In 2010, writer and longtime NPR commentator on All Things Considered and Washington Post columnist Michele Norris ordered 200 postcards that read: “Race. Your thoughts. 6 words. Please send.” She started leaving them in bookstores, at coffee shops, in the seat pockets on airplanes, without much hope of a big response. She shouldn’t have worried: people started filling them out, stamping them, and sending them, eventually adding up to over 500,000 messages. Norris includes many of them, along—each a little gem of a story—in her Our Hidden Conversations, along with interviews with numerous correspondents and essays by Norris in what the New York Times describes as an “open-mic town hall gone right.” Here are just a few of the six-sentence responses she received: “I wish he was a girl”; “I’m only Asian when it’s convenient”; “No, really, where are you from?”; “With kids, I’m dad—alone, thug”; “Underneath, we all taste like chicken”; “My beautiful Black boys deserve HOPE.” Morris reports being surprised that she heard from so many white people, though postcards came from dozens of racial and ethnic groups, as well as from over 100 countries. And while she started the project out of a sense that people at the time were very uncomfortable talking about race, these handwritten postcards proved that they had profound thoughts on race that they wanted to share. Michele Norris accepts the Peabody Award for "The Race Card Project."   In addition to the Peabody-winning narrative archive The Race Card Project and Our Hidden Conversations, Norris is the author of The Grace of Silence and host of the podcast Your Mama’s Kitchen. Her work is accessible and challenging at the same time, and I think students could spend some time doing a little research on her and her publications; they can also listen to her reporting during the dozen years she was a host for All Things Considered, hearing the rhythms and timbre of her voice, which carries so much personality. But in these times when students may feel uncomfortable engaging any number of highly contentious, emotion-laden topics in class, perhaps we could take a tip from Norris, asking students to write six words, and six words only, on a controversial or difficult topic you are dealing with in class. They might also bring in six-word responses from five or six other people. Then as a class, you could choose two or three responses to focus on, first in small groups and then in a whole-class discussion. Perhaps some of these six-word stories would yield new insights for the whole class to ponder, and lead to some open, honest, and respectful conversation. Image via WikiCommons   ... View more

  Elizabeth Catanese is an Associate Professor of English and Humanities at Community College of Philadelphia. Trained in mindfulness-based stress reduction, Elizabeth has enjoyed incorporating mindfulness activities into her college classroom for over ten years. Elizabeth works to deepen her mindful awareness through writing children's books, cartooning and parenting her energetic twin toddlers, Dylan and Escher.   Recently at Community College of Philadelphia, there has been a lot of talk about the 80/20 rule, which states that 80% of outcomes come from 20% of the causes. It’s the principle that has been reflected on in many places, such as the powerful book by Keller and Papasan called The One Thing. The basic principle is that often we are driven to do more to get better results, but more success and meaning can come when we don’t divide our focus—when we do less of what matters less. In other words, the idea behind the 80/20 rule is to identify the 20% that really matters and put our focus there. This is hard for professors in the classroom; we’re in a field where we are taught that everything matters. I have felt burdened by trying to help students’ lives outside of school, their emotional lives inside of it, trying to undo some of the challenges of a broken-in-some-places Philadelphia high school educational system while providing a rich education for a diverse audience of students ranging from age 16-60 (often in one class). There are, of course, institutional pressures as well—things we all “must do” that we would not do if not being forced to do them. Though the circumstances for all of us are different, I think it is safe to say that we have all been told, explicitly or implicitly, that doing more is the way to achieve better outcomes. At Community College of Philadelphia last semester, instructors were challenged to explore the less is more approach and add just one thing that might improve student learning. We could pick it, and there was no pressure for the “one thing” to succeed. We were just asked to do it and then to report back about how it went. I brought in career counseling to talk to my English class and tried to facilitate connections between the work we were doing in reading and writing and student career aspirations; it was pretty successful, but what I found most effective was a debrief conversation afterwards where people told stories about struggling to find and keep employment. It didn’t exactly relate to our course content as I’d hoped, but it helped me connect with students as I, too, have had struggles finding jobs at moments in my life and career, and I was happy to share my stories right along with students. By the end of the conversation, a few students had very specific goals—to reach out to career counseling to get help on a resume, to apply to two more jobs, and to get some new interview clothing. At the end of the conversation, they felt connected to each other and to me as well as empowered to take next steps that they had chosen. I didn’t seamlessly fold the activity into my curriculum, but it was still what I would consider a success. But exactly what about it made it successful? When I attended the debrief about the CCP “one thing” projects, something began to strike me. It didn’t really matter what the “one thing” was (or even the subject where the “one thing” project occurred). Of course, the content always related in some way to course goals, but what mattered after that fundamental link was established was something else entirely. What mattered was whether the interventions did one of two things: They either fostered student empowerment, fostered connection (to self, others or professor) or, in some cases, they fostered both empowerment and connection. This semester, I’m going to ask myself some questions about my lessons, assignments and practices. Does this assignment, lesson or practice foster connection and/or does it empower students? If not, I’ll consider letting it go. Though there is, for me, always grief in letting go, I’m hoping that the questions will lead me to put more of my energy into what matters most this semester for the greater good of myself and my students. ... View more

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been trying to follow my own winding path toward understanding, resisting, and reimagining research methods in writing and rhetoric. Here’s where I have ended up! Even as I and other colleagues were making changes and rethinking research methods, many colleagues in English studies weren’t taking the same journey I was on, were still holding to traditional and (to me) outmoded ways of researching and reporting on that research. Some years ago, I overheard a white woman high in the MLA hierarchy remark that earlier work Jackie Royster had done in Traces of a Stream wasn’t really research with a capital R; “it’s mere recovery,” she said. I am seldom speechless, but that comment took my breath away: as if “recovery” could ever be “mere.” And as if the work of allowing us to hear, at long last, the voices and thoughts and goals and dreams of these foremothers, and to understand their legacy of advocacy and activism and leadership were in any way simple or “mere.” Give me a break. So Jackie Royster and Beverly Moss and Shirley Logan have long been teaching me how to understand not just feminist methods but Black feminist methods. But to Shirley’s Black feminist historiography, Beverly’s Black feminist ethnography, Jackie and Gesa’s articulation of those four powerful feminist rhetorical practices—and all their embodiment of the fully engaged, non-neutral, passionate research described by Nisha Shammugaraj as the “intimacy in feminist methodologies” I would add the work of several others who have continued to challenge and expand my concepts of research methods and methodologies in the field of rhetoric and composition.  Campus of Spelman College, historically Black women’s college in Atlanta, GA, in 1908   I’m thinking for instance of my Stanford colleague Adam Banks, whose visionary leadership has created an undergraduate writing program (and a new certificate in cultural rhetorics) that engages students in the kinds of research I have been talking about. Adam and Keith Gilyard’s On African American Rhetoric articulates and embodies African American ways of knowing while demonstrating how tropes emerging from African American culture enrich our understanding of texts and act as touchpoints of African American critical methods. Signifying, call and response, narrative sequencing, and especially storytelling emerge as key concepts and methods in African American Rhetoric, as does the figure of the “digital griot” in Banks’s earlier book. For examples of such methods at work, we can look to Adam’s writings on Black Twitter, Tara Conley’s Black Feminist Hashtag Project, and Lou Maraj’s analysis of hashtags and hashtagging as method in his Black or Right: Anti-racist Campus Rhetorics. And also to Aja Martinez’s concept of “counterstory,” which provides yet another powerful method now available to feminist scholars and researchers.  These writers have been my teachers, especially over the last two decades, as they have sought to theorize, practice, and embody new ways of understanding and doing research, new or reimagined methods to use in doing so. Even more recently, I have also been learning from Carmen Kynard, whose Vernacular Insurrections: Race, Black Protest, and the New Century in Composition-Literacies Studies I studied long and hard. In a recent College English essay on “Racial Memory, Radical Reparative Justice, and Black Feminist Pedagogical Futures,” she offers—among other things—the story of “a Black feminist methodology” that is sometimes her “pissed dafuq off and holding onto my righteous anger” and other times “a story of writing classrooms” that reaches toward the ideal of “freedom and creative imagination” and “radical possibility.”  Drawing on the work of Gwen Pough, Kynard recommends a “counterdisciplinary stance” and Black storymaking—"the counter-academic, counter-positivist, and antineutral writing of unapologetic Black feminist storymaking/futuremaking,” which is, she says, an example of Black feminist methodology (329) (the kind of “antineutral writing of unapologetic Black feminist storymaking that is another hallmark of Jackie Royster’s work). It’s important to note that by “storymaking,” Kynard is not referring to linear, white, western narrative patterns. Rather, she refers to narrative sequencing (described decades ago by Dr. G), narrative that relies on “multiple, seemingly meandering stories . . . that take you to and through complicated experiences and meanings.” This storymaking is intimate, she says, full of pain and witnessing “on the screen, on the page, in the field, or in the archive--where you must build out a non-linear past and present that has been trying with all its might to erase every trace of you” (329). Kynard calls, then, for “Black, racially lived analysis” that can disrupt how the academy as a knowledge manufacturer/information industrial complex does its work” (330) and concludes by saying that such change, and the radical reparative justice she goes on to describe, are “largely impossible” if scholars “do not put themselves in the role of learning from Black folx” (341). Earlier in this essay, Kynard speaks directly to composition/rhetoric studies, saying that she “loves the work of rhet-comp, just not the field,” admonishing the field that “it’s time for you to roll with some Black feminism” (323).  Now in my 81st year, I am looking back on one white woman’s very long journey toward understanding—and deep change. I think back to my hopelessly naïve notion of how to set up quantitative and qualitative studies as though I could do so following a cut and cried series of steps from research question through to results and “discussion,” and I am chagrined by the stumbles I made along the journey. But also amazed by the amount that I have learned, and learned in my bones and in my guts, not just in my brain—and how much I have been able to share with students In my classes and in my textbooks. That’s largely thanks to the scholars of color I have been taught and mentored by, colleagues whose thinking and ways of doing research have helped shape and reshape my teaching, my research, and the writing I do for students. After all these years, I’m still going to school with them, and while I cannot ever claim to experience the world in the same way, nor do I always agree with every rhetorical move they make, I will continue to learn from Black and indigenous scholars of color. With deep gratitude.  At this point on my journey, I can say with confidence: we got this! The methods I have surveyed here constitute a full and robust set of Black/Feminist methods that we can and must teach in undergraduate and graduate seminars, make explicit in all our own work, and claim—and keep claiming—as powerful and efficacious tools. Let me repeat: thanks to the work of so many: we got this! Thanks for letting me take you along on this trip down my own memory lane. And in case you’re interested, here are the sources I’ve relied on: Works Cited Banks, Adam. Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Digital Age. Southern Illinois UP, 2011. Conley, Tara. Hashtagfeminism.com Crenshaw, Kimberlé, University of Chicago Legal Forum Volume 1989:1. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” Gilyard, Keith and Adam Banks. On African American Rhetoric. Routledge, 2018.  Glenn, Cheryl. “Truth, Lies, and Method: Revisiting Feminist Historiography.” College English (Jan 2000): 387-389. Kirsch, Gesa and Liz Rohan. Behind the Archives: Research as a Lived Process. Southern Illinois UP, 2008. Kynard, Carmen. “’Oh No She Did NOT Bring Her Ass Up in Here with That!’: Racial Memory, Radical Reparative Justice, and Black Feminist Pedagogical Futures.”College English March, 2023: 318-45.  ______________. Vernacular Insurrections: Race, Black Protest, and the New Century In Composition-Literacies Studies. SUNY P, 2013.  Logan, Shirley. We Are Coming: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth Century Black Women. Southern Illinois UP, 1999.  Maraj, Louis. Black or Right: Anti-racist Campus Rhetorics. Utah State UP, 2020.  Martinez, Aja. Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory. NCTE, 2020.  Moss, Beverly. "Ethnography and Composition: Studying Language at Home." Methods and Methodology: A Sourcebook for Composition Researchers. Eds.Gesa Kirsch and Patricia Sullivan. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1992.153-71.  _____________. "Intersections of Race and Class in the  Academy." Coming to Class: Pedagogy and the Social Class of Teachers. Eds. Gary Tate, Alan Shepard, and John  McMillan. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1998. 157-169. Ronald, Kate and Joy Ritchie. Teaching Rhetorica: Theory, Pedagogy, Practice. Heinemann, 2006. Royster, Jacqueline Jones. Making the World a Better Place: African American Women Advocates, Activists, and Leaders, 1773-1900. U Pittsburgh P, 2023.  ______________________. Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells. Bedford Books, 1996. ______________________. Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Change among African American Women. U Pittsburgh P, 2000. Royster, Jacqueline Jones and Gesa Kirsch. Feminist Rhetorical Practices. Southern Illinois UP, 2012.  Schell, Eileen and K. J. Rawson. Rhetorica in Motion: Feminist Rhetorical Methods and Methodologies. U Pittsburgh P, 2010. Shammugaraj, Nisha. “The Foregrounding of Intimacy in Qualitative Research,” presentation at the Feminisms and Rhetorics conference, Spelman College, October 2, 2023. Smitherman, Geneva. Talkin’ and Testifyin’: The Language of Black America. Wayne State UP, 1977. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. ... View more

Last week, I began describing the journey I’ve been on for about 50 years now, one in which I first tried to master (or at least understand!) traditional research methods in our field, but then went on to begin questioning many of these methods and searching for more expansive and inclusive understandings of what it means to do research on writing and rhetoric in our time. Here's the next installments of these thoughts: In the late 80s and early 90s, then, I was on my personal journey to try to think about “research” and research methods in what for me were expansive, but still inadequate ways. I remember reading, and teaching, Jackie Royster’s 1996 Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells the year it was published (and many years after that). And then in 2000 her Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change Among African American Women and Shirley Logan’s 1999 We Are Coming: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth Century Black Women and seeing the kind of passionate, engaged research Jackie and Shirley were conducting, what methods they were using as they were redefining what research in writing studies could and should look like and helping me to expand my understanding in ways that were transformational. Later, books like Gesa Kirsch and Liz Rohan’s Beyond the Archives: Research as a Lived Process (2008), Kate Ronald and Joy Ritchie’s Teaching Rhetorica: Theory, Pedagogy, Practice (2006), and Eileen Schell and K. J. Rawson’s Rhetorica in Motion: Feminist Rhetorical Methods and Methodologies (2010) helped me to further articulate the kind of research I wanted to practice—and teach my students to practice. And then came Jackie Royster and Gesa Kirsch’s 2012 Feminist Rhetorical Practices, so richly informed by feminist—and Black feminist—thought. I remember sitting with that book and then reading it with pen in hand, underlining and annotating, talking to and with it. Fully taking in what “critical imagination,” “strategic contemplation,” “social circulation,” and a “global perspective” mean as methods, as ways of knowing and of making meaning. Seeing how these four practices could broaden not only what “counts” as research but who “counts” as researchers and research subjects and scenes. Then tracking back over all of Jackie’s work that I had read, and returning to my hero since 1977, Geneva Smitherman—the divine Dr. G., whose Talkin’ and Testifyin’ electrified me but that I now understood, methodologically, on a much deeper level. I was still learning, still being challenged to rethink what constitutes methods in our field, and who gets to decide.  During these years I was also learning from teachers, students, and researchers from the Navajo nation, with whom I had an opportunity to work at the Bread Loaf School of English and its Teacher Network. I vividly remember one research project Navajo youth undertook to learn about how elders in their community had dealt with crises in their lives. To do so, the young people planned to talk individually with elders and were, at first, referring to the “interviews” they might conduct. That is until an elder asked them to think about that word “interview” and its connotations, suggesting that the word didn’t seem to fit well with Navajo ways of thinking and learning. After thinking about the baggage the word “interview” seemed to carry, the group decided against the use of that term and that method, adopting instead “conversation” to characterize the interactions they planned to have—the method they intended to use.  These Navajo researchers as well as scholars like Jackie Royster, Shirley Logan, and Beverly Moss have led me to rethink almost everything I do, from teaching to research to program administration, and so much more. Jackie’s latest book, Making the World a Better Place: African American Advocates, Activists , and Leaders, 1773-1900 (2023) is part of that “so much more.” In this monumental volume, Royster argues that the advocacy and activism of everyday African American women—far from being on the margins—were at the very heart of efforts to build and sustain this nation—not just during the civil rights movement but from their earliest presence here in 1619. What it takes to demonstrate this truth is, in Royster’s words, “to have enough imagination and fortitude to search for evidence from wherever it may be located and to extend the scope of analysis and interpretation to account for these data” and furthermore to use “a multi-lensed theoretical and analytical viewpoint” that focuses on “intersections of gender [and sexuality], race, culture, class, power, and place” in order to “bring a more fully rendered sociohistorical texture to the rhetorical actions” of these women and “to take into account their standpoints as a particular set of stakeholders within community and nation-building processes" (4). Throughout this book, moreover, Royster—herself an advocate and activist and leader—employs the words of the African American women, enabling them to speak for themselves in articulating their ways of being and doing in social spaces.  It goes without saying, though I want to underscore it here, that I have been incredibly fortunate to have studied and learned from now going on three generations of scholars of color and that my own work is indebted to them in countless ways, particularly when it comes to understanding the relationships among research, researcher, and researched. I’m still learning, of course, and next week I’ll try to sum up where I stand on research methodology in writing studies today .  ... View more

I’ve been thinking a lot about research this past year, and especially so as I prepared a brief presentation for the Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference held at Spelman College in the fall of 2023. In that presentation, I traced my own journey toward learning about, and then learning to question—and eventually to expand—research methods in our field. My aim as always is to bring these issues back to our classrooms, to bring debates and re-thinking in our field to our students and in this case, particularly, to change the ways students think about and carry out the still-going-strong “research-based assignment.”    Here is the opening of the presentation I gave at Fem/Rhets (I will share more in the next couple of weeks along with my most current thinking about student research and researchers): Flash way back to the 1970s when I was in graduate school. There were no courses in rhetoric or writing studies when I got there (and only a few when I left in 1977), and there were no courses, really, on methods. Close reading was THE method, and we were expected to come in knowing how to deploy that one. I eventually took a course on quantitative and qualitative methods, though it was not in my department but in Communications. And I found a guide book, Statistics without Tears, that I used to help me design some fairly lame studies that I used in my dissertation on Basic Writing. That was it. I can’t remember anyone ever talking about comparative methods, or about what later seemed to be obvious pitfalls of any methods that grew out of positivism. Much less about feminist methods. But I was interested in, and worried about, HOW we were doing what we were doing, and so I kept thinking and fretting about these issues as I began my college teaching career at the University of British Columbia. By the time I got to Ohio State in late 1986, I had a list of questions, and I used these questions to design a graduate course on research methods in rhetoric and writing. We read Janice Lauer and others (such as Richard Young) on quantitative methods but spent much of our time defining qualitative methods for ourselves and trying to shape what we came up with to feminist ends.  While we were doing this course—in 1991 I think—we had a chance to read a pre-publication copy of Gesa Kirsch and Patricia Sullivan’s Methods and Methodology in Composition Research—a collection of 14 essays that discussed historical, theoretical, and—ta-da!—feminist scholarship as well as case study and ethnographic research, textual analysis, and cognitive, experimental, and descriptive research. Other essays touched on collaborative research and writing (a pet project of mine and Lisa Ede’s) and the politics of comp research. What a huge change from my own grad student days 18 years earlier! Our class was inspired to write a collaborative review of this forthcoming book, doing some interviewing of our own and grounding what we had to say in feminist principles of standpoint theory and narrative framing.  This period saw a proliferation of articles and books about method and methodology, especially on ethnography and, later, autoethnography—accompanied by a vigorous debate between proponents of qualitative and quantitative methods that at times became rancorous. So as you can tell, I was a pretty slow learner in those days, though the more I learned how to use quantitative methods especially, the more questions I had about their efficacy in terms of writing research. And I was learning that qualitative methods contained restrictions that seemed somehow inadequate to the goals of the kinds of research needed for our field. Next week, I will continue this saga, which is giving me a chance to look back over my fifty-plus years in the field and assess my changing understanding of research methodologies. Please stay tuned!   Broadmoor, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons ... View more

  I recently had a chance to read columnist David Brooks’s new book How to Know a Person. Brooks says it has taken him years to learn to listen with genuine curiosity to others, especially those he doesn’t agree with. He recalls his attempts to persuade through traditional argument, showing the limitations of that approach in vivid detail and his arduous search for an effective alternative. Leaning in, listening, and then listening again, giving full attention to the person you are talking to (rather than thinking about what you will say next) turns out to be the key strategy to truly “seeing” other people. Basic to Brooks’s approach is a conversational model of discourse, rather than the lecture mode practiced in much of the academy, or the debate/disputation mode of much public discourse today. In conversations, participants are in exploration mode, thinking together: the goal is often the conversation itself, rather than vanquishing an opponent. And it’s in such conversations that Brooks finds ways to “know” someone else. Research for Brooks’s book led him to identify two levels to any conversation: the first layer is the subject—what you are literally talking about. The second layer, which he dubs the underconversation, is the “flow of emotion” going between the people talking. This second layer is really important: is it making the speakers feel safe, or less so? Listened to and respected, or not? Paying attention to the underconversation led Brooks to ask different questions: not “what do you think about this topic?” but “what led you to think this way about this topic?” Most important, such conversations offered him the space to keep opening doors by saying “Tell me more. What am I missing? Tell me more.” As I read, I kept thinking about my own practices in the classroom and in the writing center. Brooks’s advice about how to really see another person (and to make sure that person feels seen) rings very true to me. It’s why in the writing program at Stanford, we made student conferences central to our pedagogy, making sure we had time for conversations with our students, one-on-one, and making sure we focused our attention, laser-like, on our students and their writing and trying to track the “underconversation” going on in each instance. And it’s why, in my work in the writing center, I focused on asking questions, almost always leading to “Tell me more.” These are such simple-sounding teaching practices, but in my experience they are often hard to implement: time pressure, distractions, and the discipline it takes to really focus our attention all work against creating the kind of conversations Brooks describes. Reading his book is a good reminder, however, of how important it is that we keep on trying. When we give students our full attention, when we find the time and space to genuinely see them—and their work—we are truly teaching.    Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash ... View more

It’s that time of year again, when major dictionaries look into the past year to see what word emerges as marking something particularly significant about that year. I always look forward to this exercise, and I almost never can predict what the words of the year will be. This year I did make a guess that “hallucinate” would be one such word, and indeed that is the term chosen by both Dictionary.com and Cambridge. Both dictionaries reported noting the new definition of “hallucinate” to indicate the mistakes, misinformation, or fabrications produced by generative AI programs. They go on to note that “AI hallucinations remind us that humans still need to bring their critical thinking skills to the use of these [AI[ tools. . . Human expertise is arguably more important than ever, to create the authoritative and and up-to-date information that LLMs can be trained on.” Cambridge also notes adding additional related words to its corpus, such as LLM (Large language models), GAI (generative AI), and GPT (ChatGPT). The Collins Dictionary group chose “AI” as their word of the year, because that technology has dominated so much of the news cycle.   But perhaps the most surprising, and intriguing, word of the year, “after 32,000 votes and a team of language experts’ advice,” is the Oxford English Dictionary’s choice of “rizz,” short for charisma, which originated in Black culture. The term went viral after TikToker Henry de Tolla used the phrase “Livvy rizzed up Baby Gronk” in a post, but was popularized by influencer Kai Cenat, who uses it frequently in his Twitch streams. In discussing “rizz,” Cenat says it’s when “you’re so slick with our words and what you’re saying to where the girl is ‘OK, who is this?’ Then you’re like ‘Yeah, I rizzed her up. I’ve got mad rizz.’” Got that? As near as I can tell, “to rizz” means to charm someone successfully. And, I suppose, “rizz,” like charisma, in some sense means the ability to do that. Hmm. . .  Which of these words seems most likely to you to survive, and why? This is the time of year to ask our students this question, and to ask them what they would choose as word of the year. Right now, I’d have to go with something related to AI: how about you? ... View more

An empty classroom. Coat hooks on the back wall, 3 rows of desks behind a computer console. Two windows, one with an air conditioner, the other partially opened with bare trees in the background. The window shades let in light. Photo by Susan Bernstein December 7, 2023.   Pantoum for Fall Semester 2023   A   Dear students of Fall term B   We gather together to affirm C  The many languages that create writing D  That alone is quite exciting   B   We gather together to affirm– E   Written words can make us squirm!  C  The many languages that create writing F   Their definitions tumbled and imprecise*    E   Written words can make us squirm G   How do we know what words can mean F    Their definitions tumbled and imprecise H    Still we’re fully human– not a machine   G   How do we know what words can mean? I     All we imagine– worlds yet unseen H  Still we’re fully human and not a machine A  Dear students of Fall term   *” Imprecise words” from the introduction to James Baldwin’s lecture, “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity.”   Perhaps the greatest take away from James Baldwin’s “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity” this semester was the idea of “imprecise words.” Baldwin explains: I really don’t like words like “artist” or “integrity” or “courage” or “nobility.” I have a kind of distrust of all those words because I don’t really know what they mean, any more than I really know what such words as “democracy” or “peace” or “peace-loving” or “warlike” or “integration” mean. And yet one is compelled to recognize that all these imprecise words are attempts made by us all to get to something which is real and which lives behind the words.  “Something which is real and that lives behind the words”: With this opening line, Baldwin does not offer specific examples of recent events that, for him, render words “imprecise” and that cause him to search for “which is real and which lives behind the words.” He will save those events for the end of the lecture. In this way, he draws the audience into the lecture by allowing us to fill in the blanks. In 1962, when Baldwin spoke in New York, unfortunately the audience had too many catastrophic events to choose from, not unlike our own time.  The last day of class, we wrote for a while, and then the party began. We had food, music, and even dancing. The words I have to describe this scene are imprecise. I remembered that a year ago, I was on leave and thinking about retiring. I could not have imagined that a year later our class would host a celebration, that there would be anything to celebrate, and that I would want to write poetry about teaching and learning. This fall, I felt my imagination expand. It turns out that the course theme, “Think Outside the Box,” was meant for me as well.  A few weeks ago, I virtually attended the “God Made My Face” symposium on James Baldwin held at the Brooklyn Museum. In the final panel of the symposium, three visual artists discussed how they included Baldwin’s writing in their own work, from zines to films and paintings. Near the end, moderator Thelma Golden asked the panelists a final question, which, in my notes, reads: “What do you want to know about Baldwin that you don’t know? What path to a future?” One of the artists, Garrett Bradley, wondered about the role of grief in Baldwin, and if art was a salve for grief. Because in Baldwin, and in life, the audience might find grief as well as joy. Grief is hard work and joy is not an inevitability. In the direst of situations, words remain imprecise. I write poetry, and especially pantoums, when I have much to say, but don’t know how to say it. Pantoums offer precise rhyme schemes and the form provides focus for a starting point. The classroom is empty now, the semester done. I struggle “to get to something real that lives behind the words.” The goal, always, is to push language much farther than I think it can go. Still, we’re fully human, not a machine. Perhaps that is how Baldwin speaks to me at the end of this semester. ... View more

In these dark days of so much hatred and war, I am grateful for even brief moments of comfort and hope (not coincidentally the title of a wonderful album from Yo Yo Ma and Kathryn Stott). This holiday season offers some such moments—whether in the tradition of Hanukkah, which concluded on December 15; Christmas and its associated holy days; Kwanzaa, which stretches from December 26 to January 1; the Muslim Eid al-Fitr, which marks the close of the holy month of Ramadan; the Buddhist Rohatsu, which falls on December 8—or another important event.   Whatever traditions you and your students are marking this year, I hope that the events will bring time for reflection and reassessment, and especially for grace and goodness and kindness and love. In these times, we must search for, honor, and hold on to our commonalities—with persistence and commitment. This is our time to shine, to make our light known, and to share it freely.   Happy holidays to all! Andrea ... View more

Jennifer Duncan has been teaching English for twenty years, first at Chattanooga State Community College in Tennessee and now at Georgia State University’s Perimeter College in Atlanta, GA where she is Associate Professor of English.  For the last ten years, she has focused exclusively on online teaching concentrating on creating authentic and meaningful learning opportunities for students in composition and literature courses.   ‘Twas the night before finals and all through the halls, Photo by Markus Spiske via Unsplash Teachers were dealing with frantic phone calls. The students who’d waited till semester’s end, Now begged for extensions or to do work again. Red pens were a-marking and grades calculating. The final draft essays on the desk accumulating. There’s not enough coffee; there’s not enough cakes To make it through the mass of grading that waits. When, what to my blurry, tired eyes should appear, But the gleam of my computer beckoning me near. The ChatGPT login called out from the screen. Its promise to help me reached out like a dream. So I typed out a prompt to feed the AI. It can scan essays for me in the blink of an eye. It won’t do the whole job, but it offers reprieve, Highlighting some errors with computerized ease. With digital fury, it scanned work with glee, Spotting errors in syntax - a pixelated referee. Yet, amidst all the whirr as it processed the text, There still are some issues AI can’t detect. For remember, dear teacher, in this AI-filled quest, That no silicon robot can replace what is best. Armed with a teacher’s skill, wisdom, and grace, I then graded the full essay at my very own pace. I can give my attention to ideas and to rhetoric. I can comment on the essay’s argument and aesthetic. My time and attention goes to process and writing With time saved by no longer comma splice fighting. There’s no CyberClaus There’s no Robo St. Nick If you’re looking for shortcuts, I don’t have a real trick. But AI gives feedback, and it gives it quite quickly Though using it sometimes may feel a bit prickly. It doesn’t grade essays; it won’t do all your work, But a cyber assistant surely can’t hurt. Your students can use it to correct their own drafts, To find their own errors and rhetorical gaffs. You can even use it as a first run pre-grader, As long as you take your own look at the work later. So, my gift to you is this sample AI prompt To use if you want to give this method a romp. Use it with caution; use it with care. It’s not a replacement for your pedagogical flare: In the realm of essays, where ideas take flight, I seek AI’s aid to make them grammatically right. Enhance their structure; let coherence gleam; Analyze them with care; like a well-crafted dream; Give 4 suggestions to fortify this writing. Identify errors; make the vocab exciting. Now, ask for my essay; let the writing unfold In the digital realm, where great stories are told. ... View more

Jennifer Duncan has been teaching English for twenty years, first at Chattanooga State Community College in Tennessee and now at Georgia State University’s Perimeter College in Atlanta, GA where she is Associate Professor of English.  For the last ten years, she has focused exclusively on online teaching concentrating on creating authentic and meaningful learning opportunities for students in composition and literature courses.     Every teacher who is talking about AI is also talking about cheating.  My response in these conversations is pretty cynical: “cheaters gonna cheat.” Somewhere in ancient Sumeria, scholars earnestly etched out the first cuneiform lesson plans while their students passed papyrus crib sheets and used their barley money to outsource their homework. Cheating is an ancient tradition as sacred to assignments as procrastination. It’s not that I’m giving up on academic integrity; it’s just that my time and mental health can’t survive if I focus for too long on policing cheating. The reality is that if the goal is just a grade, it is faster and easier to cheat, and with generative AI advancing faster than Hermes on roller blades, there’s very little chance that I’ll catch it. Instead, I need a modern hoplite spear to deflect their temptation to cheat to protect myself and my students from the weaknesses that may lead them to seek solutions from ChatGPT instead of their professor. I’m getting to a point here … syllabus policy statements. Revising our academic integrity policies has never been a more Herculean task and, at times, it will feel like a Sisyphean one. Where do we even start? I suspect that if we start with a list of restrictions and prohibitions, especially when it comes to generative AI, we essentially create a challenge to the cheaters to see if they can outsmart us – and they can.  Instead of setting up an adversarial system, however, an academic integrity policy can be reframed as an agreement – a description of what students have the right to expect of me, their classmates, and each other. Like all modern writers tasked with creating a document with which they have no context or experience, I started my new policy statement by invoking Athena, sacrificing a USB drive, and consulting ChatGPT. It’s the 21st-century version of seeking wisdom from the Oracle, only with fewer riddles and more cat memes. To be honest (which is sort of the point), it generated some great ideas, the most compelling of which being the need for transparency.   Full transparency in teaching requires that I disclose to my students that generative AI is constantly improving, which means that course policies may change during the semester. Most importantly, any policy I create must affirm students’ rights to expect clear instructions about when and how AI is allowed, and it must offer grace when mistakes are made. Their responsibility is to honestly disclose when and how they use AI in their work. In my class, they do this by answering reflection questions before they submit every assignment, but that’s just one method.  Ryan Watkins' "From AI to A+"and Erika Martinez’s “Guidelines for Generative AI Use” each provide excellent starting points for clarifying AI usage for both teachers and students. My disclosure strategy seems to be working, and I’ve learned a lot. The reflection questions reinforce my optimistic philosophy that most students don’t cheat from malice or deception, but from misunderstanding or even from fear.  When students tell me what they have done with the AI, we can discuss what is and is not appropriate.  For example, one of my students showed me how she used ChatGPT to define some rhetorical terms she was too embarrassed to admit she didn’t know; another student used it to explain the opposing point of view to his argument so that he could counter it.  I didn’t tell my students to do either of these things, but they taught me great ways to use the tool to enter the rhetorical conversation.  On the other hand, when a student showed me the “help” she received from ChatGPT, I had to address the fact that she had pretty much let the AI write her entire essay; however, because she was honest – and honestly confused – we worked together to develop an appropriate plan before she was required to redo the entire assignment.  No Fs were needed; some education was, but that’s what I’m here for – literally. So, like a Pedagogical Prometheus, I’m handing my students a fiery gift – the knowledge that generative AI exists and I don’t know everything about it – in hopes that they’ll use it to illuminate their writing and not burn down the entire course. We can even improve their writing and my teaching while avoiding angering the academic gods, one honest conversation at a time. ... View more

Last week, I wrote about women’s attempts to get into the act where speaking was concerned, and about how colleges tried to prevent that from happening. As odd as it seems from our perspective today, those efforts tied in to the growing prominence of writing and the decline in power of speaking. (This is definitely the longest post I have subjected readers to, but I hope some will bear with me.) While oral discourse practices certainly continued into the 19th century, writing grew in power and prestige. In the ancient world, the “artistic proofs”—i.e., those created by the rhetor and delivered orally—were considered most persuasive, but by the 19th century, the “inartistic proofs”—written laws, testimonies, and so on—claimed superiority: “put it in writing” became the byword. Aided by new technologies such as improved typewriters, better printing presses, inexpensive writing equipment, newspapers, magazines, and books proliferated at a great rate, and the reading public expanded exponentially. Colleges, whose enrollments soared in the last half of the century, began to focus much more on writing than speaking. After all, colleges no longer prepared white men just for the bar, the statehouse, or the pulpit, but for careers in business and industry, where writing was increasingly the major mode of communication. And burgeoning enrollments meant that it was harder and harder to have students give speeches of all kinds: writing increasingly became the means of showing that you were worthy of progressing through the college years—and of success in the business world. Much has been written of Harvard’s Boylston Chair of Rhetoric and Oratory, and of the traditional Harvard curriculum that featured four years of rhetorical education. That curriculum began to change not only with growing enrollments but with the appointment of Francis James Child to the Chair in 1851. A folklorist by training and trade, Child turned away from rhetoric and its commitment to speaking in favor of reading and writing: students increasingly spent their time in the analysis and interpretation of written literary texts and wrote their “themes” in response. By the beginning of the 20th century, John Clapp—writing in the English Journal, summed up the situation by noting that “for the purposes of the intellectual life, which college graduates are to lead, talking is of little importance, and writing of very great importance” (23). University Museum at Harvard University Strongly influenced by Harvard’s entry exam, which focused exclusively on print literary texts, and by the Modern Language Association, founded in 1883 to “promote the study of literature and language,” departments of English in the U.S. dropped “rhetoric” or an emphasis on speaking in favor of reading and writing about literature. The MLA, however, fractured in the early twentieth century as scholars interested in the teaching of composition and rhetoric split off in 1911 to form the National Council of Teachers of English in response to what they called the “changing needs and values regarding education, particularly English language education” of an “increasingly diverse student population” who were being failed by the very narrow curriculum offered in schools and colleges. In 1914, teachers of speech and linguists also left the MLA, forming the National Communication Association; this group will hold its 105th convention this fall with a theme of “Rhetoric for Survival.”  Some attention to elocution lingered in pre-college US classes (my grandmother remembered weekly recitations in her Tennessee Quaker school—telling me more than once about the boy in her class who recited the very same poem every week for an entire year without the teacher noticing it!). But by the mid-twentieth century, the shift from the ear and mouth (for speaking) to the eye and hand (for writing) seemed complete. In the United States, first-year writing programs and graduate programs in composition became ubiquitous, and few thought to question the status of writing “properly” as a key to success.  When Walter Ong and Eric Havelock began publishing works about the rise of literacy in the ancient world, they seemed to reify the centrality of writing not just to academic and professional success but to thought itself. In Orality and Literacy Ong describes the revolution in technology that was writing, a revolution he viewed as rippling throughout society, transforming the way people think as they move from the immediate and concrete ways of knowing in an oral culture to the more abstract ways of knowing in a literate culture. In his words: Writing, commitment of the word to space, enlarges the potentiality of language almost beyond measure, [and] restructures thought (7-8). In much of his work, then, Ong posits a tension between the “old oral, mnemonic world of imitation, aggregative, redundant, copious, traditionalist, warmly human, participatory,” and the “analytic, sparse, exact, abstract, visualist, immobile world of [Platonic] ideas” (164) and writing. Many scholars (such as Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole, Brian Street and Beth Daniells) pushed back against a “great divide” or “great leap” theory of literacy, rejecting what they saw as a totalizing view of writing as a technology that transforms thought. Indeed, in his later work, Ong is more judicious in the claims he makes for writing, perhaps recognizing that Eric Havelock and others might have gone too far in arguing for a direct causal link between literacy and abstract or ”philosophical” thought. Janet Emig, another scholar who compares speech and writing, earned a Ph.D. in Education at Harvard, where she studied cognitive theories and student learning. Her study of the composing processes of 12th graders was a groundbreaking book that took the relatively new field of “rhetoric and composition” in the U.S. by storm. But her 1977 essay, “Writing as Mode of Learning” also worked to underscore the primary importance of writing. Emig opens this seminal article by saying that “Writing represents a unique mode of learning—not merely valuable, not merely special, but unique . . . writing possesses a cluster of attributes that correspond uniquely to certain powerful learning strategies” (122). Emig makes clear that she is not denigrating the importance of talking to learning, but she goes on to focus on the differences between the two and to argue that if talk is important to learning, writing is absolutely vital. She warns against blurring or ignoring these differences, which she spends the rest of the article enumerating. Arguing that “writing involves the fullest possible functioning of the brain, which entails the active participation in the process of both the left and right hemispheres Writing is markedly bispheral,” Emig goes on to describe writing as learned behavior (speaking is natural, she says); as a technology (speaking is organic); as slower than most talking and thus better at enabling learning. Writing results in a visible graphic product, and is a stark and barren medium (in contrast to the rich luxuriance of talk). She concludes that writing has always had an “aura” or “mystique” surrounding it (while speaking has been seen as mundane and ephemeral) and that “because writing is often our representation of the world made visible, embodying both process and product, writing is more readily a form and source of learning than talking” (124). I remember reading this essay—and then rereading it—as an awe-struck graduate student who not only studied writing and rhetoric in my PhD program but worked hard to legitimate writing studies as of equal significance and importance to the reading of literature. So by the time Emig and Ong were publishing their work on literacy, I was a passionate advocate of writing and of its importance to research, to theories of communication, and to teaching. I am still an advocate of writing, but as I said earlier, now I see it differently than I did then; I see the complexities and the destructive hold that an obsession with “proper” writing has had on generations of writers. And as I came to interrogate my own advocacy of writing and writing itself, I began asking “and what about speaking?” Indeed, it was hard not to ask such questions as the seismic shift in technologies of communication became impossible to ignore. Walter Ong had written about “secondary orality,” that is orality that is singularly marked by writing; I began to think about “secondary literacy,” that is writing that is singularly marked by speaking.  Cindy Selfe answered my question—“what about speaking?”—in a brilliant 2009 essay, “The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimedia Composing.” In this essay, Selfe traces the history of the aural composing modalities of speech, music, and sound and shows how they have been systematically eclipsed by the written word. This is a state of affairs Selfe finds understandable but regrettable: The contemporary adherence to alphabetic-only composition constrains the semiotic efforts of individuals and groups who value multiple modalities of expression. (616) In short, the view of writing as the desirable literacy has severely limited the communicative capabilities of writers everywhere. But Selfe too wants to resist a dichotomous binary between speaking and writing, and she tries to do this by adopting the term “aurality”: In using the term ”aurality” rather than the more common orality, I hope to resist models of an oral/literate divide and simplistic characterizations of cultures or groups as either oral or literate in their communicative practices. Humans make and communicate meaning through a combination of modalities—sound, still and moving images, words among them—and using a variety of media. As Selfe points out, during this period the growing status of vision “gradually undermined the position still occupied by other forms of sensory experience.” Seeing is believing. Put it in writing. So the spoken word, with its “soulful’ knowledge, turned inward to the largely silent practices exemplified by St. Jerome’s suspiciously silent reading. Great Shakespearean works were now not heard but rather read and subjected to written analysis: classrooms were quiet spaces where students read and wrote and observed.  Some white women along with African Americans and Hispanics in the U.S. and Indigenous people across North America often retained an attachment to what Selfe terms the network of aurality. Despite often being denied higher education, members of this group still managed to learn writing skills—and to deploy them with passion and precision—while rejecting the violence of literacy and also holding on to oral traditions: storytelling, embodied performances and presentations, church-related activities, verbal games, and other parts of what Peter Elbow terms “vernacular eloquence” in his book-length discussion of “what speech can bring to writing." And indeed, orality/aurality persisted as a kind of steady undertow to writing: teachers and scholars continued to refer to “voice,” to “tone,” to “rhythm," to the flow and musicality of prose. Still, as Selfe notes, “By the end of the twentieth century, the ideological privileging of writing was so firmly established that it had become almost fully naturalized.” During the period of the late 90s and early 2000s, as I continued to explore the history of writing (I taught a course on the history of writing at Ohio State and the Bread Loaf School of English for well over a decade), including its powers and its problems, I began to teach another course that I called “The Language Wars.” This course traced the struggle for the vernacular and the rise of vernacular languages across Europe, then shifted to the United States and the obsession with error-free prose as “good” writing—and the inevitable backlash against this obsession coming from all directions, and especially from women and people of color. We read and interrogated the Students’ Right to their Own Language documents and examined the AAVE debate in detail. We read the work of Michelle Cliff, who said after finishing her Ph.D. in, I think, Victorian literature, that she never wanted to read, or write, again; of fiery women orators such as Sojourner Truth, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Anna Julia Cooper—and many others Shirley Logan has introduced us to. We read Gloria Anzaldua and studied the ways she mixed Spanish, English, Tex-Mex. We read Anishinaabe cultural theorist Gerald Vizenor’s Lost Voices and Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance, a term he defines as “an active sense of presence.” I remember the excitement in our classroom as we explored these challenges to traditional print literacy and the even greater excitement as we began to compose pieces ourselves, pieces that mixed modes, languages, dialects, and soundscapes. Gloria Anzaldua When I offered this course, it was always over-enrolled, and perhaps this should have warned me that a new course I called “Writing 2.0: the Art of the Digital Essay” might not be as successful. I arrived at the first class to find only eight students in it. Taken aback, I asked them, as I always do, to introduce themselves and to tell us why they had chosen this course. The first three students said essentially the same thing: “Well, I almost did not choose this class, but I heard you were an OK teacher so I took a chance.” And why did they “almost” not choose it. Again, they were unanimous: the word “essay.” One said “that word makes me think of old people bossing me around—like “don’t get outside the lines in your coloring book.” And of course, what they had in mind was the kind of five-paragraph themes they’d written in high school and what they considered the “long boring” essays featured in many English classes. I had a hard time convincing them that the very word “essay’ carries a connotation of experimentation, of trying something out. They weren’t having it. So, when Adam Banks rose to deliver—and to perform—his CCCC chair’s address in 2015, I was ready for “Funk, Flight, and Freedom.” Adam’s talk mixed rhythms from jazz and hip hop with echoes of the African American sermonic tradition, mixed theorizing with personal anecdote, mixed high-falutin’ academic language with oral vernacular. In one particularly memorable moment, Banks paused to address “the essay,” saying that on this day, he declared it officially “retired” (long and loud applause). Speaking directly to the retiree, Adam said “don’t worry, Professor Essay; you can keep your office campus" and we will even “continue to give awards in your honor.” This is the tradition of resistance, of challenge, of counterpoint that Cindy Selfe explores and celebrates in her essay on aurality and multimodal composing. As she points out, and as Adam Banks demonstrated, discourse practices today are multimodal, multilingual, multimedia rich; they mix genres and styles across multiple semiotic channels. This shift to aurality has been enabled by digital technologies that are changing so quickly we can hardly stay abreast of them, as the possibilities for digital literacies seem almost endless. Print has not and will not disappear, but it is now accompanied by myriad blogs, vlogs, audio and video and imagistic compositions as well, full of illustrations and sounds and animations. Acknowledging the irony of a print text about aurality, Selfe includes four student examples of aural composing, with links so that readers can hear the spoken words. I was thinking of these aural compositions when I listened to friend and colleague Alice Wingwall, a noted photographer who lost her sight in 2000 but continues to work, talk to those attending an exhibit of hers about what she called “my soundscape world.” Increasingly in the U.S., universities are turning to writing programs to provide instruction in oral and multimodal forms of composing. We began this practice at Stanford in 2002, piloting a second required course that focuses on oral/multimodal presentations. In the same spirit, Stanford renamed its writing center the Hume Center for Writing and Speaking, and is expanding its support for multimodal compositions as well. Such moves underscore the point that no single mode of expression is able to convey all the meanings within a text. And what texts students are producing! Digital storytelling is going on everywhere I turn. Stanford’s Storytelling Project, which started as a second-year writing course well over a decade ago, is now a permanent fixture on campus. Just a week ago I was on campus for the Lunsford Oral Presentation of Research Awards, given to a second year student every term. We’ve been giving this award for about a decade now and I get to go every year to hear the winners make their presentation. Today, it seems, writing and speaking are thoroughly intertwined. Selfe concludes her article by reiterating that while she wants us to understand the historical dimensions of the rise of writing and the decline of orality as a general shift, she is not arguing against writing or the value we place on it. Moreover, teachers of writing and speaking must remember that while students today are “intuitively aware” of these changes and shifts, they still require help in understanding them fully—and utilizing them, and we must do so “in ways that are rhetorically effective, critically aware, morally responsible, and personally satisfying” (624). That’s quite a challenge to all of us. And while I have perhaps belabored Selfe’s points a bit too much, I do think it is critically important that we see the big picture of literacy changes across the millennia, that we know where we have been as well as where we are now. And where we are now – well, there’s the rub. After all, Selfe was writing a decade ago. Just think of what we have seen in terms of literacies and technologies in the last ten years. I want to move toward a conclusion, then, by considering some of these changes and innovations, in terms of their promise as well as their problematics. Yes, the relationship between writing and speaking has shifted, but as I’ve just noted, the relationship is still there, as it has been throughout history, though perhaps more intertwined and intense than ever. In fact, MIT researcher Tara Shankar has even offered a new word to capture that relationship: “spriting.” Thank you for your patience. Next week I will offer concluding thoughts and list the sources I have been relying on. Onward!   Images via Wikimedia Commons ... View more

I have written about my small FYC/Corequisite writing course this semester and the challenges that we have faced (sustained silence and misconceptions about difficulty, for example).   I have wondered at times if gaps in age and experience are insurmountable obstacles to teaching effectiveness for me. Case in point: I introduced a discussion of image analysis with a cartoon drawing of Bill Gates holding a vaccine, but not a single student in the class that day knew who Bill Gates was.  It was a teachable moment, for sure, as we searched for information on Gates, vaccines, and protests.  Still, I doubted, yet again, what I was accomplishing. The fact that three students from our already small class disappeared following Thanksgiving break only added to the frustration.  Most of the tough drafting work was complete: after Thanksgiving, students select, polish, and annotate pieces, and they craft a summative reflection to serve as an introduction to their portfolios.   I hoped the final two weeks of class would function as a workshop of sorts—open-ended space for students to collaborate and determine what they wanted to work on, getting feedback and help as needed.   But on our first day back, with a noticeably smaller group in attendance, the students drifted into isolated spaces and worked on their own.  For the next class, I invited my senior writing fellows to visit the class for open-ended conferences.  The fellows had partnered with these students outside of class, but this was the first time I had invited them into the classroom. Each of them sat next to one of the first-year writers and had a few minutes for casual chatting.  Then I heard them dive in: “So tell me what you’re working on.” “Which assignment is giving you the most trouble?” “What’s going into your portfolio?” Their talk continued.   The first-year writers began to respond, tentatively at first, and talk about their work—what they had done, what they wanted to do, what they were confused about.  In fact, these were all the things they were so often hesitant to say to me. After several minutes of these paired conversations, I heard one of the fellows call out to another fellow sitting several feet away:  “Hey, what’s that word you use when you are expecting something but you really have no reason to expect it?”  “Like a false hope?” Photo by John Schnobrich via Unsplash “Maybe.  Or ‘in vain?’” “Uh… that isn’t it.  What about…?” A few minutes passed.  The fellows were talking to each other again, but also pulled the first-year writers in: “Does this sound odd to you?” “Are you saying this?  I think it’s this word that’s tripping me up…” “Hey Dr. Moore, what do you think about when you hear this word…?” “Hey Dr. Moore, could you look at the title with us?” Talk crossed back and forth across the room, from one pair to another.   Conversations expanded, then pairs returned to more focused work. Once again this semester, learning happened in ways I did not anticipate.  My students were engaging in what Myhill and Newman (2016) call “high-quality classroom talk;” in other words, talk that is central to the development of linguistic and rhetorical control.   Students and fellows talked to each other without triangulating through me; I listened, affirmed, and supplied information as needed.   I watched and smiled. I had forgotten how much I enjoy hearing “writer talk”—and I think my students enjoyed it, too. ... View more

This is my fourth and final post focusing on the work being done by two-year college teacher-scholars who contributed to Teaching Accelerated and Corequisite Composition, a collection I edited for Utah State University Press that was published in November.   This month, I spoke with Melissa Long, an English professor at Porterville College in California’s Central Valley. Though her focus is in the classroom teaching college composition (both with and without a corequisite) and British literature, she also works as the campus outcomes coordinator, facilitates a community of practice for student-centered teaching, and oversees the college’s implementation of AB 705.   In her chapter, “Finding the ‘Right’ Amount of Rigor in the Research Paper,” Melissa argues that we should not burden our students with undue expectations. Instead, instructors of research-based writing should “assess the student’s ability to demonstrate research, critical thinking, and competent writing,” keeping “our focus on [those] threshold concepts” and not “letting other factors seep into our assessments.” Nevertheless, she writes from the perspective of an instructor who believes that students should work hard and be rewarded for their hard work.   For Melissa, the most important element of her chapter for those currently teaching corequisite/accelerated composition is reminding instructors “how they are holding themselves and their students accountable for achieving the outcomes of the course and at the same time, are not making a college education unattainable for some students.” Melissa wants to push her students to become better writers, but she doesn’t want to push them so hard that they leave the class: “Even if instructors are not currently using the research paper in their college composition courses, I hope they’ll take the time to consider how they are assessing to ensure learning. If they are using the research paper, I hope readers will consider where they can adapt and update the assignment and how they can add scaffolding to help underprepared students.”   Reflecting on her chapter about the research paper more than a year after it was written, Melissa acknowledges that “sometimes we get so focused on the writing portion that we don’t realize where there might be a breakdown in the other skills we are teaching, most often, reading and critical thinking. If students don’t know how to read a college-level text and don’t have experience thinking about complex, multi-faceted ideas, the breakdown is happening long before the first rough draft of an essay and yet we might not recognize the issues, or if we do, we find them in a final draft that is bare and anemic.” Melissa believes that “while the research paper might be the summative assessment at the end of the course and provide evidence that a student is able to put their reading, writing, and critical thinking skills together, I’ve found that if I include formative assessments throughout the semester, I can monitor how well students are demonstrating all of the necessary skills that go into the research paper and address them individually if one is not as developed as it needs to be.”   Teaching Accelerated and Corequisite was in the final stages of production when ChatGPT came on the scene, so its absence from the book, and its prevalence in current thinking about writing instruction, is not surprising. Like so many of her colleagues, Melissa is “really anxious about AI and how we teach our writing classes in a world where it exists and will only become more advanced over time. At Porterville College, we have instructors who are trying to strictly ban its use from their classes and others who are whole-heartedly embracing it as a tool that should be used to its fullest.” At the moment, she is “cautiously trying to figure out where the line is between a new method of cheating and a helpful resource to enhance student work (especially for those students who are learning English as a second language). I certainly don’t have the answers yet, but I’m seeking as much information as I can and enjoy learning how others are approaching the issue.”   ... View more

NOTE: I tell the following story with the intention of working to alleviate small frustrations in the contexts of times when writing, teaching, and learning might feel terribly fraught, if not irrelevant and impossible, even though acknowledging historic and contemporary atrocities and offering sympathy is not enough. Given the cataclysmic and too often unspoken dimensions of the Thanksgiving story, it remains critical to keep in mind the catastrophic and deeply distressing challenges of our current historical moment.  Autumn in New York: A One Way street sign is framed by blue sky and a tree with red leaves and bare branches. Not shown: two people lugging home a ten-pound frozen turkey on a 6-block walk home. Photo by Susan Bernstein November 2023   How is cooking a turkey like writing an essay? I never thought I would ask that question because I never planned to cook a turkey. Nevertheless, by the end of Thanksgiving weekend, I had revised my perspective. But first a story that helps to illustrate the processes of changing my mind. The week before Thanksgiving, my partner and I won a ten-pound frozen turkey in a raffle at the senior center. We bought the tickets to support the center, but we never expected to win a turkey. Our number was called and we were incredulous. My working memory immediately hit overload. My partner and I had a quiet holiday at home, just the two of us. What would we do with a ten-pound turkey? “We will eat it,”  said my partner.  “But who will cook it?” I asked.  “We will cook it,” my partner said. But I did not know how. Because my years in junior high school coincided with second wave feminism’s call for liberation from poorly compensated and unpaid housework, it was a point of pride that I had nearly failed home economics. At the time, home ec was required for girls only; we were taught how to sew and cook and furnish a home. All of these tasks required following very intricate instructions to the letter–something that, as an undiagnosed neurodivergent tween, I could not do. My working memory (although I would not have called it that at the time) often flooded with frustration, and defaulted to DIY (“Do It Yourself”) mode. DIY was not the preferred option in home ec, and all these years later, my working memory rebelled at the thought of all the intricate instructions involved cooking such an immense turkey.   First we had to carry the turkey six blocks home. Half-way there, I wondered if we should have called a cab. A ten-pound frozen turkey is not ten pounds when it is frozen solid. The turkey came in a plastic shopping bag, and the bag handles broke very quickly. Between the two of us,  we traded off holding the frozen bird in the broken-handled plastic bag on fairly deserted residential streets. Finally, I remembered that I had a cloth shopping bag in my backpack, and the turkey fit right in. Between the two of us, we eventually managed to lug our turkey home. More drama followed. Would the turkey fit in our small freezer (It did.)? Would we be able to find the right pans and utensils to cook the turkey? (We did, after several trips to grocery and big box stores.) How would we know when it was completely defrosted and ready to cook? (We didn’t. I used all my upper body strength to pull out a giblets package and turkey neck covered in frost and seemingly stuck inside the body cavity. We let the turkey sit in cold water afterward.) Should we brine it, or baste it, or rub it with olive oil? (We didn’t, for simplicity’s sake.) Did we really need a rack? (We didn’t. We covered the bottom of the pan with raw carrots and celery stalks.)  And so on.  The unexpected force needed to remove the turkey neck caused a revelation. Is this what students feel at the beginning of the semester when faced with writing their first college essay? That completing an essay now involved a significant, and often much longer, focus on process including discovery, drafts, missteps, and revisions? That the fixed set of rules students have shared with me over the years were now much more complicated? That writing no longer involved following intricate instructions (as students often explained) to yield a standard product? Over the years, students have recounted what this product was supposed to look like (approximately): Five hundred words, five separate paragraphs, 100 words for each paragraph, and five sentences per paragraph. Nice and precise, and be sure to not use “I” or to include your own opinion. DIY modifications would generally not yield finished products that students needed to achieve high scores on the many required high-stakes tests that seemed to determine a successful future.  But college writing isn’t usually like that, and, for many of my students, college writing is a giant step outside the comfort zone. Suddenly process matters just as much as product. Did this analogy hold? Was process as important as product?  While I did not expect our turkey to look like the ones I saw on the Food Network website, I also did not want us to contract salmonella poisoning. So I did what I imagine students do when they try to figure out how to write for college courses: checking the internet (looking up different recipes for cooking a turkey), watched YouTube (videos of chefs demonstrating various steps of turkey preparation) crowdsourced with more experienced friends (contacting folks who I knew liked to cook),and even a judicious use of AI for further assistance with directions (texting the turkey company’s chatbot when the built-in meat thermometer didn’t pop out after four hours of cooking in a properly preheated oven). There was drama, and there were missteps and steps revised. My partner and I made up the revised steps as we went along. We realized we had probably not cooked a whole frozen turkey in this millennium, or at least in many many years. But in the end we had dinner, and the next day I made turkey stock soup from the bones and the drippings, only loosely following the very helpful recipe a friend texted me the day before Thanksgiving. In the end, what I thought would be a disaster felt more like a sense of accomplishment in completing a task that seemed inconceivable in the beginning.  In working to stay focused in these last weeks of fall term, my aim is that students feel a sense of accomplishment. In taking on tasks that seem impossible at the start, no outcome is ever guaranteed. Yet learning to mitigate the trials and tribulations of the writing process remains key to undertaking the goals of first-year college writing. Through steps, missteps, and revisions, and hopefully with much less drama than my turkey story, students can begin to recognize what it means to learn and to continue to grow as writers. ... View more