This spring, I am offering five tips to students writing in each of the four genres covered in my textbook, Creative Writing: Four Genres in Brief. This time around, the focus is creative nonfiction. Of all the genres typically taught in an introductory creative writing course, students are most likely to be familiar with the conventions of the essay. Unfortunately, many of them think of the form as a stultifying exercise in repeating material already taught by the teacher—the opposite of “creative,” and an endeavor to be completed as quickly as possible, nowadays possibly with the help of Artificial Intelligence. Fortunately, the creative nonfiction essay, which can take the form of a memoir, an argument, a lyric essay, literary journalism, or a variety of other incarnations, draws students back to the pure pleasure of recording their own thoughts in ways that readers will admire, appreciate, and happily return to. Here are my Top 5 Tips for Beginning Creative Nonfiction Students: Tell a story. After many years of writing essays for school, you may have come to believe that, as long as you address the basic parameters of your assignment, your essay will be perfectly fine. Alas, a dull, meandering text that doesn’t engage the reader is detrimental to any piece of creative nonfiction. To get the narrative juices flowing, borrow some of the techniques you learned from fiction writing—creating believable characters, employing memorable dialogue, vividly setting a scene—and give your readers a jolt of excitement as they realize you are going to keep them interested in your essay. Use concrete details. One of the surest ways to keeps readers engaged is to employ concrete details—references to things they can see, hear, smell, taste and touch. Granted, if you are writing about something that happened years ago, you may have to do some serious memory work (if the events happened to you), or some extensive research (if they did not). That said, whatever time you invest in bringing the world you’re writing about to life will be time well spent. Write with style. When you’re slogging through another assigned essay that you may not care too much about, it’s easy to fall into the habit of just typing out the first thing that comes into your mind. However, creative nonfiction is all about expressing yourself as eloquently and memorably as possible. Revision is crucial. There are many differently styles you can turn to, from the plain and straightforward to the elegant and refined, but whichever one you choose, you should dive in, embrace it, then make it fully your own. Be clear about your own role in the essay. The personal essay frequently (and rightly) has the author/narrator at its center, and if you choose that point of view, be sure to think about how you are coming across to your readers. Are you trustworthy and credible, or do you seem uncertain and ambiguous in regard to your material? And don’t forget that you don’t necessarily have to take the central role. Plenty of interesting essays have the author on the edge of the action, looking on and commenting as appropriate. Tell the truth. The first four tips address the “creative” aspect of this genre, but they are meaningless if you don’t adhere to the “nonfiction” element of the essay. Sure, “truth” is a hotly contested topic in our contentious times, but every writer knows in their bones what they feel to be the truth. Naturally, if you “feel” something happened when it didn’t, that’s not truth. But if you are writing and sense that the words you are laying down don’t reflect real events, then you know it’s time to stop, reread, and revise toward honesty. ... View more

Kim Haimes-Korn is a Professor of English and Digital Writing at Kennesaw State University. She also trains graduate student teachers in composition theory and pedagogy. Kim’s teaching philosophy encourages dynamic learning, critical digital literacies, and multimodal composition. She focuses on students’ powers to create their own knowledge through language and various “acts of composition.”  You can reach Kim at khaimesk@kennesaw.edu or visit her website: Acts of Composition     Jeffrey David Greene is an Associate Professor of Professional and Creative Writing at Kennesaw State University. His research focuses on game studies, narratology, and first-year composition. He is currently the RCHSS Faculty Fellow of Academic Innovation focused on AI in Education.       This post is the second in a series where I collaborate with my colleague, Jeff Greene to reflect on AI and the issues surrounding this paradigm shift. In our last post, Questioning AI we looked at some of the larger questions affecting policy, ethics, and pedagogy.  In this post, we want to focus on application and offer some ideas for classroom practice.  Both of our assignments lean towards helping students to develop a critical eye and rhetorical awareness towards AI content. Kim’s Assignment: Revising for Humanity Finding the Humanity Photo by Drew Dizzy Graham on UnsplashI think the most disturbing thing about AI for writing teachers is that it will replace human composition and get in the way of students’ abilities to think and write both critically and creatively. We are concerned about them skipping over the complicated learning processes involved in idea generation and rhetorical awareness. I have played around with AI and considered the rhetorical nature of the content. It is hard to put my finger on it but when I read it or view an AI generated design there is a recognizable lack of authenticity. The writing is too patterned.  The language is stiff. The art feels static and overly edged. It is missing a sense of humanity, a sense of human realness and creativity.  In this assignment, Revising For Humanity, I encourage students to look closely at AI generated texts and think about what makes them human and what makes them machine. The purpose of the assignment is to get them to think about revision in a new way through the lenses of humanity and rhetorical awareness.    Steps to the Assignment:     Have students familiarize themselves with an AI platform.  Ask them to experiment with generating texts on subjects of their interest.  Teach them “prompt engineering” through follow up questions.  Guide them to recognize the relationship between their ideas and the kinds of prompts they generate.  Asking good questions gives them agency in the composition. Check out and share this article on prompt engineering from Harvard’s teaching resources. Individually or in groups, analyze a chosen AI text.  I like them to approach it rhetorically and look at style, content, and context along with other rhetorical lenses.  Identify areas in the text to “revise for humanity.”  Places where the voice feels flat, or the language doesn’t feel right, or the content feels awkward.  Have them look for patterns in style and logic.  Use a Google doc to identify areas and comment.  I like to have them screenshot the marked up version to submit in their reflection. Next, they can extend the ideas through searching for real 😉 sources that bring meaning to the text. Encourage them to substantiate through their own experiences and perspectives. Finally, ask students to revise the text based on what they have learned.  Reflect.  I think this assignment is best wrapped up with reflection and class discussion in which students articulate why and how they Revised for Humanity.  They can share their marked-up versions to articulate their choices. Jeff’s Assignment: Flex Your Bot**bleep** Detector One of the scariest aspects of Gen AI is the ease with which fake information can be generated with a few keystrokes. Propagandists are already harnessing this technology to create misinformation and flood the internet with a cacophony of “bot**bleep**,” a term defined as “information created by Generative AI with no regard for truth and then used by humans (with no regard for truth either) to persuade others” (Kowalkiewicz).   With this proliferation of misinformation in mind, it’s important that our students critically analyze Gen AI content from the ground up with an understanding of how LLMs function and why AI generated content always needs to be viewed through a critical lens. The goal of this brief exercise is to develop a stronger bot**bleep** detector. Steps to the Assignment Have students start by engaging in short, extemporaneous writing on their relationship with Gen AI and research: What do they know about the technology? Do they feel that the content it generates is trustworthy? Why or why not? What part could or should AI play in knowledge generation or research? Introduce the complexities of Gen AI and the concept of “bot**bleep**” through this full article or slide deck where authors Timothy Hannigan, Ian P. McCarthy, and Andrew Spicer describe the process by which an AI can “hallucinate” and generate bot**bleep**. The slide deck does a particularly good job of explaining how LLMs function and should be treated to avoid epistemic risk. Next, we’ll try to engineer some bot**bleep**. Have students log into whatever free (or paid if supported by the university and available equitably to all) LLM and try to get the AI to answer a research question. You may find that using near-future predictive questions such as: “Please describe the economy of Paraguay in 2027” has a high propensity to generate truthful-sounding bot**bleep** from many LLMs.   Students should then probe the AI further with requests for more information, citations, and critical interrogations about the provisional knowledge that the AI has generated. Students should attempt to verify all information gathered through different sources such as direct citations (if they exist!). Finally ask students to write reflectively on the initial information generated by the AI. Was it verifiable information from the start or did it just sound truthful? How much of the information was fabricated? In what ways could the information be verified independently? How should this output be treated critically? How might you use (or not use) a Chatbot in a research project given your knowledge of its propensity towards bot**bleep**? If you intend to have students use Gen AI for research, it may be worthwhile to discuss approaches and expectations for using these tools. One additional resource is from the MLA-CCCC Task Force for Evaluating the Use of AI in Scholarship and Creative Activity. Their initial guidance on transparency, accuracy, source attribution, responsibility, originality, and quality make for a good starting point in these discussions. ... View more

Earthquake Writing Neurodivergent Teaching   On Friday April 5 at 10:23 a.m. at my home in Queens, N.Y., the furniture began to shake.  It was the day after a class art museum field trip and workshop and I was at home making a multimedia project for my students. The project was a collage designed around one of my favorite James Baldwin quotes that I pasted in the center: “All Safety is an Illusion.”  My partner was away for the morning. Our cat was in the other room with a door between us. The cat is always curious about my multimedia materials, and who can blame him? But his curiosity necessitated a closed door.  I hastily packed up my materials so I could open the door. By then the furniture was no longer shaking, and I realized that we had been in an earthquake. I had been in several earthquakes before but never managed to feel the shaking. I mostly slept through them, and for one I was in the depths of the subway on a moving train.  But this one didn’t feel like much. There didn’t seem to be too much disruption in the other room, though the cat was not happy. The news said the earthquake was magnitude 4.8. In Manhattan, the trains appeared to be running on time, and structural damage was minor to non-existent. The news showed footage from viewers’ home security cameras. There was a bit of shaking and then all was still.  Screenshot of an emergency alert from my phone: Earthquake in the NYC area. A correction was offered later. The earthquake was 4.8 magnitude, not 4.7. Photo by Susan Bernstein April 5, 2024 Soon afterward we received an emergency alert with an all-clear to “continue usual activities.” But what did that mean exactly? That everything was somehow back to normal? That we could go about our business and forget about what had just happened? I continued working on “All Safety is an Illusion.” Screenshot of an emergency alert from my phone: All clear with a possibility of aftershocks. Photo by Susan Bernstein April 4, 2024 The earthquake happened three days before the solar eclipse. The next day, Saturday Night Live offered a “Weekend Update” piece about these two events, featuring the Earthquake and the Eclipse. Laughter helped release tears. I didn’t think I was scared at the time of the earthquake, but the mayor’s response was slow, and when the response finally came, we were told to stay inside.  The night of the earthquake, I had a nightmare about being alone in the dark, so it felt good to laugh. The day of the eclipse, my partner and I watched the NASA live stream of the eclipse unfolding across North America. In Queens, the eclipse was partial, but we knew folks in the middle of the U.S. who experienced full totality. From their texts, I felt awe and wonder. It was clear that words weren’t enough to describe the experience.  At the same time, I thought of my students. I considered what might be helpful for them to grow their writing. My students this semester are far from home, and many are overseas for the first time. What would they need to process at this moment? I attempted a prompt for an in-class writing activity: Since we last met, our city has experienced an earthquake and a partial eclipse. With that in mind, I invite you to reflect (in writing and/or drawing) on what one or both of these events means to you. Include quotes from our James Baldwin readings to ground your writing. If you made a drawing, write down what you made and why. With insights from trauma-informed care (which includes attention to “safety, trustworthiness and transparency, peer support, collaboration and mutuality, empowerment voice and choice, and cultural, historical, and gender issues”), as well as an understanding that not everyone might want to write about traumatic experiences, I also offered in-class writing options that would offer students opportunities to reflect on our field trip to the art museum, which was the subject of a major essay whose due date was impending. Most of the students chose to write about the earthquake.  I considered how the major essay assignment could be tweaked to include the earthquake writing. The goal of the assignment is to document experiential learning, to offer words to process an experience. 4 days afterward, writing about the earthquake seemed to provide such an experience. As they reported from small groups, some of the students mentioned that they found a powerful connection to Baldwin’s words: “All safety is an illusion.” James Baldwin: “All safety is an Illusion.” Collage and photo by Susan Bernstein. April 5, 2024 As a writing teacher, I understand that words can be imperfect substitutes for experience. What’s more important, it seems to me, is the effort to find words–or, as Baldwin suggests, “the effort behind the words.” Success isn’t guaranteed, and that ought to be a given. Words can’t be forced. The hope is, however, that teachers and students, writing together, can find the time and space to open ourselves to discover possibilities for words, especially in the presence of earthquakes and their aftershocks.  ... View more

I’ve been collecting sentences for a long time. And one kind of sentence I look for—and love—is one whose structure somehow enacts or performs what it describes. Recently I ran across such a sentence I found almost SIXTY years ago. It was written by “new journalist” Tom Wolfe and published in Esquire on March 1, 1965, with the title “The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson. Yes!” The article itself is vintage Wolfe. He traces the “legend” of Junior Johnson, a good old boy from the hills of North Carolina, who bootlegged moonshine along the back country roads, outfoxing the local law enforcers – for years. He went on to be a famous race car driver in the fairly early days of NASCAR, as well as a successful landowner. But my favorite passage in the article is one long run on sentence that mirrors one of Johnson’s dare-devil escapes from the sheriff. Here it is: Finally, one night they had Junior trapped on the road up toward the bridge around Millersville, there’s no way out of there, they had the barricades up and they could hear this souped-up car roaring around the bend, and here it comes—but suddenly they can hear a siren and see a red light flashing in the grille, so they think it’s another agent, and boy, they run out like ants and pull those barrels and boards and sawhorses out of the way, and then—Ggghhzzzzzzzhhhhhhggggggzzzzzzzeeeeeong!—gawdam! there he goes again, it was him, Junior Johnson!, with a gawdam agent’s si-reen and a red light in his grille! Tom Wolfe at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1988   The clauses pile up, barreling along, taking hairpin curves . . . and then . . . the long made-up word meant perhaps to sound like squealing tires—and “there he goes again.” Left the law in the dust, outfoxed again. I can imagine Wolfe had a lot of fun writing this sentence, and it’s one I have shown students from time to time over the decades when we were playing with sentences, asking them to think of an event in their lives they could describe—using and stretching and pushing basic sentence structures to try to embody the description. Having fun with syntax! So here’s to Tom Wolfe and to the 1960s, which gave us so much experimentation in writing. We are living in another great moment of syntactic creativity—from the language of hip hop to the magic of the best advertising—even to business reports aimed at entertaining as well as informing shareholders. It might be a good time to ask students to go on a sentence treasure hunt to see what they come up with—and to challenge them to have some fun with sentences!   Image via Wikimedia Commons ... View more

I wrote earlier about “insight on demand,” the way our assigned reflections require students to find and articulate an insight that demonstrates learning (and validates our teaching)—all according to a schedule.  Over the past few weeks, I’ve encountered a different challenge in one of my advanced classes:  in individual project conferences and assignments, several students not only cited personal experience in support of broad generalizations, but they also cited previous self-citations (“as I’ve said before,” “as I’ve pointed out in my assignments,” etc.).  Personal experience is, of course, a valid source of evidence for literacy practices and language development.  But when personal experience is used as the basis for sweeping generalizations—or when disciplinary practice and tradition are summarily dismissed because they do not align with beliefs based on personal experience—we’ve got work to do.  Photo by John Schnobrich via Unsplash In my FYC and corequisite courses, I generally have to help students value their literacy experiences as a groundwork for further learning;  they too often dismiss their experiences as irrelevant or inferior. But in advanced courses, particularly introductions to linguistics and applied linguistics for language pedagogy, I occasionally encounter students who seem to think that their experiences as language users or language learners are sufficient expertise to judge or ignore decades of scholarship.   Novel constructs or technical definitions of known terms are rejected in favor of personal definitions and understandings.  My prodding during conferences this week yielded pushback along these lines (with my responses following in italics): “Well, as I’ve said before, I do not believe that aptitude can be quantified…” (But does that also mean it cannot be investigated?) “I plan to draw on my experience in the project; are you saying I cannot do that?”  (Of course not, but I did say that experience needs to be interrogated and interpreted in light of published research.) “I can tell you about backsliding in language learning.  It happened to me.” (But did you look at how cognitive theorists define and account for such backsliding? They suggest it’s more than having a new teacher.) Good teachers always provide explicit error correction.  (Of everything? Doesn’t the context of the error make a difference?) I am a visual learner, so a good language teacher will give me visual input.  (Did you read Willingham’s review of learning styles? What would he say about this statement?)  How do you respond when students privilege their own experience over a scholarly tradition or consensus?   What do you say when students resist substantive or reflective interaction with assigned readings or discussions?  I’d love to hear from you. ... View more

This spring, I am offering five tips to students writing in each of the four genres covered in my textbook, Creative Writing: Four Genres in Brief. My last post discussed poetry writing, and this week I shift focus to fiction. Fiction writing is arguably the most popular genre among first-year writers. Unlike the case with poetry, students probably read a good bit of fiction before entering their college composition course; it’s possible you can build on their knowledge of how narrative works, which is often strongest in genres such as fantasy, romance and sci-fi. Of course, literary fiction tends to privilege character and style over incident and spectacle, so students may benefit from rethinking their storytelling priorities.   Here are my Top 5 Tips for Beginning Fiction Writing Students: Make sure something significant happens. “Where’s the trouble?” my fiction writing teacher James Gordon Bennett used to ask our class during every workshop, and it’s a question worth repeating every time you compose a new story. The sort of conflicts most of us happily avoid in real life are often embraced in fiction. And something important has to be at stake. The problem might be trivial in the reader’s eyes, but it should matter a great deal to your protagonist. Don’t make your main character too good or too evil. Yes, you want your protagonist to stand out and be someone readers want to know more about, but if your character feels, on the one hand, like Satan incarnate, or on the other, like an angel who has left their wings at the door, readers are likely to check out—or worse, stop reading altogether. Try to create characters whose qualities are like those of most real people: a combination of the admirable and the flawed. Be open to changing the story’s point of view. Sometimes the most interesting person in the story is not the best person to tell it. If you’ve ever read The Great Gatsby, for instance, you know that while the presence of narrator Nick Carraway, is important, he is not the most interesting or complex character in the novel. Even a simple switch from first-person (“I did this”) to third-person limited (“She did this) can make a huge difference in how we interpret the narrative. Use dialogue. Again, this might sound obvious, but often you will be so caught up in the telling of your story that you’ll forget to have your characters speak to one another. That’s a missed opportunity because how they talk to each other, in addition to what they have to say, can reveal a great deal about who the characters are and the nature of their conflict. Don’t, however, feel that your story needs to be composed entirely of talk. Effectively employed, a little dialogue can go a long way. Refer to the five senses to ground your reader in the world of your story. You might have believable characters engaged in a riveting conflict, but if your reader can’t envision the setting, it may feel as though the story is taking place in some amorphous limbo. Vivid visual descriptions of key places in the narrative are a good starting point, but don’t forget to include taste, touch, sound and smells as well. ... View more

Decades ago, Lisa Ede and I did a nationwide study of members of seven professional organizations in the U.S., surveying a random sample of 1200 members of each to ask questions about writing practices, and particularly about collaboration and collaborative writing. We wrote a book about this study, Singular Texts / Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing (1990). In our book, we reported on two types of collaboration that emerged during our study.  The first and most common we called “hierarchical collaboration,” a model that had a clear leader who set agendas and organized activity, with members most often carrying out tasks assigned by the leader. This kind of collaboration, we found, favored white males (no surprise there!), often downplaying contributions by women and focusing on achieving a pre-set goal. We also found that this kind of collaboration was often very efficient and got results quickly.  The second kind of collaboration that emerged we termed “dialogic collaboration,” because it was founded on dialogue and conversation, because leadership was distributed throughout the group, and because it was attentive to process as well as to the product or goal. Such collaborations were by definition more inclusive and welcoming than hierarchical collaborations and, again not surprisingly, seemed to be practiced much more frequently by women than men. They were often time consuming and even messy: but they also often produced surprisingly fresh new insights.  Over the years, Lisa and I thought long and hard about other types of collaboration, and we were especially intrigued by the advent of what one of my students called “authorless prose,” the kind found in much of Wikipedia and in boilerplate materials: what differing kinds of collaboration enabled such prose? And of course, today I am concentrating on human/bot collaborative writing and what to make of it, how to value it, and how to teach students to engage effectively and ethically in it.  But recently, I have been reading about the work of Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize winning professor of psychology who wrote—and practiced—adversarial collaboration. Kahneman, who studied human judgment and decision making, made a habit of collaborating—rather than debating—his intellectual opponents, or those who disagreed with him. In fact, he insisted on it. His goal was not to win, but to get at the truth, and collaborating with an adversary was one way to go about reaching that goal.   Daniel Kahneman on stage at a TED Conference   A recent article by Cass Sunstein in the New York Times (April 4, 2024) describes an example of this kind of collaboration: Kahneman and a colleague had published a study showing that people are generally happier if they have higher incomes—up to a point of about $90,000.  The article attracted a lot of attention and, later, a critic who in a similar study found just the opposite: that people with higher incomes are happier, period. Kahneman could have practiced what he calls “angry science,” attacking the new study and its author and showing why his research was superior. But he didn’t do that. Instead, he asked his critic, Matthew Killingsworth, to collaborate with him—and they worked together, along with a “friendly arbiter” to look back at the studies, under a microscope this time, to see if anything had been missed. Together, they discovered a glitch in the data, one that led the two studies to similar, rather than opposite, conclusions. As Sunstein put it in his article, “Both sides were partly right and partly wrong. Their adversarial collaboration showed that the real story is more interesting and more complicated than anyone saw individually.” I think adversarial collaboration can have an important role to play, especially in the current political climate. As we are encouraging our students to collaborate more, and more effectively, we can teach them about this form of collaboration, one that asks them to engage critically, openly, and fairly with someone with whom they disagree, inviting that person to join in on a search for facts and truth, rather than the kind of “angry science” that is based on attack and counter attack—and almost never changes any minds!   Image via Wikimedia Commons ... 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.   Before I became a professor at Community College of Philadelphia, I taught high school Art History and Language Arts for four years. One of the pleasures of this experience was having my own classroom. I would keep out supplies from projects we had been working on and often hang art on the walls as well. Students could see themselves on the walls, and they knew they had an audience: the other students, teachers and parents who might enter the classroom. Once I became a full-time college professor, though, classroom walls quietly dropped out of my lesson plans. From semester to semester, my classrooms assignments are different. The classroom itself can feel like a temporary holding place for knowledge, not something over which I (or my students) hold ownership. That changed this semester, I think for the better. It all started when I paused by a “little free library” near campus. It’s one of many small free book stands across the city; this one is special because it’s constantly stocked with discarded (but wonderful) books from the main branch of The Free Library of Philadelphia. In this “little free library,” I found an Eyewitness book on Ancient China at the exact moment I was teaching my Humanities 101 students about Confucianism and Taoism. I took it and decided I would incorporate it into my lesson in some way. It was full of colorful illustrations of ancient Chinese artifacts; I thought my students would love working with these images. However, like most Eyewitness books, it was geared to a younger audience. Modifications needed to happen if I was going to use it in my college classroom. At first I thought maybe I would make copies of the pages and create a worksheet with questions about the objects. This seemed like too much work and too great of an expense, and it also felt only moderately engaging. I debated just ripping the pages out of the book to hand out so I wouldn’t have to copy anything. Then I had a brainstorm: if the pages were ripped out, perhaps we could curate a gallery of ancient Chinese artifacts in the classroom. I purchased black construction paper and sticky tac that students could use to mount the objects. Then I posted a sign on one classroom wall that said “Taoist Influences in Ancient Chinese Artifacts” and another wall sign that said “Confucian Influences in Ancient Chinese Artifacts.” After we watched a YouTube clip about how exhibitions are curated, I asked students to pick an object from the white board (I had used sticky tac to put the ripped-out book pages on the white board), then on an index card describe the object and write one sentence about how they could see either Confucianism or Taoism reflected in it. They cut out their object, mounted it on the black construction paper, and posted it along with their index card tag in either the Taoism “gallery” wall or the Confucian “gallery” wall depending on which influence they chose to highlight. As was true in high school classrooms, even having a small perceived audience beyond the teacher increased motivation. Students dove right in! It was an activity that lent itself nicely to group or independent work (students could pick). The exercise also helped students with spatial relationships (the way they chose to hang the pieces on the wall at first was cramped!). Most importantly, it helped students sort ideas from Taoism and Confucianism in an entirely different way. They viewed the gallery and wrote about their favorite pieces, and we later debriefed about the activity itself to learn about some of the challenges that came with trying to describe objects or to categorize them when two philosophies seemed present in a single object; this was a beautiful way to help students understand sanjaio (the coexisting and overlapping three teachings in ancient Chinese culture: Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism). The question “how do we sort things that naturally overlap?” became the center of discussion. My students were engaged in critical thinking about philosophy; I would contend that keeping that gallery activity up reminds them, even now, of their engagement. Gallery activities can be done in any classroom. You can make a gallery for diagrams of mitochondrial processes or a gallery of most aesthetically pleasing math formulas. It may be that your college’s rules state that nothing can stay on the walls; even so, this activity can work: you can photograph the walls before the work is taken down and show it on the smart board when students walk in, or you can photograph it and make a handout so students can have a memory of the gallery in their folders. But what if there’s not enough time to do something like this? Sometimes a biproduct of the content coverage model which still pervades so many college classrooms is a taller and taller wall between students and professors. A pause, even if brief, to decorate the physical walls of the classroom with the efforts of students can ultimately help to break down the walls between students and professors by increasing ownership and engagement. As a side benefit, seeing the gallery also helps boost my mood! When I’m lecturing, instead of an empty expanse of graying paint, my students’ hard work looks back at me, and my students look back at me with a bit more life in their eyes, too. A close up of the author’s classroom walls.   ... View more

A Pedagogy of Falling Neurodivergent Teaching    Preface: The City University of New York Board of Trustees holds meetings at which members of the CUNY community (students, professors, staff, etc) are allowed to testify, either in person or online. The following link offers my  online testimony: Testimony to the CUNY Board of Trustees A few weeks ago, after classes, I tripped and fell on uneven cobblestones on the campus where I teach. The fall felt hard and I thought my glasses were broken and my teeth had cracked. Fortunately, they weren’t and they hadn’t. Kind people helped me up and gave me water and ice. I said I was okay; I thought I was.  Then my knee began to stiffen and, using my phone camera as a mirror, I noticed my swollen lip and bruised chin. Because of this new information, I decided that I needed to head over to the urgent care center in my neighborhood to help me determine if the ER or additional aftercare were in order.  But I was nearly ten miles and a few highways from my neighborhood and the geography seemed daunting. Usually I take public transit for 60-90 minutes each way, but the commute is less than a half hour by car. To be cautious, I would need to use ride share.  I am used to requesting accommodations for neurodivergent needs, especially tech-friendly classrooms. However, I now realized, with great humility, that I had taken my mobility completely for granted. Bearing witness to the material reality of long decades of underfunding and austerity in higher education means confronting ADA-unfriendly disrepair. I found that the campus was built like a fortress of inaccessibility: outside staircases with no ramps for people in wheelchairs or those who use canes or walkers, hilly terrain and uneven pavement everywhere, and closed campus gates that prevented easy exit and entrance for rideshare vehicles. Sign on campus lawn near a classroom building that reads “Not Accessible Trail”  Photo by Susan Bernstein August 29, 2033 Again, with kind help from others, I managed to leave campus and return to my neighborhood for medical care. While my knee was sprained and swollen with dark purple bruises, and difficult to walk on, there were no broken bones and no torn joints or ligaments. In reading the x-ray results, I felt tears of gratitude well up. It was a humbling experience, the random impact of falling and the privilege of access to health insurance.  The next week, I cautiously made my way back to campus. In the classroom building, I climbed a few steep stairs (with no ramp) and walked the long hallway to reach the elevator to the floor where my classroom was located. I dreaded that elevator. Even before the pandemic, the elevator was too small to allow access to wheelchairs, and the large crowds that used the elevator during and after classes made social distancing impossible. But that morning the elevator was almost empty. I reached the classroom early while another class was still in session, but found an empty classroom where I could elevate my knee and meditate on the first day of the second half of the semester. After introducing the second writing project, I checked in with students. I wanted to make sure that we were on the same page with classwork, so I created this survey using google.forms.  More importantly, I wanted to know if open-ended writing time was useful for students. The first writing project featured a significant amount of unstructured class time for writing, reading, and consulting with me about progress and process. I asked students the following question: Some of our class time in English 110 and English 115 is devoted to independent reading and writing. How do you usually spend this class time? Respond in detail with specific examples. The responses were so descriptive and filled with many helpful ideas, especially for breaking down larger assignments into smaller and more manageable segments. I decided to make a Tips and Hints sheet  based on the surveys to share with the class. I also made a word cloud so that students would have a visual image of their suggestions: Word cloud with white letters on a back background. Photo by Susan Bernstein August 29, 2033 Recently, a New York Times columnist wrote an opinion piece about the unexpected aches, pains, and sprains of aging. My post isn’t about that, though I certainly am humbled by both the vulnerability and the potential–but not necessarily assured–resilience of the body, and I am certainly more mindful of how much I take mobility for granted.  So–what is a Pedagogy of Falling? Falling is a scary experience, and a Pedagogy of Falling doesn’t necessarily imply rising like a phoenix from the ashes. I was reminded that I have a body and that bodies, including students’ bodies, are vulnerable to unforeseen circumstances. A Pedagogy of Falling takes into consideration the individual and collective experiences of bodies, or more simply put, students’ and instructors’ embodied experiences inside and outside of classrooms, before, during, and after a brief semester of first-year writing.  Take the word cloud as one example. We write together, yet the writing process unfolds differently for each of us.The word cloud reveals the ever-shifting balance of individual and collective experiences of the processes of writing. In other words, I fall alone, but the access to accommodations for mobility is, or ought to be, a collective experience. I write alone, but a community of writers supports, or ought to support, the collective experience of writing classrooms together. A Pedagogy of Falling remains conscious of the need to cultivate empathy and to emphasize approaches that facilitate writing for individual students and the collective of bodies in writing classrooms. A Pedagogy of Falling is not new; it relies on memories of difficult times and places, and builds on the uncertainty of not knowing ultimate outcomes for concerted efforts.  Perhaps most significantly, a Pedagogy of Falling does not assume that everyone will heal or recover according to university mandated schedules or semester timetables . Put more simply, in the long wake of the coronavirus, a Pedagogy of Falling is a pedagogy of everyday life.  ... 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.   Okay, this title is obviously a false promise.  As we move through a year of AI in our classrooms (or trying to keep AI out of classrooms), we can agree that it’s unlikely we can AI-proof all our assignments – by the time you finish reading this blog, AI will likely have learned to do something new. There are, of course, some instructors who will revive their old school writing lessons, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with returning to paper and pen compositions. In fact, we know there are important cognitive links between the physical act of writing and learning. Handwritten assignments, however, do not fully address the issues with AI plagiarism, and students still need the skills of writing and delivering content in the digital age. Instead of implementing wacky formatting guidelines or having students hide key words in texts to prevent pasting from ChatGPT, I’m creating assignments that outsmart the AI by moving students into higher level thinking. The basic premise of my new process is simple: find out what the AI can do and ask the students to do one thing more. In Bloom’s speak, I ask them to perform one task higher on that ubiquitous chart. Photo by Viralyft via UnsplashBut how to know what AI can do? Just ask it, and, like a villain willing to reveal a plan in an elaborate monologue, AI will tell you everything you need to thwart it. Feed it a writing assignment and prompt it to break the assignment into individual tasks identifying the cognitive skill required to complete each task. Next, ask “Which of these cognitive skills are you able to mimic? Which of these tasks can you complete? What are your weaknesses?” ChatGPT is great at remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating – at least that’s what it told me when I asked what levels of Bloom’s taxonomy it was able to mimic. Recalling facts, summarizing information, identifying patterns or trends, and differentiating between fact and opinion are part of a research process, but they are not the whole of the writing experience.  According to the monster itself, ChatGPT has no emotional intelligence or creativity. Because it trained by indiscriminately consuming massive amounts of data, it can only imitate, not generate any novel ideas or solutions. It does not fully understand context the way humans do, and it has no independent critical thinking skills, so when we target our assignment to the top of the pyramid – where writing teachers tend to play anyway – we design assignments that the generative LLM can’t yet mimic. Here's an example: I routinely ask students to create an annotated bibliography as part of their research process. What parts of this are easily produced by ChatGPT? It can summarize and evaluate the credibility of a source, and, if students take the time to feed it the entire text of all of their sources, it may even be able to identify patterns between them, so I allow the students to use the AI to do those steps. They must properly cite their AI usage, and, of course, they must take responsibility for the accuracy of the summary. If the AI hallucinates, it’s up to them to detect it. Now, it’s time to level up the assignment. Require students to explain why they chose their sources (emotional intelligence and critical thinking) and how they connect to the larger argument the student is trying to make (contextual understanding). Ask them to connect each source to at least one other of their sources explaining how they fit in conversation. This gets students beyond basic understanding and puts them in charge of applying and evaluating which, in this case, also includes reflection and contextualization. When I tested this out with my students, their annotated bibliographies deepened in terms of their critical thinking, and they were much more selective in terms of what they added to their source lists. Their focus was less on correct MLA format (a skill that is entirely useless to them outside of my class) and more on how to use sources to build their argument. Students also reported that they learned “how to use AI as a tool and not as a crutch” and that the requirement to do more self-reflection during the assignment gave them “a deeper understanding of [their] capability to be creative in [their] writing.” Wasn’t that the point of the assignment after all? ... View more

This blog almost didn’t happen.   I came to 8:45 on the evening it was due with no clue what I wanted to write about.   I was not particularly stressed about this; after all, I knew the editors at Bedford Bits would understand.  I could just email them—I’ve got nothing this week.  There would be no consequences to my pay or a grade.  Maybe my vanity would take a hit when I admitted I had no insights worth sharing, but I knew I would recover in a couple of weeks. I had spent much of the prior week working on an analysis of reflective writing, a project that my colleagues Jackie Ridley (Kent State University) and Madison Dashner (independent scholar) and I were taking from conference poster to journal article.   We were befuddled by some of the language choices that students in our study had produced in assigned reflections, regardless of the context (writing tutors, pre-service teachers, syntax students):   Their word choice and syntactic structures appeared to work as hedges, keeping them distant from their learning experiences as well as conclusions about what happened during those experiences. We wondered if the pressure to produce a reflection (with a required word count) by a specific deadline might actually be working against the kind of reflective practice we hoped to inculcate.  In their efforts to produce “insights on demand,” perhaps students resisted more direct language choices.  And I wondered how we would have responded if, instead, students had submitted a single line: “Sorry, Dr. Moore.  I got nothing on this right now.” Of course, the reflective questions we asked made such answers unlikely, and our questions were made with the best of intentions—to push students towards habitual questioning and a consistent reflective practice.  I have to ask, do we expect more from students than we expect from ourselves?  I had no problem telling my editor that I had nothing.  In contrast, when one of my advanced syntax students “reflected” that he had found the exercise straightforward and easy, I badgered him about making connections and meeting the wordcount.  In short, I demanded that he be “more reflective.”  Looking back at his answers to the exercises, I found his initial response was completely appropriate—he knew what he was doing.  I am working with that same student again this term in a different context; he stops by my office regularly to talk through what’s happening in his work as a supplemental instructor.  He clearly practices reflection. I wonder what might have happened if I had trusted his initial response in my syntax class? Most of my corequisite writers compose bland reflections.  In her classic Reflection in the Writing Classroom, Kathleen Yancey speaks of a writer who does not know her own text, who cannot assess her own text. I often see this lack of knowledge in my corequisite writers: their reflections become springboards for conversations about texts.  When they tell me they don’t know how to answer my reflection questions, I usually ask more. My advanced students, however, generally use reflections over the course of the term, not so much to talk about their understanding of content but to assess their own learning.  Many of them conclude the term by talking about the need to trust the process, trust themselves, and to not overthink or panic.  So yes, I think reflections are valuable teaching and learning tools.  But I have questions about when and how I assign and respond to them. If “I’ve got nothing on this right now” is a legitimate response (and I think it is), what, then, is a teacher’s best answer? I’ve got nothing on that right now.  Give me a little more time to reflect. ... View more

I’ve been following MIT Professor Ethan Mollick’s newsletter One Useful Thing for some time now, with interest and admiration—and I have also watched some of the videos he has created. He writes (and speaks) clearly, cogently, and persuasively, so I always look forward to reading what he has to say. No surprise, then, that I jumped at a chance to pre-order his forthcoming book, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI.  Mollick discusses his forthcoming book in the latest posting in his newsletter. He says he is most often asked whether he wrote the book or whether he and AI wrote it. His answer is that he wrote the book, and he goes on to say that he has found that he is a better writer than ChatGPT-4 or any of the competing AI tools available today. In fact, his and other research indicates that the best writers (he says top 20 percent) are better than AI right now and may be for some time to come. That doesn’t mean, however, that he didn’t make use of AI tools in writing his book. He tells readers how helpful AI was in summarizing sources for him when he was somewhat distanced from them, noting that with over 200 references in the book it was hard to keep all of them at the forefront of his mind. He also used AI to get himself going when he found himself on what my students called the “struggle bus.” At one of these impasses, he would ask AI to give him an idea or two, a nudge of sorts, and while he found that what AI provided almost always got him “unstuck.”  Most provocative to me, however, was his use of AI to create “readers,” AI personas who would then give him feedback. He said he began doing this when he wanted some advice at a time that would have been inconvenient to call on his editor, so he would ask an AI to step in. Here is his description of the prompt for one of the first such personas he created: You are Ozymandias. You are going to help Ethan Mollick write a book chapter on using AI at work. Your job is to offer critical feedback to help improve the book. You speak in a pompous, self-important voice but are very helpful and focused on simplifying things. Here is the chapter so far. Introduce yourself. We can see that Mollick is being playful with this prompt, naming his soon-to-be critic Ozymandias, the Greek name for the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses the Great. Percy Shelley chose the name for his poem on the fragility and short-lived nature of fame shortly before a long-awaited portion of a statue of the pharaoh arrived at the British Museum in 1821. (I think students will appreciate the choice of a name for Mollick’s AI-generated critic more if they “get” the context of his choice.)    The statue that inspired the poem that inspired Mollick's AI-generated persona   At any rate, here is what “Ozymandias” quickly produced in response: Ah, dear Ethan, greetings. I am Ozymandias, your humble, yet impressively intelligent, aide. I see you’ve made a good start on your chapter about artificial intelligence in the workplace. But, alas, perfection is a journey, and we have miles to go before we sleep, do we not? Let’s delve into the labyrinthine corridors of your discourse and shed light on areas that could be enhanced. Mollick is amused by Ozy, appreciating the pompous stance especially. He says he went on to create a number of other readers and to use them in different ways as he was writing his book. This rhetorical move seems to me one that student writers could take advantage of. We can help them as they create an “ideal critic” for their work – or two or three. And since these are creations, students don’t need to worry about hurting anyone’s feelings if they reject or discard the advice, as Mollick often did. I am always recommending that students seek out responses to their work: doing so now may be easier than ever!   Image via Wikimedia Commons ... View more

Kim Haimes-Korn is a Professor of English and Digital Writing at Kennesaw State University. She also trains graduate student teachers in composition theory and pedagogy. Kim’s teaching philosophy encourages dynamic learning, critical digital literacies, and multimodal composition. She focuses on students’ powers to create their own knowledge through language and various “acts of composition.”  You can reach Kim at khaimesk@kennesaw.edu or visit her website: Acts of Composition         Jeffrey David Greene is an Associate Professor of Professional and Creative Writing at Kennesaw State University. His research focuses on game studies, narratology, and first-year composition. He is currently the RCHSS Faculty Fellow of Academic Innovation focused on AI in Education.       Although versions of AI technology have been around for a while, the cumulated conversations are reaching a peak as we try to make sense of the chaos, hesitantly embrace it, and question its impact. What started out as a fringe conversation has worked its way into many of our cultural and educational institutions. Now these conversations have reached mainstream status and are on the minds of teachers, students, and a range of professional and personal communities. Almost a year ago I wrote the post, “What We Fear, We Draw Near: Challenging AI and Chat GPT” (March 2023).  In that post, I contemplated questions in uncharted territories with both cautious optimism and a mind towards exploration of possibilities: We will experience disruption and this tool does present us with real concerns. It is undoubtedly a major paradigm shift that asks us to rethink much of what we know about the teaching of writing. We wonder how it will challenge issues of plagiarism and intellectual property. We recognize the potential threat to students’ abilities to write and think critically on their own. We worry about a world where creativity is merely an algorithm, and the humanity of our discipline is lost.  So, where are we now – a year later?  After an influx of articles, conferences, new tools, and worldwide conversations we are starting to figure it out. We are approaching it from different angles, policies, practices, and new ethical considerations both in and out of the classroom. My university has created channels for discussing the implications of AI. My colleague, Jeff Greene, is at the center of these conversations on our campus and received an AI fellowship to take a deep dive to explore the complexities of AI and develop an AI toolbox for teachers and students. Jeff and I speak often and lately, our conversations focus on questions revolving around this work. As a teacher of multimodal composition and a mentor for new teachers in the field, these questions are important to me. I am happy to collaborate on this post and that he has allowed me to pick his brain with some of the driving questions that have defined our discussions. What follows are some of these questions along with his answers: Q: What do multimodal composers need to know/consider about AI? A: That there are many opportunities, pitfalls, and ethical considerations around using Gen AI for multimodal projects. On the one hand you have a technology that can help students to quickly develop images (Dall-E, Midjourney), audio (MusicGen, AudioGen), or text (ChatGPT, Claude) very rapidly and by only using natural language prompts. It’s extremely powerful for developing a variety of content, but there are also significant ethical issues in how these models were developed, trained, and deployed.  Q: How can we integrate AI into our multimodal classrooms to enhance learning experiences? A: As an instructor, the first step is to decide exactly how much (or how little) Gen AI is appropriate in your classroom given your pedagogical goals and the needs of your students. At a bare minimum, I think instructors need a syllabus statement on AI that lays out their expectations for AI use in their class. Below are several helpful resources put out by different institutions to aid you in crafting a syllabus statement: Duke Learning Innovation gives some good general advice for thinking through an AI policy Brandeis' CTL gives a number of AI policy samples that range from maximally restrictive to inclusive Here's a flowchart from Umass CTL that helps an instructor consider how AI will affect their pedagogy and/or whether their statement or policy will be effective.  Next, an instructor may want to consider adding specific AI statements on individual assignments. Different multimodal assignments likely require different levels of Gen AI. For some assignments, you may want to be maximally restrictive when it comes to Gen AI, and for others you may actually be encouraging students to use AI in specific ways such as using Dall-E to develop images for a digital storytelling assignment. Finally, if you’re going to develop an assignment or unit that deploys a specific Gen AI platform, consider offering class-time for tutorials and experimentation and also be aware that many of these tools are in beta and can rapidly go from “free” to “paid” status. I had this happen mid-semester with an AI tool and it threw a wrench in my course preparation and plans.       Q: What ethical considerations and conversations do we need to bring into composition classes—particularly in relation to content creation and multimodal composition? AI generated image from the prompt: “Make me an image of an erudite chihuahua in a lab coat grading essays” GPT-4/Dal-E, OpenAI, 21 Mar. 2024, chat.openai.com/chat.A: There are so many ethical considerations when it comes to Gen AI right now that it’s hard to find a place to begin. Students first need to understand how the technology works (on a basic level) and then the ethical considerations in terms of how these models were trained. It’s integral that everyone (not just students) understands that in building these models, companies like OpenAI fed ChatGPT massive amounts of “content”--text, art, etc.--without the consent of the millions of writers, artists, and content creators. This is a huge ethical issue that many stakeholders are currently challenging legally.  There are also individual ethical issues with how the human component of ChatGPT was trained. As an example, in order to train “toxic” material out of ChatGPTs model, human trainers had to endure a variety of horrific content for very little pay. In addition, the tools themselves can be biased and still display toxic or inaccurate information despite their training. We need to encourage students to consider citation and attribution practices for both text and visual artifacts.  For example, the image above was created with the prompt: “Make me an image of an erudite chihuahua in a lab coat grading essays.” This image was generated using GPT-4/Dall-E. and includes attribution through the citation in the caption. Creating images with your class and then discussing the copyright issues surrounding the development of Dall-E/Midjourney may be a useful way to explore the ethics of Gen AI.  For students in our classrooms, there are also originality/ownership issues when it comes to creating content with Gen AI. For example, what does it mean to create content with AI? At what point is the content mine vs. the AIs? If I just use Gen AI as an ideation tool, but create all the content myself, is the content still mine? What if I write an essay in concert with Gen AI–having it punch up my sentences or make suggestions on improvements/edits– who owns it? How do I properly cite ChatGPT? Is Dall-E actually creating anything if it’s simply deconstructing and remixing nearly endless pieces of previously published art? These questions are worth exploring with your students. Q: How does AI impact research practices (location of sources, prompt engineering, etc?) AI can be a tremendous tool for student research as long as it’s properly introduced and contextualized. Much like conventional search engines, Gen AI can be a good starting point for a research project to locate primary and secondary sources or simply for ideation. At this point, I’ve been recommending Claude over ChatGPT or Perplexity because Claude has been developed on a constitutional AI, which basically means it tries not to do many of the bad things that ChatGPT does such as creating fake sources or making stuff up. In addition, Claude is pretty good about providing specific citations on command and also admitting when it doesn’t have a specific source for the information it has delivered.  But Gen AI can also do other cool things when it comes to research. For example, you can easily upload a spreadsheet to Gemini AI (Google’s AI tool) and have it rapidly develop visuals from a dataset. You can also give ChatGPT a rubric and have it “score” something (writing, etc.) and provide formative or summative feedback.  ***************************************************************************** These questions barely crack the surface of the complexities related to AI. Our conversations are merely a start, but we are all participants (both students and teachers) in this ongoing conversation. As Jeff points out, AI is an expanding field and conceptual framework that is constantly changing. We, as a discipline and as a culture, have much to ponder.  Stay tuned for our next post . . . where we share a couple of hands-on, classroom activities that use AI in interesting ways. ... View more

Ethos, Pathos, and Budget Cuts: An In-Class Writing Assignment  Neurodivergent Teaching   For Writing Project 1, students were asked to analyze the essay “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity,” by James Baldwin, which they would use as a model to create a manifesto: Calling attention to an issue important to students that was in need of significant changes. Then, much as Baldwin’s conclusion offers a manifesto for much needed social change, students suggested what changes would look like and how change might take place in 2024. In early drafts, students approached the issue from a very general stance. For instance, social media is a problem that can be solved by individual users changing their personal habits. As might be imagined, much of the draft writing looked as if it was filling out a template. To grow deeper, writers needed to build credibility (ethos) by including very specific examples– not necessarily personal examples, but examples that would show their deep involvement with the issue. Because the examples would dive beneath the surface of the issue, the writer would reach out to the emotions and sensibilities of the audience (pathos). For any writer, it’s a challenge to communicate with specific examples and depth of feeling. How can writers choose and organize examples that are too numerous and often too devastating to make sense of? How can writers convey emotions that frequently seem unfathomable to experience, and at the same time, describe them to an audience?  There aren’t easy responses to those questions. It’s a writing problem not unique to 2024, but each class, individually and collectively, wrestles with the problem in its own way. As a teacher, it also affects me. Following is an in-class writing assignment, lightly revised, that attempts to grapple with this circumstance: Reconsider the Manifesto section of Writing Project 1. What issue is important to you? Why is it important? What do you want the audience to know about what is important to you? WHY? Allow me to be more specific. Recently, professors and students gathered together in the dining hall for a demonstration sponsored by our union. The goal was to build solidarity and understanding for ongoing contract negotiations. There was free food, and people were invited to fill out forms to write their “2 cents” (their opinion) about how to make our college a better place. Later the professors received photos of this event. This included the 2 cents opinions.  I was very moved by the photos, so I made a video.  The video is a manifesto about education. The second half offers specific evidence about why education is important, and what needs to be done to improve education at Queens College. For me, this is connected to our reading because education is a human right, as explained in Article 26 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and in Part 4 of our course reading, the writer offers an example of someone who fought for their human right to education.   This is my two cents form: Sample of Supporting Evidence: What needs to change? The heaters in my classrooms don’t work. The windows in my classrooms are too heavy to open. The tech in my classrooms often has no sound. The classrooms are so small that students don’t have room to move. The bathrooms have no paper towels and the tampon machines are empty. Photo by Susan Bernstein February 29, 2024   So: for your in-class writing today, identify an issue that moves you, and explain why you are moved by this issue. You can choose any aspect of this issue that is a powerful example for you. This powerful example can be connected to our course reading. We will make a list of those examples before we begin writing.    Here are a few examples from the students’ list: Education: what do I see around me–and how and why would I change it?  Social media: how would I change it for children? Why?  The drafts that followed offered examples not necessarily from personal experience, but with more personal engagement with specific problems. Our small classroom that day was too hot and the windows, which opened only to their full height and not lower, brought in too much cold air.   Budget cuts, like ethos and pathos, are not abstract concepts, but embodied experiences.   Rust and peeling paint on a light pole outside a classroom building.  The sticker includes the union name and the caption: Give us your 2¢ Photo by Susan Bernstein February 29, 2024   ... 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.   One of the things I tend to dread relates to group work, which, when running smoothly, is one of my greatest joys to witness! The problem is usually the moment when I tell students that it’s time to do group work. Often students are tired or expecting to be passive learners that day or feeling some social anxiety. Whatever the case may be, the energy shifts to frustration as soon as I say the time has come to talk with each other (even if students can see the full agenda on the board and know it’s coming). It’s particularly bad if I make a last-minute decision for students to engage in group work, but I have learned over time students are happier to comply when they know why I want them to complete group work and similar activities—and when they know the worries I might have about the activities. A few weeks ago, I noticed that the energy in the room was low, so I decided I wanted make some visual representation of the content of “The Contendings of Horace and Seth” in groups. Instead of saying “Let’s get into groups now” or sorting student names on the board, I said “I am noticing the energy is low in the classroom, and I’ll bet talking to each other will give you some energy. Let’s get into groups now.” The process went smoother because students knew I was shifting to try to help everyone, not just at random. Narrating my thought process works for other group activities as well. Last week I tried an activity for the first time where I grouped students based on their chosen essay topics for a brainstorming session. We’d done brainstorming before but never in homogenous groupings. I told them my plan, followed by: “I’m nervous about this because I know this means you will be asked to talk to some people you’ve never talked to before, but I absolutely think you can do it. I’m also nervous because I always leave someone out when I make groups. It doesn’t mean I don’t like you!” Sure enough, Najae did not make the list on the board, but she laughed, and I sighed, and the class went on to have a great time talking with each other; some students even gave email feedback about how helpful it was to hear the thoughts of others who were writing on the same topic. It’s hard to shake the feeling of needing to be an expert both in course content and lesson planning, but I think these moments of vulnerability are energizing for students. We are, in these moments, on the same plane as students as learners and experimenters. There is, of course, a balance to be struck. It’s true that I could always create the groups in advance or figure out a way to be “a more perfect teacher.” But sometimes I think the best work is done when we embrace our imperfection. We do not have to narrate our thinking to students at every single turn, but sometimes when we share our inner workings, we make space for students to do so with us and with their peers. At this juncture in my career, I find more and more that it’s the smallest shifts in my teaching methods that make the biggest difference in student engagement. ... View more