Confusing and Messy: A Brief Return to Zoom Teaching and What Happened Next Neurodivergent Teaching Before pivoting back to a "snow day" spent teaching on Zoom, I took a brief morning walk.  Photo by Susan Bernstein 13 February 2024   Recently, weather forecasters predicted that my city was about to receive a nor’easter with high winds and 5-8 inches of snow. The afternoon before the storm, public schools announced that they were pivoting to remote learning, and the university system that I teach for made the same announcement shortly thereafter. Back to Zoom, we were told.  I told myself that it’s only for one day, not the rest of the semester. Our previously scheduled in-class Discovery Draft would readily adapt to Zoom. For the lab hour, students would write reflections, which grew out of field notes I wrote as students were composing their Discovery Drafts (see the end of this post for reflection questions).    My field notes reflected previous Bits posts about teaching in social isolation and  my earlier frustrations with Zoom, the space of muted mics, blank screens, and occasional chat questions. After my return to in-person learning a year ago, Zoom seemed even more jarringly inadequate. I missed the instantaneous feedback of the classroom, the facial expressions, body language, sighs and groans perceptible in person, but not on Zoom.  When I read the students’ remote classroom writing this time around, the frustration really hit home. I had miscalculated the amount of writing that students would be able to complete on Zoom, even as I had remained on camera, offered guidance, and encouraged the use of chat for questions and concerns.  The discovery draft submissions were shorter than I had expected, and the reflections suggested that students needed more time to complete the prompt. So I planned a second day of in-class writing, in the hope that students would have an opportunity to complete their drafts in person. This way, I would have more writing to assess and students would have more opportunity to practice critical thinking to complete the discovery draft assignment. What followed was messiness and confusion that I should have anticipated. Where, students asked, was the instructor's feedback? Why didn’t the class offer a peer review session? I replied that these processes would take place after the discovery drafts were completed. But how, the students asked, could they possibly complete the drafts on their own without further guidance from someone else?    An important part of the writing process, I offered, is struggling with the writing process. Besides, you should have an opportunity to see what you can do on your own before comments or assessment from anyone else. Perhaps it’s an unfamiliar strategy, but it’s an important aim of the course–to learn new practices to grow your own writing for a variety of situations, not only for English writing assignments. All the same, class ended–at least for me–with messiness and confusion. Moreover, much of the city received little more than 3 inches of snow.  I remembered in-person classes on days much worse than this, and, yes, even a day in elementary school when I walked home a mile in a blizzard because the buses couldn’t navigate the roads home from school.  But that long-ago blizzard was not this brief February snowfall. “It Was a Mess,” the New York Times suggested, recounting later that same day how  the public school system’s remote learning system (different from Zoom) proved inaccessible. Due to a technical glitch, many students and teachers were unable to login, and some parents who were privileged to have a day off took their children sledding. The unplanned switch back to remote learning felt more like an unnecessary throwback to the traumatic days of pandemic lockdown. Yet, in remembering the seemingly endless trauma of lockdown, I gained a new perspective on my struggles with anxiety. Those struggles felt deeply rooted in my inability to adapt to the new conditions of online teaching. But after a one-day pivot backward, I felt something shift in my brain. The real problem, I thought, is Zoom. Or rather, the problem is an assumption about accessibility: if a large system is in fact inaccessible, the burden of creating accommodations is left with individuals who are struggling. In the midst of the pandemic’s social isolation, I wrote often about the struggles with online learning that are left unspoken and documented years before the Covid-19 pandemic by Beth Hewlett, including insufficient privacy for staying on camera, inadequate access to Wifi, and inaccessible platforms for neurodivergent and other disabled learners. Zoom exacerbated these problems, as well as the stigma and embarrassment of  not conforming to the current status quo in the wake of the pandemic. In other words: Education, at best, remains messy and complicated. There is no one-size-fits-all method or methodology for any teaching and learning, in or out of the classroom.  Nevertheless, that insight also applied to how I planned the lesson the day after we returned to the classroom. I had assumed everyone would adapt to drafting on their own for two class periods. That clearly wasn’t the case. In the midst of the pandemic, I made a video slideshow to explain grading criteria, and to offer suggestions to alleviate frustration with the writing process: Don’t worry if the process is messy and confusing, and don’t be afraid to make mistakes. I would need to revisit that lesson now, and to work on adapting it for new perspectives and ever-shifting circumstances–inside and outside the classroom.    In a grading criteria video I made for remote learning,  a masked dinosaur shares suggestions on the writing process. Screenshot by Susan Bernstein, February 16, 2024; video circa 2021.  In a grading criteria video I made for remote learning,  a masked dinosaur shares suggestions on the writing process. Screenshot by Susan Bernstein, February 16, 2024; video circa 2021.   3 Questions for Reflection (class assignment): In reviewing your in-class draft, what gives you the most joy? What do you think your audience will like about your draft? Why? Take a look at the University of Toronto document The Transition to University Writing. What questions do you have about this document? Based on this document and what you already know about writing, what would be your most important focus for revision? What do you want to learn about revision to better grow your writing? What feedback, questions, or support do you need from me for revising your draft by the due date? Where should I concentrate my attention? ... View more

Sensitive Witnesses is the thought-provoking name of a new book by Kristin M. Girten—with the subtitle Feminist Materialism in the British Enlightenment. The title caught my attention because I wondered who these “sensitive” witnesses might be and because I have been writing in this blog space recently about feminist rhetorical practices, which include—now that I think of it—sensitive witnessing as well as being sensitive to witnesses of all kinds.  Girten, who has co-edited an earlier book, British Literature and Technology, 1600-1830, is Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska, and while I love 18th century literature, this is not a book I would have ordinarily run across since I do not regularly read scholarship on that area. So: serendipity! In this book, Girten is at pains to insist that there were writers in the 18th century who did not follow the “scientific method” of Francis Bacon and fellow philosophers who espoused distanced and “objective” observation and eschewed any embodied connection to what they were observing. And who were these writers who resisted such distanced, and disembodied, observations? All women (philosophers), including Aphra Behn, Margaret Cavendish, Eliza Haywood, Lucy Hutchison, and Charlotte Smith.    Portrait of Aphra Behn, by Mary Beale (17th c.)   These women, according to Girten, were purposefully “intimately entangled” with whatever they were observing; their observations were “profoundly embodied.” Girten dubs this form of feminist materialist practice, of intimate and embodied observing “sensitive witnessing” and thus implicitly argued for a broader, more inclusive version of science and of scientific endeavors.  Girten sees these women as foremothers of today’s feminist materialists, and it seems to me that she makes a very persuasive case. But I could also see these 18th century sisters as foremothers of today’s feminist rhetorical critics such as Jacqueline Jones Royster, who argue strenuously for the embodied nature of the research that they do and who also seem “intimately entangled” with their subjects, and very purposefully so. I feel even more encouraged, then, in recommending that we teach the feminist rhetorical practices I wrote about a few weeks ago to all our students, thus making the research we do more inclusive and more able to report accurately and fully the full nature of what we are studying.  ... View more

This week, I was reminded in two different classes that what I say (or what I think I say) and what students hear may be quite different.   Sometimes, such “mis-hearings” can give us a laugh—like the time I had a multilingual student in an ESL course begin a paragraph with the expression, “firstable.”  I noted that we would say, “first,” but the student repeated the expression in a later composition.  When I pointed out that “firstable” is not a recognized word, he was puzzled. “But Professor Moore, you say it all the time.”  “I most certainly do not.” “Yes, you do.  You said it today in class: ‘Firstable, we need to understand why Alexie wrote this.’” It was quite clear.  I was saying “First of all,” and he was hearing “firstable.”  We laughed, and he adjusted his notes. Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com via Unsplash This past week, in my corequisite writing class, another student was struggling to proofread and edit a draft of her literacy narrative.  I had asked the students to annotate some of their editorial choices; I wanted to understand more about their decision-making processes.  The student, who had several issues with end punctuation and run-on sentences, added several capital letters mid-sentence, but no periods.  In the annotation, she noted that she was starting a new idea, so capital letters were required.  I thought back to an editing session I had led earlier:  she had not processed the discussion of periods, semicolons, clauses, or conjunctions, but she had heard that new ideas required would be signaled by a capital letter.   I could focus on all the things she did not hear—or I could focus on the fact that she was diligently applying what she did hear to her current assignment.   I applauded her work, and after a few quick examples in conference, she returned to her editing with a stronger conceptual base. And in an introductory linguistics class, I was working through the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) inventory of English consonants and vowels, including the sound called a velar nasal (written as a [ŋ])—this is the sound you hear in words with an “ng.”  I assigned some common words for students to transcribe for homework, including several with the velar nasal sound: penguin, linguistics, and finger.  Some students submitted rather odd transcriptions—their versions lacked an initial vowel and did not include a [g], which is clearly present in all of these words: they wrote [lŋwɪstɪks] instead of [lɪŋɡwɪstɪks].  I asked them what was going on. “Where’s the vowel and the [g]?  Don’t you hear those sounds when you say the word?” They were clearly perplexed.  “Dr. Moore, you said the velar nasal was the same as an I-N-G.  So every time we have a word with an I-N-G, we replace that whole part of the word with the [ŋ], right?” Again, my first thought was to wonder why they were so confused:  we were working through isolated consonants sounds one by one, so how could they have heard that one symbol would represent a vowel and two consonants?   “Did I say that?”  They nodded.  I hesitated, and then I laughed.  “Well, that was not very clear, was it?  Let me try again.” I have no doubts this group—who diligently take and share notes—will master phonetic analysis. How have you been mis-heard by students?  I would love to hear your stories. ... View more

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the longitudinal study I conducted at the turn of this century, one in which I followed a cohort of Stanford students from their incoming year through one year past their graduation. In particular, I’ve been thinking about what I learned about their connection to what they wrote. At the beginning of the study, students didn’t seem to feel any strong connection at all: they were writing to get a grade, to get a job, or for other practical reasons. In short, they didn’t see the writing they were doing as connected to their identities, to who they were as people. As the years went on, however, student participants began to feel more connected to their writing, began to take ownership of it and see writing as a way to make their marks on the world. In fact, they started to define writing as something that gets up off the page and makes something good happen in the world. And as a reflection of themselves, of their thoughts and character and purposes.  I’m thinking about this shift in their relationship to writing because I am wondering what we would find now: especially with the rise of misinformation and deep fakes, along with the rise of AI generated text, I wonder how students’ perception of their relationship to writing is shifting and changing now. Do they feel that the writing they do at least has the potential to embody their hopes and dreams, to represent their authentic selves? Do they feel identified with their writing? And if so, to what degree, and why?     These seem like pressing questions to me, ones that can best be pursued in longitudinal studies like the one I began over two decades ago now. I know that Jessica Enoch and her colleagues at the University of Maryland are considering such a study, and I hope that they will do so—and that others will follow their lead. We are clearly living in a great watershed moment in terms of writing: how to define it, how to understand who and/or what can deploy it, whether it can in the future be “owned” in the traditional sense of copyright, and perhaps most important, how it can reflect and create our best selves rather than our worst. Can writing still be the means of “making something good happen in the world”?  Food for thought, especially for those of us who are privileged to teach writing today.   Image created with Microsoft Designer   ... View more

Over the next four months, I will offer five tips to students writing in each of the four genres covered in my textbook, Creative Writing: Four Genres in Brief. The suggestions will highlight advice that, over my decades of teaching, I have found to be the most useful for writers just beginning their journeys into the creation of literature. I’ll begin with poetry, the first genre covered in the text, and also the one that I turn to first when I have something to say. Many students approach the writing of poetry with the sense that anything goes, that whatever leaps from the writer’s brain to their fingertips is, almost by definition, a poem. I don’t believe that’s the case, which may make me sound overly fussy, but if each utterance is the equal of every other utterance, there’s no real point in holding a class on creative writing. Everyone who composes a poem is already writing as well as they ever will. So, granting for the moment that student writing may be made stronger in a classroom setting through mentoring by instructors and peers, here are my Top 5 Tips for Beginning Poetry Writing Students: Use the concrete and specific to evoke the universal. One of the most common assumptions new creative writers make is that the more general and abstract their work, the more likely readers will insert themselves into the piece. The idea is that specific details about specific experiences shut out those who have not experienced the exact same events. In fact, the opposite occurs in creative writing. The vaguer the presentation, the more likely the reader is to drift away from it, whereas vivid details help us to imagine seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, and touching what the poet hopes to convey, thereby triggering similarly rich visual and sensual memories of our own. Compose in terms of lines rather than sentences. The prose poem aside, free verse and metered poetry consists primarily of lines rather than the sentences that run through them. This is one of poetry’s great, and underappreciated, freedoms—the right to stop and start a poetic line wherever that break can open up meaning and insight and generate excitement. The least interesting poems tend to be those whose lines consist solely of complete sentences. Simply running one sentence into the next line (enjambment) can suddenly open up a range of new ways to envision the poem. Read your work aloud before presenting it to others. Unless you’re a musical marvel, you wouldn’t impose a song you’d never rehearsed before on friends and family, much less on an audience of strangers. Make sure that at the end of every draft, you let your poem be heard—even if you’re the only one listening. How a poem sounds aloud is often quite different from the way you imagine it in your head. Revise. It’s the rare poem that cannot be made better through serious reconsideration and rewriting. Especially when you’re starting out, you’re likely to use language you’ve heard before, phrases that make strike the ears of more experienced readers as cliché. As you rework your images and lines, try to create a poem that’s both strange and clear. That might sound like an odd combination, but we can only view new worlds and ideas when we can plainly see them. Read, read, read. It’s been said many times, but it bears repeating: good writers are good readers, and great writers are great readers. Being familiar with renowned work from the past and present, if only because it will help you decide what you don’t want to do yourself, is essential. In fact, many writers believe that the best cure for writer’s block is reading the work of other writers. Poets, in particular, benefit from encountering as many short poems as possible. A topic, specific form, or even an image or a phrase encountered in another poem can be just what you need to get started on your own. ... View more

Red banner embroidered with NO CUTS PSC CUNY placed on a classroom window ledge. The window overlooks the boulevard in front of campus.     The First Day of Class: Lab Hour Neurodivergent Teaching    Excerpt from my first-day teaching journal (revised for clarity) We are in a room in a building that faces the Boulevard. In front of the building my colleagues are protesting university budget cuts. We can hear them chanting through the window.  I admit–it’s distracting. I said to the students that half my heart is out there but my whole self is here in this room with them, and that this campus is an incredible place with an incredible history. While I wish I was at the rally, it’s good to be in class too–this teaching and learning–is deeply connected to what’s going on outside.    This semester my section of College Writing includes an additional lab hour once a week and is required for all students. For the lab hour, the class is divided into two smaller sections and each section meets with me one hour a week for extra writing practice.    On the first day of lab class, immediately following College Writing, after a long hike one floor down from our classroom and through several labyrinthian hallways with confusing signage, we arrived in the room and settled into our new seats. I invited students to take out paper and pen (to write in a different modality off the screen) and offered them the following writing prompt: Introduce yourself to me as a learner. How do you learn best? What engaged you most in English 110 today? What was not interesting? What else do you want me to know about you as a student in College Writing? Then, ask me a question—about the class, about me, about anything you’d like to know. I will read the questions ANONYMOUSLY and respond as best I can.  As writing began, we opened the window for ventilation. That’s when we heard the chanting outside: REVERSE THE CUTS The room faced the main entrance to campus, and this classroom building also housed the college's administrative offices. We were listening to my colleagues at a union rally in front of the building. The cuts mentioned in the chant referred to the 24 full-time temporary faculty who were fired two weeks before the beginning of the semester to save money for the college. The students were interested, and I briefly explained the purpose of the union rally. As the chants continued, the students wrote down their writing experiences and their questions. The questions generally focused on the syllabus, and students had other questions too. Which writers and books did I recommend (besides James Baldwin who we’re reading in class, Martin Luther King’’s speeches and essays other than “I Have a Dream,” and bell hooks’ “All About Love”)? What is my favorite activity in NYC? (Long walks in Manhattan and Queens, and visiting the New York Public Library at 5th Ave. and 42nd St.) I wrote with the students as well, and took advantage of the opportunity afforded by writing to process the usual and unusual challenges of this first day of Spring Semester 2024. Ceiling at the New York Public Library with a painting of clouds and sky surrounded by an ornate frame.   ... View more

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