Guest Blogger: Michelle Kaschak is an Assistant Teaching Professor of English at Penn State Lehigh Valley. She teaches IRW courses, first-year composition, and upper-level social science and technical writing courses.  When I was child, I loved connect-the-dots books and worksheets. They helped me learn to see the big picture as I connected each line to the next number or letter.  As a writing teacher, I am always looking for ways for students to practice writing outside of the classroom or to help them “connect the dots” to help them understand that writing isn’t always at a desk or on a computer. That we can stretch our writing skills to other locales and other purposes.     In this effort to change locales and make connections, I tried to find ways to utilize resources on our small campus. In my basic writing classes, I started using our campus art gallery to have students practice descriptive writing with a touch of art appreciation.    I am fairly certain many of my students have not spent any length of time looking at or writing about art. Although we have a small campus and a small gallery, we do have rotating exhibits that offer everything from pen and ink drawings to large sculptures and photography.    The class before we go to the gallery is a practice class. I had them look at a sculpture of a dancer and watch a short video of a ballet performance. We wrote down different words to describe both. They even had to stand up to pose like the sculpture, so they could write about the kinesthetic feeling of the movement. It ended up being quite fun.   For the next class in the art gallery, I had them do what I called an “Art Gallery Walk.”  I asked to look at three different pieces of art in the gallery and get them to write down as many adjectives as they can for each one. I urge them to think about how a word like small or weird could be rewritten to be more specific.       Some of the adjectives they wrote down were life-like, chilling, weathered, prickly, jubilant, and even ethereal. It stretched their vocabulary skills, though some students were stronger at this than others. After writing their adjectives, they had to turn those descriptors into a short paragraph describing at least one of the pieces of art.      A sample response from one student:  “I believe this is a Cuban woman since cigars are big in Cuba and it still is. Cuba is very old fashioned and this woman shows that; she looks like she’s been out in the sun and is smoking a cigar. Cuba is a part of her and she is a part of Cuba.  I really enjoyed this piece and felt a connection to it.”  What the students get from this exercise is the ability to think about word choice in writing. I try to guess which piece of art they wrote about by looking at their paragraph. If I cannot guess, they need to think about how they can be more specific and clear in describing it.   Overall, this lesson provides them with a concrete item to write about. It gets them in the gallery looking at and critiquing art. It’s not uncommon to hear, “I don’t like that.”  Or “This piece is weird.” But then they have to learn how to explain why. They learn to use their vocabulary skills to go beyond the typical words. That, to me, is the fun part of doing this assignment.    In turn, I think the students learn to “connect the dots” between what they see, what they think and what they write.    What are your strategies for helping students build vocabulary and “connect the dots”? ... View more

What happens when your plans for a term suddenly don’t work? How do you adjust? This fall, I’ve had to do some hard thinking about these questions. If you follow this blog, you know that I disappeared in mid-October. On the evening of October 14, I fell, after tripping over a small baby gate that we use to separate the dogs when they are eating. I ended up taking an ambulance ride to the emergency room. After many x-rays, I was diagnosed with a severe hematoma and sprained knee. I was sent home with prescriptions for pain killers and instructions to use a walker for the foreseeable future. That night, I didn’t think a knee injury would upend my teaching plans. I am teaching fully online, so I didn’t need to get to a classroom. I had everything for the week of October 14th already queued in Canvas (our LMS), so there was nothing to worry about. Wow, was I wrong! When I attempted to get out of bed the next morning, I realized how badly injured I was. Just getting my leg off the bed was a major adventure. I had to loop a rolled sheet under my foot, like a stirrup, and then lift my leg onto the floor. I found that sitting at the computer for any length of time was impossible. Without my usual time at the computer, I couldn’t keep up with students, prepare materials for future classes, or grade their work. Coping Strategies Let the department stakeholders know ASAP. Even though I didn’t need my department to do anything to help me, I wanted them to know what was going on in case students came to them with questions. Let students know next. If I were teaching in an on-campus classroom, students would have noticed immediately if I were to hobble into the classroom with a walker and a bandaged knew. My online students had no way to know. I not only told them what happened, but I also told them what kinds of delays to expect as a result. Look for shortcuts. I have a cache of daily posts that tie to various topics I teach, and I raided that collection for discussion and instructional ideas. I normally try to write several new things each week. With the injury, I had to take the shortcut of using what I already had. Get ahead on whatever you can. Since I could only sit at the computer for short sessions, I had to find a way to use that time effectively. I found that I could copy over one or two of those daily posts, revise lightly, and queue them to publish later during those short sessions. I was able to set up daily posts for a few weeks in advance this way. Change what you need to. After a few days of struggling to get work done, I knew that the original plan was not going to work. I reworked the course schedule so that I could drop a major writing assignment. I hated giving up the activity, but it was the right choice. Ultimately, the change gave me some extra time to grade and let students have more time to write their longer reports. Realize that it’s okay to lower your expectations for yourself. Probably the hardest task for me was recognizing that I simply couldn’t be the teacher I wanted to be this term. Last spring I used screencast feedback on students’ projects. They loved it, and I planned to use it again this fall. Unfortunately, that kind of feedback takes two or three times as long to produce, so I had to lower my goals and go back to a combination of annotations and end notes for feedback. Fortunately, the term is nearly over, and I am doing much better. I can even sit at the computer for as long as I want to again! It’s been a challenging term, but I think I will make it through just fine. Perhaps more important, I gained a lot more sympathy for students who suffer major setbacks during the term. I certainly don’t want to fall again any time soon, but all in all I may have improved a bit as a teacher as a result this fall (pun intended).   Photo Credit: WRONG WAY by David Goehring on Flickr, used under a CC-BY 2.0 license ... View more

There are moments in our teaching lives that can feel epic, as much for what happens outside the classroom as inside. This semester was my first semester teaching in New York City after five years away, and it has often felt like a journey with a strong sense of purpose: non-linear, a quest or picaresque narrative, where kairos matters more than destination. Nonetheless, we have arrived at the end of the semester, and it is time for final reflections. The reflection assignment for this term invites students to consider their first semester in college and their first college writing course as a journey. My hope is that this reflection will invite students to consider writing as a process that goes hand-in-hand with their self-discovery in their first semester. Good journeys to all! End-of-Semester Reflection Consider your work in this writing course as a journey that began in August 2018 and that culminates in a significant destination in December 2018. As part of that journey, reflect on the significance of our theme: The Rhetorical Power of Stories. Your reflection should be 600-800 words and can be arranged in paragraph form. Select at least 3 (or more) of these questions to frame your reflection. What are some of the most important stories about this journey? Beginning or end points? Stopping places? Places of celebration and/or frustration? Where does your WP 3 fit into this journey? What did you learn from your research? What did you learn from creating your own syllabus? What did you learn about the rhetorical power of stories from our course texts? Consider the rhetorical appeals of pathos (sensibilities and emotions), ethos (credibility and integrity), and kairos (context and circumstances)? What were your responses to our course texts: James Baldwin, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Black Panther, and Adrienne Rich? What is your philosophy of writing? What wisdom did you gain that you can call on in future writing experiences inside or outside of the classroom? What awareness did you achieve about writing that you would like to share with others, including the professor and students just beginning the writing course? What do you want to add that isn’t included here? ... View more

Today’s guest blogger is Dustin Ledford, a graduate student at Kennesaw State University working toward a Master’s Degree in Professional Writing with a concentration in Composition and Rhetoric. He teaches First-Year Composition courses at KSU and also teaches diploma- and certificate-level composition at Georgia Northwestern Technical College. Dustin’s experience in the technical college system leads him to specialize in professional and workplace writing, which he incorporates in his course design to provide his students with experience writing for a variety of genres and audiences.   How often have you asked students questions like “How does this sentence sound when you read it?” or “When you look at this image, what does the author want you to feel?” Chances are, if you’ve taught a class involving multimodal rhetoric, questions like these (or some variation thereof) have come up countless times during lecture, office hours, or even in assignment comments. What do you do, though, if a student’s writing is too verbose or too fragmented, but the student is hard-of-hearing? How do you explain visual rhetoric if a student can’t see the image because of a visual impairment? Would you be able to cope, or would you be at a loss? How do you think the student might feel in that situation? This is a challenge that I’ve faced many times as a composition instructor: I have worked not only with many hard-of-hearing students, but also with students facing cognitive disorders, learning disabilities, and visual impairments. Instead of just accommodating, best educational practices encourage us to build accessibility into courses from the ground up. So what does that look like? For a practical example, I’d like to share a lesson and accompanying low stakes assignment discussing visual rhetoric. This assignment takes the idea of a relatively simple accessibility practice — writing alternate text attributes for images — and combining that practice with analyzing visual texts. Due to the nature of alternate text attributes, this exercise can also help students practice concise writing. Background Readings and Resources The St. Martin’s Handbook:  7Reading Critically; Ch. 16, Design for Print and Digital Writing; Ch. 18, Communicating in Other Media The Everyday Writer(also available with Exercises😞 Ch. 9, Reading Critically; Ch. 22, Making Design Decisions; Ch. 24, Communicating in Other Media EasyWriter(also available with Exercises😞   3: Making Design Decisions; Ch. 6: Learning from Low-Stakes Writing; Ch. 32: Conciseness Everything’s an Argument: 14: Visual Rhetoric; Ch. 16: Multimedia Arguments WebAIM: Alternative Text Assignment Learning Outcomes Students will be able to identify and evaluate rhetorical elements of images. Students will recognize the importance of alternative text in making their texts accessible. Students will practice concise, descriptive writing through the genre of alt-texts. Assignment Preparation Assemble (or locate) two short documents that are dependent on images to convey their full meaning. These text can be as simple or complex as desired, so long as students are given adequate time to read each document. Draft a short, simple quiz for each document (no more than five questions) that includes questions which cannot be answered without at least a basic understanding of the content of the document’s images. These can be simple questions (e.g. “According to the text, what’s an example of a fossil fuel?” when the example is only pictured rather than mentioned) or they can be more complicated questions involving simple charts or graphs. Remove all the images from one of the documents. (We’ll call this Document A.) Additionally, if any of these images have existing alt texts, be sure to remove (and save) them as well. Leave the spaces for the images, and number the spaces. Repeat this process with the second document (Document B), but be sure to keep the images grouped with the appropriate document (A’s images and B’s images). Assignment Procedure Break the class into pairs. (We’ll call members of each team Students 1 and 2). Provide Student 1 with Document A, and provide Student 2 with the images. Be sure to tell them not to share either with their partner. Instruct Student 2 to write 5-15 word alt texts for each image they were given, then give the descriptions (but not the images) to their partner. Have Student 1 use Document A and Student 2’s alt texts to complete the quiz on his or her document. Have students repeat the process with Document B, but reverse their roles (the student who did not have the pictures writes the alt-text for the other student). Review the quizzes as a class (or provide an answer key) and have students score themselves. Afterwards, have them look over the images from their respective documents. Have each student revise the alt-texts they were given based on their experience taking the quiz. Be sure to take some time with students afterward to discuss their experiences, particularly in terms of how images were important for conveying ideas and how the loss of that resource affected their ability to grasp the full meaning of the texts they read. Ask students to volunteer some of their alt-text descriptions and provide some of your own for comparison. Discuss what details took priority in each image and how having context changed their understanding of each image. Reflection on the Activity When I recently taught a student with a visual impairment, I became acutely aware of the difficulties students can face in our image-centric culture. Before we discussed visual rhetoric as a class, I contacted this student by email and asked if she would be comfortable sharing her own experiences with navigating her readings (and the Internet in general). This became a learning experience for my class (myself included) because it gave us insight into how difficult it can be to lose out on some of the intended meaning of writing when authors don’t take everyone’s needs into consideration. Additionally, while I am still learning, this experience taught me to rethink some of my teaching methods and even the language I use to express certain ideas so that it is more inclusive to all the students with whom I work. What strategies, activities, or assignments do you use to make your class accessible or teach accessibility? ... View more

In the recent powerful Paul Schrader film First Reformed, a young couple seek counseling from the minister of a tiny historic church in upstate New York, played by Ethan Hawke. The wife is expecting their first child, but the husband fears bringing a child into a world that climate change will make unfit for that child to grow up in. He has studied the science and knows the facts. The young mother-to-be is at his side in his environmental activism, but her heart tells her that she wants this child.   Emotion inevitably enters in to any decision to have a child or to abort one. Many couples would never abort a pregnancy even if the scientific facts indicate that the child cannot survive or will face ultimately insurmountable physical challenges. Some people—maybe most—who fully understand and accept the realities of climate change choose to reproduce in spite of what they know about the future of the world their children will grow up in. Until I started researching the most recent edition of Elements of Argument, I had not read any articles by those who have chosen not to start a family. I have read about climate change about as much as the average citizen, but I had never really thought about my sons’ generation having to confront the question of whether to have children or not because of the direction the world is headed.   Are there situations where reason has to win out over emotion? We have seen emotion overcome reason in the anti-vax movement. And we have seen the consequential outbreaks of illnesses: one Ohio school just announced that it can no longer allow religious exemptions for vaccinations. A headline in North Carolina reads, “School with high rate of vaccine exemptions faces state’s biggest chickenpox outbreak in over 20 years.” At that school, out of 152 students, 110 have never gotten the chickenpox vaccine.   It is difficult to comprehend the magnitude of the changing climate’s effect on our world, and it is difficult to imagine climate change’s future consequences. The world’s leaders, for the most part, seem to understand that climate change is real and to accept that attempts to lessen its impact must cross national boundaries and party lines. The Paris Accord is their attempt to address their concerns globally. Responsibility applies to individuals as well as world leaders, though. And, when the future of the world is at stake, reason must win over emotion or politics.   Photo Credit: “Beaufort Sea coastline” by ShoreZone on Flickr, 8/4/12 via a CC BY 2.0 license. ... View more

Ok, it's the end of the semester. We're wiped out, students are wiped out, and we're either slogging or sprinting to the due date for the final essay in Comp I. The other night at dinner, I got the nutty idea that we should do something fun in our second-to-last class of the semester. "A game!" suggested my high schooler, and I went seeking out markers, cardboard, and my copy of A Writer's Reference to try my hand at inventing a version of Jeopardy. I saw the game as a fun opportunity to reinforce the common vocabulary of the course and review key rhet/comp concepts. I'm sharing my Composition Jeopardy clues in hopes that you might improve them, add to them, borrow them if you're so inclined, or just smirk at them, confident in your own way to end a semester. The class this past Wednesday--at 8 am, mind you--was surprisingly spirited and worthwhile. Students collaborated, negotiated, checked their notes, checked their handbooks, cheered for one another. The winning team, in a thrilling move, beat the runner-up by a single point (!!) on a final-Jeopardy wager of 1,401 points. The prize was chocolate. Students were engaged and even acknowledged the value of the game in thinking through their final revisions. When one finance major in control of the board said "I'll take Parts of an Essay for 600 points," I read the clue (a statement that represents an objection to your position), and a criminal justice major across the room grabbed his head and shouted, "That's what my draft is missing! A counterargument!" So much of what we do in a semester is heavy and hard. This day in class was light and quite lively. Best of luck as you wrap up your semester and move on--to the solstice, to the sofa, to the ski slopes, or wherever your December takes you. ... View more

As I've noted before, I once participated in an online forum where the participants quarreled a lot. One of the things they griped about was the way that some members "padded" their post count with lots of very brief entries intended to run up their score. Their goal—due to the fact that every forum member was ranked individually against the entire membership—was to make it to the top of the heap.   I thought the whole thing was rather silly at the time, but I did find myself on occasion being dragged into the competition. I recognized that the larger motive behind the forum's incentives to "reward" quantity over quality was to encourage site activity, and that the forum owners themselves were engaged in a post-count competition with similarly themed forums. What I didn't know at the time was that there is a name for the way that the site was designed: it's called "gamification."   Gamification is the process by which an activity that is not, in itself, a game, is turned into one. "Players" are ranked according to their levels of participation. This website, for example, is gamified, with all of us ranked, badged, and labeled according to a rather bewildering number of criteria, some of which I still haven't wholly figured out. And, as Stephanie Miller's "The Power of Play: Gamification Can Change Marketing" reveals, a lot of marketing campaigns are being gamified as well, like Domino's Pizza Hero mobile app feature (you can find her article in the 9th edition of Signs of Life in the USA). Even educators are looking into gamification as a way of transforming American education.   "Well so what?" you may be thinking. "What's the harm in making things fun?" The problem (and there is a problem) only appears when rampant gamification is subjected to a semiotic analysis. For when it is considered in the context of the larger system of contemporary American culture, we can see how gamification is a reflection of an overall hypercapitalistic tendency to turn everything into a winner-takes-all competition, with all of the "losers" that that entails.   Gamification looks even more sinister in the light of Sarah Mason's exposé of the way that it is being employed to incentivize worker productivity without a corresponding increase in actual income, "High score, low pay: why the gig economy loves gamification." Going beyond her own personal experience as a Lyft driver subject to the sirens of the game, Mason reveals a form of worker exploitation that is intentionally grounded in the psychology of gambling addiction. Here's how she puts it:   In addition to offering meaningless badges and meagre savings at the pump, ride-hailing companies have also adopted some of the same design elements used by gambling firms to promote addictive behaviour among slot-machine users. One of things the anthropologist and NYU media studies professor Natasha Dow Schüll found during a decade-long study of machine gamblers in Las Vegas is that casinos use networked slot machines that allow them to surveil, track and analyse the behaviour of individual gamblers in real time – just as ride-hailing apps do. This means that casinos can “triangulate any given gambler’s player data with her demographic data, piecing together a profile that can be used to customise game offerings and marketing appeals specifically for her”. Like these customised game offerings, Lyft tells me that my weekly ride challenge has been “personalised just for you!” Former Google “design ethicist” Tristan Harris has also described how the “pull-to-refresh” mechanism used in most social media feeds mimics the clever architecture of a slot machine: users never know when they are going to experience gratification – a dozen new likes or retweets – but they know that gratification will eventually come. This unpredictability is addictive: behavioural psychologists have long understood that gambling uses variable reinforcement schedules – unpredictable intervals of uncertainty, anticipation and feedback – to condition players into playing just one more round. In short, what is happening here goes well beyond mere fun. Gamification is at once a form of behavior modification and an extension of the surveillance society in which we live, where everything we do is tracked and data mined on behalf of corporate profits that are not shared with the vast majority of the population. With artificial intelligence—which is grounded in mass data collection and algorithmic analysis—emerging as the newest breathlessly hyped game on the block, we can see that this hypercapitalistic cultural tendency is only going to continue its expansive intrusions into our lives. And that's not just fun and games. Image Credit: Pixabay Image 1293132 by OpenClipart-Vectors, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

This week's featured guest blogger is Joseph Couch, Professor at Montgomery College. “I think she’s a gold digger,” quite a few of my students once said during a discussion of Nora Torvald in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll House. When I asked how the students made this interpretation, they unanimously responded that Nora asks for money for Christmas. A reminder of the reason why, which occurs later in the play, only brought the response, “But we didn’t know that at the time.” Since backstory and exposition in drama take place through dialogue rather than through a speaker or narrator as in fiction and poetry, students often do not notice when characters drop "hints" in their lines.  Subtext, which often appears in dialogue in drama (as does almost everything else) can be particularly difficult to discern and interpret, even if it may seem far more obvious than a hint to some readers. After this class meeting, it became clear that students often expect strictly linear and explicit references in a literary text, including plays with their sometimes lengthy blocks of dialogue and monologue. This experience inspired me to create an exercise to help students track implied meanings in plays as outlined below. 1. Select a key piece of information revealed through subtext, such as hints about a character’s past or the foreshadowing of a character’s actions. 2. Write an outline of the play’s act and/or scene structure either on the board or on a handout to distribute and place the moment when the audience learns the full truth in the structure. You might want to include a section for events before the play’s action begins. 3. Have students break into pairs or small groups and ask each to answer a question such as: When does the character first mention or hint at X? When does the character first take a similar action or make a similar choice? When does an action or event take place? (Sometimes it may occur before the play’s onstage events) When does the audience first learn of X, and when does it occur? (These answers may also involve events prior to the play’s beginning) Why does a character do or say X, and when does the audience learn of the reason(s) why? 4. Instructors can decide whether pairs or groups should answer the same question or different questions, depending of course on the lengthy and difficulty of the text. As for the above example from A Doll House, I have all groups answer the question about Nora’s interest in money as a first use of this exercise that is an example of the last bulleted suggestion. 5. Students can either place their answers on the handouts the instructor provides, or the instructor can chart the answers on the board. To provide support for answers, students should include specific page, act, and/or scene numbers. Having students do this activity while the class discusses the first play of a course or unit introduces subtext in drama and the importance of close readings of dialogue. Alternatively, instructors could choose to use the activity only for a long and/or complex play, which may require multiple uses of the exercises during class time or for homework.  Revisiting these steps for more than one play can then gauge student progress with reading subtext in drama throughout the unit or course. For a more-tech savvy approach to the activity, professors can make use of a plot-mapping software program like Plotist for a more impressive presentation or if a class is taught in a computerized classroom. A simple chart or outline in Word or on the board can work fine, too. The key is for instructors to use what is most comfortable for them and their students in consideration of available resources. After using this activity at least once, instructors might just find that students no longer accuse Nora Torvald of being a gold-digger. Mine, thankfully, no longer do.   ... View more

On November 24, S. Matthew Liao wrote an op-ed piece for The New York Times titled “Do You Have a Moral Duty to Leave Facebook?” Liao, who teaches philosophy and bioethics at NYU, examines a number of reasons for deleting Facebook—for your own good as well as for the good of others. He points out the most obvious reasons: Facebook can be addictive and all-consuming and is linked to depression; it has played a major role in spreading misinformation, hate speech, and lies; and it has allowed others to harvest personal information for millions of people without their permission or knowledge. Despite these problems, Liao ends his editorial saying he will stay on Facebook until it “crosses a moral red line.” In his opinion, Facebook has not yet crossed that line because it did not “intentionally” sell the data of its users nor did it assist “intentionally in the dissemination of hate speech.” Should Facebook cross that red line of intentionality, however, Liao says we must “opt out.” Jaron Lanier, well known for his work on artificial intelligence and virtual reality, has come to the opposite conclusion. In his latest book, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, Lanier argues that social media have programmed us, like Pavlovian dogs, to behave in certain ways and to be mesmerized and dehumanized in the process. Whatever benefits social media may have are outweighed, in Lanier’s considered opinion, by “catastrophic losses to our personal dignity, happiness, and freedom.” Lanier opens his book by wondering why cats are everywhere online and that dogs are NOT. Lanier wants us to be more like cats: Cats have done the seemingly impossible. They’ve integrated themselves into the modern high-tech world without giving themselves up. They are still in charge. There is no worry that some stealthy meme crafted by algorithms and paid for by a creepy, hidden oligarch has taken over your cat. No one has taken over your cat; not you, not anyone. (p 2) Alas, Lanier argues, we are not like cats in our online lives but much more like dogs: domesticated, obedient, loyal, dependable, and susceptible to training. In a long discussion of behaviorism and its ill effects, Lanier argues that social media has strong behavioristic tendencies and that it is training us to lose our free will—and to like doing so! The complex problem Lanier describes with the acronym BUMMER, which stands for “Behaviors of Users Modified, and Made into an Empire for Rent,” has six moving parts: B is for Butting into everyone’s lives C is for Cramming content down people’s throats D is for Directing people’s behaviors in the sneakiest way possible E is for Earning money from letting the worst assholes secretly screw with everybody else F is for Fake mobs and Faker society Lanier takes up each one of these “moving parts” as he details his fifteen arguments for quitting social media, and he makes a very strong case. Indeed, it is bracing to see how social media, once hyped as the way to bring people together and give everyone a voice, is now out of favor with so many people, even those like Lanier who are Silicon Valley natives. Lanier is no dictator, though, and he ends the book with a softer tone, saying he knows he’s not the one to make decisions for everyone else and that “not everyone has the same options.” So he doesn’t demand that users abandon social media today but rather that they—and especially young people—explore what life might be like without the radical influence of social media. Such self-exploration could take many forms: “explore wilderness or learn a new skill,” he suggests. But whatever form your self-exploration takes, do at least one thing:             detach from the behavior-modification empires for a while—six months, say?. . . After your experiment, you’ll know yourself better. Then decide. Writing about Lanier’s arguments offers an opportunity for students to begin the kind of exploration Lanier calls for, beginning perhaps with a whimsical account of how much they are like cats rather than dogs—or vice versa. And because the chapters are brief and very straightforward, each one makes a good text for a rhetorical analysis. No matter what they decide about his overall call to delete social media, Lanier raises questions that every student should think about as they come to deeper understandings of how their values and beliefs are shaped by social media. Image Credit: Pixabay Image 998990 by Pixelkult, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

Today’s guest blogger is Tanya Rodrigue‌, an associate professor in English and coordinator of the Writing Intensive Curriculum Program at Salem State University in Massachusetts.   In 2016, I engaged in two new experiences: I composed a personal audio documentary of the 2016 women’s marches and recorded myself talking through my process. One of the reasons why I chose to do so was because I assign longform audio projects in my writing courses yet never composed one myself. I thought I would learn more about how to effectively teach soundwriting if I did a version of my own assignment and reflected about it along the way.   From these experiences, I learned that recordings of my process, or what I call audio process notes, function as sites for both learning and invention. In listening and analyzing my own audio process notes, I discovered I was using talk as a means to learn—to learn how to write in a foreign genre in a foreign modality. My talk explicitly revealed cognitive moves associated with deep learning such as metacognition, problem-posing and problem-solving, and persistence. I also discovered, as Peter Elbow claims in Vernacular Eloquence, that messy, unplanned talk as opposed to careful writing, is a fertile ground for generating good ideas.   The inclusion of audio process notes in writing assignments, particularly those that ask students to compose in a new genre, is ripe with pedagogical potential. The audio process notes not only help students learn and identify the important cognitive moves needed to thrive in intellectual environments, but also more broadly teach students about writing, rhetoric, revision, idea development, and perhaps most importantly, how to approach a new writing situation.   Assigning audio process notes is appropriate for any writing assignment, not just multimodal writing assignments. Instructors may consider using or adapting the following description and audio process assessment tool in an undergraduate writing course.   Assignment Description: While composing your project, you will reflect on your process along the way in audio form. If you have a smartphone, you can simply record yourself using an app and email the file to yourself. Otherwise, you may consider using Audacity, QuickTime, or Windows Media Player on a computer. I recommend you record yourself talking about your process after, or even during, each work session. You are required to have three entries, and each entry should be between 3-8 minutes. These notes will be assessed using five categories associated with effective learning and strong writing: rhetorical knowledge, problem-posing/problem-solving, play, persistence, and metacognition/reflection. Assessment Tool: Process Notes [5 categories] 4 The composer demonstrates these abilities in a sophisticated and thoughtful manner consistently across their process notes. 3 The composer demonstrates these abilities in an effective manner across all or most of the process notes. 2 The composer demonstrates these abilities in an adequate way with room for growth in some of the process notes. 1 The composer demonstrates little to no effort in demonstrating the abilities in the five categories. (1) Rhetorical knowledge: the ability to consider purpose, genre, audience, sonic rhetorical strategies, and context when making decisions.         (2) Problem-posing and problem-solving: the ability to pose challenging questions, and/or recognize a problem or issue and making a plan for how to approach solving it.         (3) Play, experimentation & flexibility: the ability and willingness to try out different ways to address a problem or achieve a goal, and/or take risks in an effort to determine what strategy/method is most effective.         (4) Persistence: The ability to sustain/maintain interest in and attention to the project. The composer stays on task and works through problems or issues without giving up.         (5) Metacognition and reflection: The ability to think about one’s thinking, and to reflect on the impact of rhetorical decisions and their effects.           ... View more

In the classroom, how long do you typically wait for students to respond after you ask them a question?   One second, three, ten seconds, twenty?   If a student doesn’t readily know an answer or signals non-verbally they are uncomfortable answering, do you move to another student whose hand shoots up in the awkward silence? How do you as a teacher feel in that moment of silence?   I was recently introduced to the groundbreaking research of Mary Budd Rowe, who recorded classroom interactions during the 1960s, '70s, and '80s for exactly these moments of silence. Through two decades of recording and analysis, Dr. Rowe discovered what the typical response of teachers was to silence… and its consequences on student learning, student perceptions and attitudes about teachers and schools, and a host of other outcomes.   [For more on Dr. Rowe’s research, see: Rowe, Mary Budd. (1986). Wait Times: Slowing Down May Be a Way of Speeding Up. Journal of Teacher Education, 37(1), 43-50.]   Dr. Rowe distinguishes between two types of wait time: Wait Time 1: after a question is asked. Wait Time 2: after a student responds.   Two Critical Moments to Pause at Least 2.7 Seconds   Wait Time 1: After you ask a student a question.   Wait Time 2: After a student pauses in responding and/or seems to be done with their response.   The latter silence is the harder to tolerate, as the student looks at you for non-verbal cues that his/her/their response met your expectations or satisfaction. As that silence fills the classroom, nod to the student, maybe even smile, and count the seconds in your head…   And see how students respond.   Dr. Rowe’s research revealed that waiting three seconds increased students’ verbal fluency by 300-700%, increased linguistic complexity, increased speculative reasoning skills, logic formation, significantly improved students’ perceptions of teachers, increased the number of questions students asked in class, increased the variety of students voluntarily participating in discussions, and improved written measures where items were “cognitively complex.”   Simply by waiting three seconds.   Not surprisingly, improvements were not just found with student performance.   Positive outcomes for teachers included: teachers’ responses exhibited greater flexibility, decreased discourse errors, and improved continuity in the development of ideas. Further, the number and kinds of questions asked by teachers changed, and the expectations teachers held about students who “never talk” changed significantly.   Every semester we hear expressions like: I just can’t get them to talk. I have one class that talks all the time, but another it’s like pulling teeth just to get them to respond. I think it’s the time of day. Students seem tired right after lunch. Etc.   I challenge you to call on a student and just wait. Nod. Make calm eye contact. Maybe smile a bit. But let the silence build (for a minimum of three seconds)!   See what happens.   They will talk. Or others will start talking.   Listen to their responses, and then pause three seconds when they’re done. And ask a follow-up question.   Then repeat the strategy with another student. Ask an open-ended question that genuinely seems interested in learning how they think: How do you feel about this? What are the things you like most here? What was most memorable to you about this experience?   And wait… ten seconds if necessary. Or more.   Other students will pick up on how interested and calm you are in the silence, and they will start to volunteer responses. They will feel safe, confident, and valued.   It will transform your classes and your students’ learning. Students’ perceptions of you as a teacher will go through the roof.   She’s such a great listener. He cares about what I have to say. I learned a lot in her class.   I think the key is to combine the two kinds of wait times with open-ended questions that are focused on students’ perceptions, feelings, and experiences. If you ask only propositional knowledge-based questions of students that, too, can intimidate students and shut them down. However, if you shift toward a classroom practice that prioritizes students’ care and emotional well-being and combine the strategies embedded in Dr. Rowe’s “wait time” research when listening to students, you will see a significant change in student responses.   Classes that “never talk” will come alive!   ______   As always, I am grateful to you for your reading, and I’d be especially grateful when you comment, like, or share this post.   If you do try out this three-second-pause strategy, let us know what happens. I would be grateful to learn from you about your experiences!   Also what tips or strategies do you recommend that have worked for encouraging class participation?   ... View more

If you haven’t heard of the Listen First Project, check them out! Devoted to mending “the frayed fabric of America by bridging divides one conversation at a time,” this project is currently celebrating its fifth year of work: We believe in the power of starting new conversations that move from 'us vs. them' to 'me and you’ to turn the tide of rising rancor and deepening division. Listen First Project creates opportunities and teaches skills for conversations that tip the scales toward a stronger and more equitable future for our nation and better relationships in our daily lives. You can read about Pearce Godwin, who founded Listen First in 2013 after six months in Africa taught him the crucial importance of listening to understand, and about Listen First’s team of leaders on their website. With over 150 partners in the Listen First Coalition, the Listen First Essay Series, and the National Conversation Project (which has grown out of the National Week of Conversation started in 2018), the Project now reaches hundreds of thousands of people across the United States and beyond.     Their message is simple but profound: if we want to move beyond the divisions that are tearing at the foundations of our democratic society, we must learn to listen. Here are the strategies the Project suggests: Listen First to understand rather than to reply Listen First before rejecting a conversation Listen First before dismissing alternative ideas Listen First before launching attacks Listen First to more effectively advocate your position If this sounds a lot like what Krista Ratcliffe calls “rhetorical listening,” and it certainly does, it gives teachers of writing one more good reason to base their courses on rhetorical principles and to spend time in class introducing and discussing them with students. Rhetoric is founded on the concept of dialogism, of give and take, of two or more people working through issues together. The importance of audience in rhetorical theory and practice relates directly to this concept. I like to begin each course I teach with such fundamentals and with exploring how they are at work in our everyday lives. But these discussions need to inform every class that follows, as we practice what it means to attend carefully to an audience and what it means to practice “listening first.”   Fortunately, we now have sites like Listen First and resources like the essays and books of Krista Ratcliffe and others to help us do so. As we near the end of 2018, it’s time to invite our students to join the Listen First Project, to take the pledge to “listen first” and to spread the word about the National Conversation Project. As I am writing this post, I am also reading the new U.S. Climate Report, with its blunt and stern warnings of what is happening to our earth this very moment. Never have we needed the ability to listen to understand more than we do right now. So much of our students’ future depends on it. Image Credit: Pixabay Image 2275202 by Couleur, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

In a recent guest post, Sara Heaser wrote about the metaphors she uses in teaching first-year composition. Her observations have been lurking in the back of my mind since then, and in preparing for our final weeks of class, I’ve been taking a critical look at my own metaphors, specifically those I use when talking to students about their drafts, especially drafts composed early in the writing process.  For example, when I read a piece that seems to lack focus, I may ask students to imagine those devices that are set up in science museums and malls—contraptions in which a penny or nickel is released at the top of a wide funnel, and the coin circles around and around, at times careening in wide loops and at times spiraling smoothly, until it reaches the bottom and falls through the narrow opening into a small container.  Sometimes finding a thesis that will control the paper is like that—we have to go through the careening and spiraling until we finally settle into a workable proposition to anchor the paper. It’s normal and helpful, and not at all a failure.   When I’m working with students in later stages of the revising process, perhaps when they need to think about cohesion and what they themselves characterize as “flow,” I might invoke the image of myself trying to learn to drive a vehicle with a manual transmission – with jerks and stops and whiplash-inducing lurches. That sort of metaphor can encourage students to think about a reader’s experience of working through the meaning emerging in a text.   Or perhaps I have a student who is developing a complicated argument but who seems to drop the ball just at the end. Living and teaching in a football culture, I might say that the conclusion to the paper feels like a punt on third down, or a Hail-Mary pass thrown when there is plenty of time on the clock to run a full set of downs and get the ball over the goal line.   But I’ve realized that, more often than not, my metaphors for talking to students about writing are metaphors for problems, for struggles, for what might be seen as inadequacies or error—even though I work diligently to characterize writing as a recursive process, not a failed outcome. Still, I rarely use metaphors to describe what works—only what doesn’t.   In my advanced grammar class—more like an introduction to syntax for English majors—there are a number of students who want to become teachers. In our text (Doing Grammar), author Max Morenberg makes a point of encouraging novice teachers to put grammar skills to work in recognizing not just what student writers do poorly but what they do well—the strong use of a modifier, a cleft-sentence that gives a sentence a rhythmic punch, an existential-there construction that works in context. My students in that class have practiced just such a recognition of rhetorical and syntactic dexterity in their analyses of 50+ word sentences from authors they admire, and in their papers, many have articulated analogies and metaphors to capture their sense of awe at a writer’s craftsmanship or prowess.   I see a two-fold lesson for myself in these reflections: first, in all student papers—whether from freshman writers in a co-requisite section or advanced writers in the major—I want to point out and praise sentences that work, sentences that sing, sentences that sail into the end-zone, punctuated with a ball-spike and celebration dance. Second, I want to develop metaphors for describing those successful sentences, word pictures that will help students understand how a reader experiences their words and why a given sentence carries the weight that it does.     What metaphors do you use to celebrate powerful student writing? ... View more

During the last presidential campaign, many of us made the mistake of trusting what we read on social media. It was easy to pick up on a quote or a meme that said just exactly what we wished we had said and to pass it along to those friends and family members whom we had not already blocked due to irreconcilable political differences. Facebook and Twitter and other media have made it easy to pass along misinformation with the click of a button. We were too naïve initially to recognize the forces at work to shape our opinions. We should have known, given how quickly Facebook picks up on any search we do and plies us with ads for just that product or service. Go to cars.com, and you are hit from all sides by car ads. Start planning a trip to New York, and it is ads for flights and hotels. How could we not have known how closely our interests – including our political ones – were being digitized and studied? More importantly, how could we not have questioned the sources of political news that seemed too good to be true—or too appropriately demeaning to our opponents to resist? It’s a simple truth of print journalism that articles do not have to be documented in the way that academic research has to be. Yes, we read direct quotes that we hope are correctly attributed to the specific speaker identified, but we also have that “source close to the White House” or that staff member who wishes to remain anonymous. It is easy to fall into the trap of trusting everything in print. Even the best journalistic writing does not come with notes and a list of works cited. Maybe that is why documentation seems such a foreign concept to students. However, good journalists, in print or on air, know the power of proper attribution. They know that statistics from the State Department about the number of American tourists killed in foreign countries are likely to be trustworthy and trusted. A report by the Department of Transportation, identified as such, about the number of accidents caused by distracted driving bears the weight of authority. We have all learned pretty quickly as the researched essays we assign increasingly draw on electronic sources that students do the digital equivalent of trusting anything in print. They tend to assume anything that came up in a search is just as good as any other source. After all, they found it on the Internet! Of course, Wikipedia is the first source that pops up in many searches, and we have to remind our students that some of the people writing for Wikipedia are no more qualified to write about the subject than they are. A Wikipedia article can be a quick source for facts, but its author is not guaranteed to be a specialist on the subject. Somewhere along the way students must learn how to evaluate online sources. As they incorporate those sources into their writing, in support of their arguments, they often have to be reminded to take advantage of the weight of authority. There is a reason to avoid “floating quotations,” those that appear with no lead-in or no identification of where or whom they came from. Sentence. “Quotation.” Sentence. The value of using sources is that another author can lend authority on a subject of his or her expertise that the writer does not have. If that source is identified only on a works cited page and in parenthesis by last name and page number, the claim of authority is lost. One of the most useful skills for documented essays that our students can learn is to work into their own sentences the claim to authority of the author they are quoting or paraphrasing. A very different claim to authority is becoming more and more apparent in some of the political battles going on right now. Personal experience and anecdotal evidence can be one of the most powerful types of support because of the emotional impact it adds to the mix. This is the basis for the impact of the #MeToo movement. It is also the reason that survivors of the tragic shootings at the Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, were able to lead a march of hundreds of thousands of supporters of gun control and school safety reform. There are few types of authority greater, on an individual basis, than the ability to state, “I know it is true because it happened to me.”   Photo Credit: “Emma Gonzalez imagery at Minnesota March for Our Lives” by Fibonacci Blue on Flickr 3/24/18 via CC BY 2.0 License ... View more

I am here in Northern California, where there are 80 dead and 1,000 unaccounted for in the worst wildfire of the state’s history. Air quality is bad; people are wearing masks. And coughing. Yet people are also giving thanks that, in this time of cataclysmic climate change, the loss of life and property was not even worse. Grace under pressure, as Hemingway once defined courage.   Many people this Thanksgiving week are working to bring food and clothing and shelter to those in need; food banks are reporting record numbers of donations and record numbers of people seeking aid. In my small village, our food bank distributed 58 turkeys and as many hams, along with staples and fresh vegetables—and a few treats for kids.   As always, I am grateful for family and friends. And as always, I am most thankful for students, for young people everywhere who give me—every single day—reason to hope. Here’s a poem of thanks for them, and for all of you: “When Giving Is All We Have” by Alberto Ríos.   Happy Thanksgiving to all.   Image Credit: Pixabay Image 1768857 by Sabrina_Ripke_Fotografie, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more