in the ENG 101 course. The curriculum is “backward designed” from 101 and tailored to each cohort of students. In the coreq section, students are reading the same challenging texts and writing the same college-level essays as they are in the ENG 101 section, just more slowly, with more scaffolding, more opportunity for practice, and more individual attention. As a result of this design principle, there are four major activities in most co-rec courses: Activities designed to review, reinforce, and answer questions about the material just covered in the 101. Activities designed to prepare students for what is coming next in the 101. Activities designed to improve students’ ability to read challenging texts. Activities designed to address the non-cognitive issues that too often cause students to give up and drop out. DS: I know from experience that this can be a lot of material to cover in a 50-minute course! How do you juggle and prioritize these various activities?   PA: It is a lot of material. In a traditional developmental writing course, all we addressed was writing issues. At my school, Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC), we call our corequisite model the Accelerated Learning Program or ALP. In ALP or other corequisite courses, in addition to writing issues, faculty have also taken responsibilities for helping students grow as readers while we also need time to address those non-cognitive issues. Because of all the material now loaded into the corequisite course, I strongly recommend that it meet three hours a week, although financial situations at some schools have made it necessary to limit these courses to just one or two hours a week.   Part 2 of this conversation will appear next month. ... View more

Week 4 of the semester is about to begin—perhaps the most difficult semester I’ve ever had. Nearly eight years ago, I taught a full load of composition and ESL courses at a community college while going through chemotherapy. I wore hats to cover my hair loss, and fatigue kept me seated and perhaps a bit quieter than usual in the classroom. But the challenges of treatment were lightened by being at school: my colleagues and students offered normalcy and respite from relentless reminders of cancer. We lack even a semblance of normalcy this semester, and no respite from relentless reminders of Covid-19. I told myself getting ready to write this blog post that I wouldn’t “go there.” But I don’t know how not to. The pandemic is draining in its ubiquity.  I don’t want to delve into “simple strategies for creating discussions” or “four things to do when you get to class on Monday” or “the best technologies for live streaming a class,” although there is a need for those sorts of posts. Instead, I will offer three reflections that give me hope. First, we are still teaching—in countless difficult but equally viable ways. I am teaching a “hybrid” course: in my Tuesday/Thursday class, I have half the group on one day, and half the other. I am also doing individual Zoom meetings, mini-videos in which I screen-capture content to share, online discussions, and a number of surveys and emails. And I may change this up next week, depending on what is happening with my students. Even when I have them in class, what I would normally do is not possible—and I’ve seen the effect of spaced out seating and masks (which we must, must, must have) on conversation and shared thinking. Even when we collaborate in the classroom, digital lines of communication mediate the shared work. We are learning to learn differently. I am exhausted at this moment, but I am learning. I have colleagues who are live-streaming, colleagues who are fully online, colleagues who are using Slack or Twitter or GroupMe, and some who are combining all of these. Then students test positive, and we juggle our teaching to accommodate both students fully online and those in person. We shift again. We savor the moments when the class latches on to a concept or a reading—they play with the language or the assigned text—and for just a moment or two they aren’t consumed with the logistics of doing a college class during a pandemic (how do I turn this in? Can I go to the writing center in person? If my internet is down, what I do? Can I send you a screen shot?).  Second, students are still learning. “Aha” moments still occur in our Zoom meetings, discussions, individual video conferences, and social media chats. For some of my students, I think the invitation to do classwork is like a luxury now, a space away from the latest news cycles. For some, it is a means of coping, and for some others, it has added a new layer of stress to their already stressful lives. And when a student tests positive, we see the ripple-effects in their lives, the lives of their families, their workplaces, and our classrooms. In my hybrid space, I ask yet again: was this worth it?  But students submit assignments, ask questions, revise and rethink. They are still learning, just as I am. Third, we are still collaborating as a profession. I miss office and hallway conversations, and I regret the cancellation of conferences. But new opportunities have arisen, and we are still—perhaps even more so—connected.  I’ve been to virtual camps and virtual seminars. I’ve “attended” meetings on countless different platforms in virtual spaces, and scholars have shared their work in all sorts of forums. (Witness the Brazilian Linguistics Association, Abralin, which hosted a phenomenal summer gathering of some of the foremost thinkers in linguistics—all accessible and free). MacMillan hosted boot camps for corequisite instructors, too. And in the midst of all of this, I think I have connected more with instructors in my department and across campus locations than ever before. Our questions—How are you?  Are you ok?—are not perfunctory.  We have surely made mistakes in this season, just as our administrators and institutions have. Accountability is required, and we will have to address the failures in the weeks and months to come.  But at the same time, I am encouraged. We can talk about what we are doing in this particular moment, using the present progressive—action in process: We’re still teaching. Students are still learning. We are learning along with them. We are forging connections and innovations in the now, present progressive. And these on-going actions result from who we are, simple present tense, across times and contexts: we teach. Students learn, and so do we. We create, connect, and innovate. We teach.  How are you teaching in this moment? What are you learning? What gives you hope? I look forward to hearing from you. ... View more

Photo Credit: Kyle BrettSarah Heidebrink-Bruno (recommended by Jenna Lay) is pursuing her PhD in English, with a concentration in literature and social justice pedagogies, at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA. She expects to finish her degree in 2020 or 2021. She teaches a range of composition and rhetoric courses, including English 1, 2, and 11, in addition to interdisciplinary courses in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies as well as Africana Studies. She has also taught online courses in English and WGSS, with a focus on pop culture themes, including modern relationships. Her research interests include restorative justice practices, women's literature of the 1960s-present, feminist theory and praxis, and writing center tutors' instruction.   How do you hope higher education will change in the next ten years? In the next ten years, I hope to see folks in higher education intentionally divorce themselves from the “ivory tower” image and embrace education as a truly equalizing experience — by prioritizing access to the most vulnerable and historically marginalized among us, including BIPOC, LGBTQIA folks, and differently abled, faculty, and staff. I would like to see a concerted effort to serve the community in which colleges and universities are located, in ways that the community deems desirable and appropriate. Moreover, I’d love for all of the stakeholders in colleges and universities to have a greater focus on holistic students’ experiences — ideally, academic and student affairs would work in tandem to recognize students as complex young adults, rather than essentializing one aspect of their identities in one space.    How does the next generation of students inspire you? I am constantly inspired by my students. Though my colleagues have sometimes suggested that students are generally apathetic and only interested in getting good grades/a degree, I think this stereotype ignores the larger structural issues that students must face in order to not feel the pressure to just “get it done.” In my experiences, I have been lucky to see students blossom through their research and writing processes into conscientious young adults who have strong values and ideas about the ways in which education — and the world — can change. They constantly amaze me with their curiosity and their willingness to ask difficult questions and challenge ideas that seem untrue or unjust.    What have you learned from other Bedford New Scholars? I relished the opportunity to learn with and from my fellow Bedford New Scholars during our summer orientation meetings. Specifically, I really liked learning about the different writing assignments and classroom activities that my peers have used — which I am eager to try myself! I learned a lot from their feedback and insight on my work, which I intend to use to improve my teaching this coming semester. Finally, it was reassuring to hear that we are all facing similar struggles, especially at this difficult time, and that they were willing to share different solutions and moral support for dealing with these challenges.    What is it like to be a part of the Bedford New Scholars program? I really appreciated the chance to meet and work with the dedicated staff at Macmillan who organize the BNS program. I admit that I had little insight into the publishing world and the process that scholars undergo as they progress from an idea to a fully-formed reference guide or handbook, etc., but I enjoyed learning about the inner mechanisms of the publishing world and the ways in which writers seek feedback from their peers as well as their editors throughout the process. (Admittedly, it was also cool to see exclusive content prior to its public release!) It was clear to me how much the editors and staff members really care about the authors they work with and that they are dedicated to producing thoughtful and helpful teaching materials (among other products).   Sarah Heidebrink-Bruno’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 Sarah’s assignment. For the full activity, see Student Information Sheet. For my “assignment that works,” I shared a version of my Student Information Sheet, a form that I typically hand out during the first week of class as a way to  Establish the tone of the course; Get to know more about my students and their learning needs;  And finally, gather information that I then use when I am lesson planning.  In the sheet, I ask them about their preferred names (if any), their pronouns (if they feel comfortable sharing that information with me), and what kinds of learning environment and activities they prefer. For example, I include a list of possible activities, such as Think-Pair-Share, answering questions in small groups, Check Out tickets, and more. They can either check off boxes in the list of options or add additional suggestions. After everyone has completed the sheet, we then discuss how we best learn and what kind of learning spaces have been the most impactful. I tell them about my own learning and teaching techniques that have worked for me in the past, with an explicit emphasis on the fact that I need and expect for them to give me feedback on pedagogical choices and activities in the classroom to make sure that I am reaching folks where they are. I will note that although I’ve used a hard copy of this form in the past, it would be very easy to create a version in Google forms (or another digital space), which would also allow the instructor to easily see what the most popular choices are. The instructor could then use that information for an ice-breaker activity or discussion at the beginning of the next class. ... View more

A lot of our formerly “normal” lives has been intermittently or completely shut down over the last seven months—schools, churches, restaurants, and live performances of all kinds, from sporting events to concerts and plays. What has NOT shut down, however, and has in fact grown dangerously, is the flood of mis- and dis-information, lies, and conspiracy theories afloat on social media, streaming into our lives through our devices. I’ve written about this state of affairs before, and I’ve looked for ways to prepare students to distinguish truth from lies, fake photos from real ones, and I’ve included straightforward tips for doing so in all of the books I’ve written (or co-written). I’ve been modestly encouraged by recent decisions by Facebook to label misinformation as such and to block, when they can find it, the attempts by foreign agents of governments (read: Russia) to pose as “true Americans” and post false information intended to benefit a particular political candidate (read: Trump). Last week I came across a new tool for detecting and dealing with misinformation that I think is worth sharing with students, especially since they are now doing so much of their work online. It’s called Misinfo Mondays and it’s a series of posts created by the Mozilla Foundation on their blog, dedicated to upholding the Mozilla Manifesto that “The internet is a global public resource that must remain open and accessible to all.” That goal might suggest that on the Internet, anything goes—including lies and fake photos—but Mozilla would disagree, describing their mission this way: The direct work of the Mozilla Foundation focuses on fueling the movement for a healthy internet. We do this by supporting a diverse group of fellows working on key internet issues, connecting open Internet leaders at events like MozFest, publishing critical research in the Internet Health Report, and rallying citizens around advocacy issues that connect the wellbeing of the Internet directly to everyday life. Aiming for a “healthy” internet means, among other things, being able to identify and resist unhealthy uses of it (you can check out their Internet Health Report for more on this). And that’s where Misinfo Mondays comes in. This is a weekly series that aims to “give you the tools, tips and tricks needed to cut the crap and find the truth.” I’ve read two of the posts so far and have found them informative and useful. This week’s post, “Deepfakes and Other Trickery in Imagery,” distinguishes between “deepfakes”—that is, doctored videos—from “cheapfakes” —videos or images taken out of context­. It explains how deepfakes are computer-generated videos, but they differ substantially from CGI used in films: CGI is “entirely fabricated in post-production by digital artists,” whereas deepfakes involve “digitally mapping new faces or mouth movements onto footage that already exists” using algorithms. And while deepfakes are certainly concerning, the post warns that cheapfakes are more prevalent: “Cheapfakes are incredibly easy to do, since they generally only require you to copy/paste,” such as “taking an old photo of a crowd and saying it was an anti-Covid 19 protest.” The post provides many examples of deepfakes and cheapfakes throughout—and offers two cautions: first, that AI-generated images are increasingly easy to create and use for unethical purposes, and second, that such imagery has at least the potential to do some good (as in some forms of virtual reality therapy). The challenge, then, is for users to grow sophisticated enough to not only learn to spot deepfakes, just as we have learned to recognize photoshopped images, but also to learn to spot the simple cheapfakes using images out of context. For writing teachers, that means teaching reading to include the ability to read images—real and fake. And Misinfo Mondays is there to help us do so. Image Credit: Pixabay Image 925856 by StockSnap, used under the Pixabay License  ... View more

Greetings to writing teachers everywhere as I’m writing this on the last day of August, 2020. Oh my goodness, what a summer this has been. I have spent the last seven months at home on the northern California coast, going out only to the post office, grocery store, and any doctor’s appointments; going to Zoom meetings and doing workshops and presentations online; missing family and friends that I can no longer visit; and trying to advocate for racial justice and for free and fair and unobstructed voting—which hasn’t been easy cooped up in my home office in this fairly isolated rural community. What has kept me going has been getting to teach a small class for teachers pursuing master’s degrees at the Bread Loaf School of English. Virtually, of course, via the ubiquitous Zoom. With in-person classes at the Vermont campus cancelled, Bread Loaf declared a “summer of writing” and asked students (all teachers) if they wanted to sign up for small tutorial classes during which they would work on a major writing project. So I met for six weeks with three teachers—twice a week via Zoom and then individually through FaceTime conversations and over email, a mini version of the kind of online teaching that so many of us will be doing this fall and perhaps all year. The luxury of working in such a small group isn’t lost on me—I feel incredibly lucky to have had this experience. And I have learned so much by working along on the three projects: one on the way clothing works in multiple ways to both constrict and liberate characters in contemporary Latinx fiction; one on the nontraditional and very effective rhetorical strategies used in CCCC Chair’s addresses by scholars of color; and one on the history and development of Afrofuturism that argues for its inclusion as a central feature of high school English curricula. All brilliant projects. But I also had the privilege of getting to know what these teachers are facing as fall term approaches, what their fears and hopes are, and what they expect their students to be struggling with when they meet them (partially in person, partially online). This pandemic that affects every aspects of our lives is leaving its mark on our students in so many ways. Teachers find themselves delivering lessons and books (along with meals and even medicine) to the homes of students, looking for workarounds for students who have no access to internet or no place to work quietly at home, working with technologies that are necessary but also very frustrating, arguing with local and state officials hell bent on fully opening the schools no matter what, and, most of all, worrying about how best to keep students safe, not to mention their families and themselves. Add to all this the polarization of our communities, the stoking of hatred and bigotry, and the veritable tsunami of misinformation, conspiracy theories, and outright lies arriving minute by minute through social media and other sources intent on creating ever more chaos and division. It’s a lot. It’s enough make us despair, to give in. But teachers are not likely to do so. In fact, teachers I know are more determined than ever to teach, even against all odds, and to learn and to help their students learn. That’s why I’ve seen—all summer long—teachers across the country creating imaginative ways of engaging students online, exciting curricula to get and keep their attention, determined ways of making real connections with students, and ongoing commitment to creating spaces for listening, for understanding, and for civil discourse. I know it’s a tall order. But if anyone can deliver on it, writing teachers can. I’d so love to hear from you about what your teaching will be like this fall and about how your students are doing. Stay safe. Image Credit: Pixabay Image 768696 by Free-Photos, used under the Pixabay License ... View more

Michael S. GarciaMichael S. Garcia (recommended by Kimberly Harrison) is pursuing his MFA in Creative Writing at Florida International University. He expects to finish in April 2021. At FIU, he has taught Writing and Rhetoric, Writing in Action, Essay Writing, and Creative Writing: Forms and Practices. He has also taught 11th and 12th grade English at a Title I high school. As a writer, he has published short stories, essays, web articles, and poetry.   What is the most important skill you aim to provide your students?  We are currently living in an important social and political moment—a time rife with conflict, strife, and disinformation. Never before has there been so much (mis)information coming at us from all sides, all the time. I believe my most important role as a writing and rhetoric teacher is two-fold: I must teach students how to evaluate information through a critical lens, so they can filter out the noise and arrive at well-informed opinions; simultaneously, I must empower my students with the skills, knowledge, and confidence to express themselves in an accurate, thoughtful, and ethical way.    How will online or remote learning affect your teaching? While teaching remotely is not ideal, I have chosen to view it as a learning opportunity, a chance to grow into a more effective teacher. Keeping students active and engaged can be a challenge in the very best of times, but now, with all our teaching happening through digital tools, it is more crucial than ever to focus on student engagement. In my in-person classes, I really focus on trying my best to implement lessons and activities that engage students and keep them interested, but it is so easy to become distracted or fatigued when meeting through digital platforms like Zoom, so this aspect of my teaching will be even more important now than ever.  Also, while I already make use of digital tools and platforms in my usual in-person teaching, I will rely on them now more than ever before. I suspect that I will become more adept at using a variety of digital tools as part of the teaching process.  I anticipate that what I learn from remote teaching—not just in terms of student engagement and technology, but perhaps in other areas I haven’t considered yet—will turn this challenging time into a net-positive for my development as an educator, increasing my effectiveness as a teacher in the long term.  What is it like to be a part of the Bedford New Scholars program? The Bedford New Scholars program has turned out to be an invaluable experience for my personal and professional development. I have learned about the process behind creating and publishing educational materials, something I had very little idea about beforehand. The program also gave me the opportunity to collaborate with a great group of accomplished scholars from around the country that I may not have met otherwise.  Additionally, the opportunity to preview and give feedback on upcoming Bedford/St. Martin’s texts and tools that are currently being worked-on is a really cool experience. It’s great to see the thought and care that the people at Bedford/St. Martin’s put into their projects, and how important it is to them to collaborate with a varied and diverse group of educators—I think this collaborative approach helps ensure Bedford/St. Martin’s texts and tools are effective and relevant to both teachers and students.   What projects or course materials from Bedford/St. Martin's most pique your interest, and why? I was very impressed by the wide array of texts Bedford/St. Martin’s offered in my subject area; it seemed there was a text for every approach, something I wasn’t aware of before the Bedford New Scholars project.  The project I was most interested in was the Achieve learning platform. I think it’s great how the platform empowers instructors to create effective, multimodal assignments, while also encouraging and enabling collaboration—not only between the student and their instructor, but among students and their peers. It is intuitive and easy-to-use while also having depth in what it is capable of. I’m excited by the opportunities and possibilities that Achieve presents, not only in the composition classroom, but in teaching the subject of English overall.  Michael’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 Michael's assignment. For the full activity, see Discourse Community Profile.   My “Assignment That Works” is the Discourse Community Profile, the first major assignment I assign as part of the first of FIU’s two-course introductory writing sequence. For this assignment, students are asked to write a profile on a discourse community of their choice; this involves describing the discourse community, citing specific examples of discourse from this community and where it occurs, and examining what can be gleaned about this community from analyzing its use of language. Students are asked to conclude the profile with a reflection on their relationship to this discourse community, why they chose to write about it, and what they learned in the process.  The assignment sheet is designed with question-and-answer format to make the assignment prompt as clear and concise as possible. We spend the first unit of the course scaffolding up to this assignment with foundational lessons about rhetorical awareness, rhetorical strategies, how to choose the appropriate genre (this is where they learn what a “profile” is), and code-switching. Students are asked to submit a “first steps” topic proposal to ensure they understand what is being asked of them. They submit a low-stakes first draft for instructor comments and peer review, giving them time to polish their work before the final draft is due.  ... View more

Allison Dziuba (recommended by Jonathan Alexander) is a PhD candidate in English at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). She teaches courses in the lower-division writing sequence, in person during the school year and online during the summer. She also teaches the Summer Bridge writing lab, a pre-college course for incoming UCI first-years. She has served as the editorial assistant for College Composition and Communication and Rhetoric Society Quarterly. She is currently the Campus Writing & Communication Fellow at UCI. Allison's research interests include college students' self-sponsored literacy practices and extracurricular rhetorical education, and intersectional feminist approaches to rhetorical studies.   What is your greatest teaching challenge? Time management. Whether I’m teaching a 50- or 80-minute class session, the time seems to fly by. I was advised early on to plan lessons around just one main point or activity. Planning more concise lessons allows me to better explain what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. It also provides space for students to shape each class with their questions and interests. As a teacher, I want to better adapt to my students’ needs, to let them drive the agenda. In sketching out the full term, it’s important for me to set reasonable goals, too. Because my university is on the quarter system, we only have 10 weeks together as a class. I have to tailor my expectations based on this relatively limited time frame and prioritize the skills and experiences I hope will be most valuable to my students (more on this below). What is the most important skill you aim to provide your students? I teach lower-division writing, which means that, for many of my students, our class is their first college-level writing experience. It’s often the smallest class that they’ve taken so far (around 20 students), so they have an opportunity to get to know their instructor and peers. Understanding that this is a potentially crucial moment in their undergraduate careers but also a brief and largely introductory one, I focus on rhetorical flexibility. That is, we aim to address the question, how does a rhetor craft messages in different genres and modes to communicate their purposes? I care deeply about what my students have to say, and so my hope is that helping to cultivate their rhetorical know-how will allow their voices to reach a variety of audiences. Students explore how they can shape communications and how messages move through the world; in so doing, they engage with the often overlapping communities to which they belong—home, college, local/regional, transnational, etc. This process of discovery animates my dissertation research as well—how do college students develop their rhetorical educations and their sense of belonging within campus and broader ecologies? What is it like to co-design or work with the editorial team at Bedford/St. Martin's? I’ve enjoyed working with the English composition editors because they’re knowledgeable about the world of writing instruction and they’re attentive to the needs of instructors. These traits, combined with their close familiarity with the Bedford catalogue, make for generative working relationships. For example, one of the workshops during the BNS summit was about developing writing assignments that are transparent in their aims—a topic that I and other teachers think about a lot—paired with a preview of a forthcoming book focused on tackling writing problems. Special kudos to Leah Rang and her team for organizing a virtual summit experience this summer that ran smoothly, covered a wide range of topics, and provided both graduate students and editorial staff opportunities to get to know one another and to ask each other productive questions about composition pedagogy. What have you learned from other Bedford New Scholars? I value the creativity and generosity of my BNS colleagues. In particular, I’m inspired by the assignments they’ve shared and their explanations of how these activities function in their classrooms. A few examples are Corinne’s gamification of teaching about the (potentially unintended) circulation and re-appropriation of texts, Kalyn’s step-by-step approach to analyzing rhetors’ source synthesis, and Sierra’s engagement of visual composition practices, as inspired by her pre–grad school career. I plan to incorporate elements of these activities into my own teaching practice. Overall, gathering this group of inquisitive, like-minded folks together for the summit lead to fruitful discussions about teaching and what we care about as teachers. These conversations and my peers’ commitment to their students will help to sustain my academic journey, and I hope to continue to cultivate these connections. Allison’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 Allison's assignment. For the full activity, see Opinion Barometer Activity  I’m sharing the “Opinion Barometer,” an in-class activity that aims to help students recognize the knowledges that they bring to the classroom and to explore nuances of rhetorical stances, beyond mere pro/con. I credit a fellow graduate student writing instructor with the spatial and interactive structure of the activity, and I’ve developed it over time to align with course assignments and to be relevant to the populations of students I’m teaching. Students are given statements or claims and are asked to move to a point in the classroom to indicate how much they agree or disagree with the statement. I’ve used this activity with first-year students who are encountering college-level courses and college life for the first time; the sample questions are crafted particularly with new college students in mind. I feel that the Opinion Barometer facilitates honest discussions about my students’ goals and expectations for their college careers. I’ve also used this as a warm-up activity before diving into an op-ed assignment. My intention is to boost students’ perceptions of their own expertise and to begin brainstorming topics that they have opinions about. I’d like to think more about how this activity could be adapted for an online teaching environment. Thanks to my fellow Bedford New Scholars for considering possible modifications. For instance, Sidney recommended gauging students’ opinions via an online poll and then asking them to write brief rationales for their positions. ... View more