I'm interested in hearing your policy and innovative solutions to dealing with digital devices in the classroom. I'm forever telling students to put their phones away, even though my syllabus states there are no digital devices of any kind allowed in class. I know many instructors seem fine with students bringing laptops, ipads, and phones into class and using them. However, I can't tell you how many times I've passed by someone else's class and noticed students texting or surfing around on social media while pretending to take notes. Many years ago, I also taught in a room that had a bank of computers and had to constantly waste time policing students who were surfing around Google versus writing that day's essay. While I realize college students are supposed to be adults and some instructors just shrug it off if students are distracted with their devices versus engaging in the class, I personally find it distracting when I'm trying to work with students in a classroom. Plus, there are the obvious issues of cheating on tests and students not knowing what's going on in class if they aren't paying attention.  ... View more

Recently I came under some good-natured (?) teasing about being a 21st-century professor who still collects paper copies of student writing. Yes, I do, for several reasons. I believe that manuscript presentation is part of the writing process. This includes final editing, document formatting and yes, stapling a paper so that its pages stay together for reading. On that last point, stapling a paper has become an area of contention in some of my classes as students don't think to take this final step. Thus, I receive papers with loose pages, turned-down corners, paper clips, and recently, a hair pin. Yes, I could avoid all of this by having all final drafts submitted electronically, but I think this takes an area of accountability away from a student. How easy to just hit "submit" and let me print off the paper if I need to examine pages side-by-side or want to "draw" on the paper as part of my feedback. I also don't just take in the final paper alone; I ask for successive drafts, in-class peer reviews, and post-writings so that I can examine the student's writing process, not just the final product on a flat screen. There is a certain amount of pride, it seems to me, with presenting a printed paper copy of a composition in physical form. I want beginning writers to feel that sense of ownership and responsibility for their work. Sometimes, for logistical reasons, I do ask for electronic submissions--this also has its merits in terms of feedback--but I am not quite ready to give up the paper copies. Does this make me a dinosaur as a professor? What do you prefer--paper or digital?  ... View more

Carl Rogers, for whom Rogerian argument is named, took a concept that worked in couples and small-group therapy and extended it to large groups, even nations. Rogerian therapy is based on nonconfrontational communication. This communication is hampered, whether in dealing with individuals or nations, by the fact that there is no longer anything approaching a shared worldview. Rogers wrote, “Although society has often come around eventually to agree with its dissidents . . . there is no doubt that this insistence upon a known and certain universe has been part of the cement that holds a culture together.” In the Rogerian approach to argumentation, when views of what that worldview should be collide, effective communication requires both understanding another’s reality and respecting it. I was reminded of Rogers’s emphasis on shared common ground after the recent midterm elections when I saw headlines like this one from the Wall Street Journal: “What the Midterm Election Shows: America’s Two Parties Live in Divergent Worlds.” Almost half of voting Americans revealed through their choices that they feel very real threats to their “known and certain universe.” There is no place in that universe for abortion, same-sex marriage, gender fluidity, or immigrants. Throughout the Obama years, as liberals cheered change, there was a seething hostility that the election of Donald Trump brought to the surface. America’s (liberal) dissidents, those who threaten the security of a white Christian worldview, have increased in number to the point that they too constitute around fifty per cent of the voting public. Rogers would advocate that the two sides come together by seeking common ground—seeking that which they can agree on as a starting point for discussion. That’s hard to do, though, when the two sides live in divergent worlds. President Trump’s strategy as the midterms approached was the opposite of Rogerian argument. He went on the offensive, attacking the other side rather than seeking common ground. He rallied his supporters around causes by attacking liberals and condemning them as threats to nationalism—which many on the other side read as white nationalism. He played on the fear of the “other.” He intentionally broadened the gap rather than trying to bring the two sides together because establishing common ground among his supporters was more important. He created common ground within his base by constantly stressing how the other side advocated policies that threatened his supporters’ world. A group of families traveling from Honduras to seek asylum in the U. S. became the equivalent of an armed force attacking our Southern border—and a threat to our way of life. A search for common ground could have focused on how to control our borders, but, with the elections looming, it was more expedient to constantly refer to the liberal desire for open borders, making liberals appear to be as far as possible from protecting the American way of life. Having a Democrat-controlled House next year may make compromise more essential, if not more palatable, for conservatives. There are just too many differences in worldview between Republicans and Democrats to make common ground appealing to either party. While the Right can argue that they are protecting the most basic of American values, the Left can argue that their beliefs are firmly grounded in our country’s beginnings as a nation of immigrants seeking freedom from tyranny.   Photo Credit: “Anger! A couple arguing :(” by Free Images on Flickr 08/09/17 via a CC BY 2.0 License ... View more

In a previous edition of The Story and Its Writer, we included a page illustrated and written in 2009 by Michael Kupperman titled “Are Comics Serious Literature?”  In the first panel, a cowboy answers in the affirmative, but in the next panel another cowboy answers, “I SAY THEY AIN’T.”  A violent fistfight ensues — a series of pictures illustrating “SOK!” “POW!” “BAM!” “BIF!” and “CLOP!” – as the first cowboy beats up the second. In the last panel, the winner says “NOW WHO ELSE SAYS COMICS AREN’T SERIOUS LITERATURE?” Kupperman is spoofing the comic book style he’s using to make his point, but in the process he shows his reader that supposedly childish graphics can answer serious questions.  Instructors and students who enjoyed the page-long story “Are Comics Serious Literature?” will be happy to learn that in May 2018 Kupperman published a new book, All the Answers, in which he again asks a serious question and answers it brilliantly.  It’s a graphic memoir, the same genre as the true-life stories told so well by Alison Bechdel and Marjane Satrapi in the recent tenth edition of The Story and Its Writer.  In All the Answers, Kupperman tries to solve the mystery of his father Joel Kupperman’s lack of emotional support during his entire life.  Joel Kupperman, currently living in a nursing home in the last stages of dementia, was a college professor of philosophy when Michael and his younger brother were growing up in rural Connecticut in the 1970s and 1980s.  The family had a secret — the boys were never told that their father had been a world-wide celebrity.  In the decade of the 1940s he had been a child prodigy star on a popular weekly radio quiz show out of Chicago called “The Quiz Kids.” Joel Kupperman refused to talk about or reveal anything about his past life to his children.  This emotional withdrawal had crippling consequences for his family.     In a recent conversation, Michael Kupperman told me that it was painful for him to return to his memories of childhood and create All the Answers, but it was even more difficult, as he said, “to sell my pain to a publisher” in order to come out with his story. “The Quiz Kid experience went, along with the rest of my father’s childhood, into a kind of locked box.  It was understood that talking about it would cause him pain, so we didn’t bring it up.  It wasn’t until I started really examining it that I started to see what it had done to him – and through him to me and the rest of the family.  His generation and the generations surrounding it were not about talking about stuff and dealing with trauma.” Kupperman feels that his earlier work, such as “Are Comics Serious Literature?” involved what he describes as “the absence of meaning.” His readers could decide if his drawings were funny or not, but as an artist he was “committed to the painstaking parody and reproduction of pop culture.”  It was only when Joel Kupperman began to suffer from dementia that Michael realized he had a very limited time left to ask his father about his earlier career as a Quiz Kid.  Joel continued to be evasive, but Michael’s questions were answered when he discovered five scrap books created by his paternal grandmother documenting Joel’s ten years as a radio celebrity, from the ages of six to sixteen. His father had hidden the scrap books behind a shelf at home in his library.  The photographs and mementos taped onto their yellowing pages became the source of the richly detailed visual world of the 1940s that Kupperman meticulously creates in All the Answers. As a precocious child, Joel had the ability to perform complex — if trivial — math problems in his head, and in the process remain unflustered while on the air in a coast-to-coast live radio show.  As an adult he was very modest; he never considered himself a genius because he possessed this talent. His mother had been his tireless publicist, continuously pushing him to meet prominent people who admired his plucky performances on the radio.  His fans were as diverse as the movie comedians Abbott & Costello and the industrialist Henry Ford.  Michael Kupperman believes that his father was promoted as a celebrity by the national radio networks and used as a non-threatening American symbol of the Jewish race to fight anti-Semitism during World War II.  His memoir is more than a personal story about his difficult relationship with his father; it is also about the country’s fascination with celebrities and our long history of religious intolerance.  I entirely agree with what Jake Tapper said about All the Answers on CNN: “Poignant and funny and sad.”   Ann Charters is the author of The Story and its Writer.  ... View more

I’m writing this post on November 5, the day before midterm elections, 2018, and writing with my heart in my mouth. Tomorrow, as I’m speaking to instructors and students at the University of Central Florida, our country will be making momentous decisions, from coast to coast, about the kind of citizens we want to be, about the kind of leaders we want to elect, about the kind of country we want our children and grandchildren to live in, and about the kind of language, discourse, and argumentative strategies we want our leaders, and our citizens, to adopt. To say I’m nervous doesn’t begin to describe this state of anxiety.   So tonight I am thinking of other times, other places, and specifically about the early days of this much-hoped-for democracy. I’ve had occasion to do so because this weekend I met my grandnieces, now 14 and 11, in New York for a weekend of theater. I had seen Hamilton when it first arrived on Broadway but not since; the girls had not seen it BUT know every single word of every song in the show, complete with accents and hip-hop beats. They were beside themselves with excitement as we walked the ten blocks or so from our hotel to the theater and waited in line to take our seats. The moment Aaron Burr stepped forward to sing How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten Spot in the Caribbean by providence, impoverished, in squalor Grow up to be a hero and a scholar? they were mouthing the words along with him, and they stayed on the edges of their seats through the entire three-hour show. And what do they think the show is about? They are pretty well up on the history, I was very glad to know; they have Miranda’s Hamilton book and read the essays in it along with his annotations of some of the key lines. Along with the rest of the crowd, they cheered when they heard There would have been nothin’ left to do For someone less astute He woulda been dead or destitute Without a cent of restitution Started workin', clerkin' for his late mother's landlord Tradin’ sugar cane and rum and all the things he can’t afford Scammin' for every book he can get his hands on Plannin' for the future see him now as he stands on (ooh) The bow of a ship headed for a new land In New York you can be a new man (and a new woman too, they said). And later they stood and cheered when they heard “Immigrants: we get the job done!”   So they know some of this very complex history of our early democracy, and they understand that they too are immigrants, that all Americans except for indigenous people are immigrants. And Hamilton has helped them understand this concept and apply it to their own lives—and to the arguments swirling around them and all of us.   Whatever happens tomorrow, I will be glad to have seen Hamilton again and to have had a chance to talk with young people about what they see in this play, what they hear in its lyrics and view in its moving choreography. And to have thought about what immigrants have brought to this country, and will continue to bring if we allow them to. We could do a lot worse right before this election than to listen to—and really hear—Miranda’s lyrics. When I meet instructors and students at UCF tomorrow, I’m going to ask how many have seen Hamilton or listened to the soundtrack—and hope that a sea of hands goes up.   Image Credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alexander_Hamilton_portrait_by_John_Trumbull_1806.jpg (Public Domain) ... View more

I have been teaching my students to think about academic writing and argument as a conversation, a metaphor which incorporates many of the characteristics I associate with civil discourse: empathy, listening, compassion, understanding, and reciprocity. But I wonder how adequate this metaphor is at a time like this – when children are separated from their families, birthright citizenship is threatened, and the essence of one’s identity can be erased with the stroke of a pen. A number of writers have lamented that the inability to have civil conversations may be a greater issue than the policies that challenge conceptions of national identity, democracy, and social justice. But what would a serious conversation in the current context look and sound like? What middle ground is there?   These are questions that have occurred to me long before the current moment. I am reminded of a discussion with my students about an Ethnic Studies class Latinx educators adopted in a Tucson public school. The class immersed Latinx students at the school in the study of history, annexation, colonization, and community activism. Class discussions fostered a sense of cultural pride, agency, and power. But the superintendent of schools in Tucson led a campaign to eliminate the class because he felt the subject matter engendered hate for America. My students didn’t follow the superintendent’s line of argument, so I asked what they would say to the superintendent.   One student offered that it wouldn’t be worth responding to someone who was so dismissive of the effort to teach students their history, instill pride, and motivate them to strengthen their communities. Others indicated a desire to engage in a conversation to better understand why the superintendent eliminated the class. I, too, wanted to pursue the reasons why an ethnic studies course felt so threatening. Perhaps there was some fundamental misunderstanding about the class and maybe there was some other way to look at the problem – a view from the middle – that would facilitate a conversation.   However, I also wonder about my role as a teacher of writing and rhetoric when a student does not see any middle ground in issues about identity, social justice, and democracy. Is it more meaningful to understand why some educators limit what is taught in schools or to find ways to support initiatives in education that are culturally sustaining?   For a moment, I want to think about NPR host Krista Tippett’s reflections on what our most difficult conversations entail. That we can have these conversations at all requires building relations rooted in trust. A good conversation is motivated by our own convictions, she explains, and includes raising good questions that reflect “genuine curiosity.” So how do we create the kinds of spaces that foster “good conversations?” And how do we find “middle ground,” as Tayari Jones asks in a recent article? Can we assume that this middle ground “represents a safe, neutral and civilized space?”   I can’t say that I have answers to the questions that Krista Tippett and Tayari Jones ask. My co-author, April Lidinsky, and I describe the metaphor of conversation at length in From Inquiry to Academic Writing and stress the idea of empathy in trying to understand arguments that differ from our own worldviews. We write that empathy is the ability to understand the perspectives that shape what people think, believe, and value. To express both empathy and respect for the positions of all people involved in the conversation, academic writers try to understand the conditions under which each opinion might be true and then to represent the strengths of that position accurately. We adopt a Rogerian approach to argument that grows out of the give-and-take of conversation between two people and the topic under discussion. In a writing, this conversation takes the form of anticipating readers’ counterarguments and using language that is both empathetic and respectful.   Developing empathy entails looking critically at how factors such as race, class, gender, faith, and sexuality inform the ways we see the world and exist in relationships to one. These factors point to the multiple forms of oppression that individuals experience everyday. Before we can empathize, we must understand how power operates and disenfranchises. As educators, we need to acknowledge with our students the nature of intersectionality and challenge normative and reductive views of identity. At a time when we live in segregated communities and our friends are scattered geographically and virtually, it’s important that students understand how abstract ideas about citizenship, power, and identity affect day-to-day experiences.   I am mindful of Jones’s argument that establishing common ground is complicated. This is especially the case when those we disagree with overlook or ignore how people are directly affected by “policies or cultural norms.” I think of my student who said he would not try to engage the superintendent. As a student of color, my student took the elimination of the ethnic studies class as a personal affront to black and brown people who have spent decades struggling for equity and justice. The superintendent was not just making an argument that seemed to invite a response; he was creating policies that change people’s lives.   What middle ground exists when a student recalls the time when ICE surrounded his house and took his father away? When children are separated from their families at the border? When elected officials challenge the very foundations of how to define citizenship and treat civil and human rights as negligible? My student hears that he does not matter in policies that center whiteness and nativism. I understand why he and others would walk away from a painful conversation.   As teachers of writing, we can and should create spaces for difficult conversations built on relationships, trust, and reciprocity. But sometimes it’s fine to let our students rage without having to reconcile their feelings of vulnerability and anger.   Photo Credit: Pilar Berguido on Flickr 02/09/05, via a CC BY 2.0 License ... View more

Today's guest blogger is Milya Maxfield, an instructor in the Academy of Inclusive Learning and Social Growth and a writing center professional at Kennesaw State University. She has a BSW and an MAT in Secondary English Education, and her experiences working with individuals with disabilities inside and outside the classroom have shaped her areas of study, combining her love of digital spaces, writing, differentiation, and accessibility. At its core, the Academy for Inclusive Learning and Social Growth at Kennesaw State University and the Advanced Leadership and Career Development (ALCD) program are designed to be “fully inclusive” and help “students who do not meet higher-education requirements for admission” integrate into the general student population, giving them similar experiences and socialization to those of their peers. These shared experiences make an enormous difference as they leave college and enter the workforce (Migliore, Butterworth, & Hart, 2009). I developed this Communication Story Assignment for the internship class that Academy students take in the first year of the ALCD program. A communication story in the context of this assignment is an easily customizable, generally digital tool that individuals with disabilities use to teach others strategies for effectively and respectfully communicating with them (Pouliot, Müller, Frasché, Kern, & Resti, 2017). Students work on this project for the entire semester, completing mini-assignments and homework every week. The final product in my class is a 2-4 minute video and includes four main components: an introduction, their story, tips for communicating, and a conclusion. VERY IMPORTANT: If you are doing this activity with students with diagnosed disabilities, make sure that they feel comfortable self-disclosing. Reiterate that they only need to discuss their disabilities if they want to. Learning Outcomes Upon completing the assignment, students will be able to Record and edit footage using everyday technologies, such as their phones and tablets. Advocate for themselves using their Communication Story to negotiate a healthy and productive working environment. Note: Learning outcomes may vary beyond these initial two because scaffolding and differentiation are critical to this assignment’s success. Background Reading for Students and Instructors The St. Martin's Handbook: 16d, "Considering Visuals and Media"; 17b, "Writing to be Heard and Remembered"; 17d, "Practicing the Presentation" The Everyday Writer (also available with Exercises😞 3b, "Plan your Text's Topic and Message"; 3c, "Consider your Purpose and Stance as a Communicator"; 3e, "Think about Genres and Media"; 3f, "Consider Language and Style" EasyWriter (also available with Exercises😞 1c, "Considering the Assignment and Purpose"; 1e, "Reaching Appropriate Audiences"; 1g "Considering Time, Genre, Medium, and Format"   Procedure Prewriting and Planning On the first day of class, we have a class discussion about what my students find challenging in their internships and jobs, particularly those difficulties which involve communication (and miscommunication). I show my students two videos: Disability Sensitivity Training and Young Stroke Survivor with Aphasia: Laura. We discuss what components of the videos we liked and what we might want to implement in our own videos. Using the "Do This, Not That" Graphic Organizer, students write: What people should do or not do when communicating with them Example: Use my name when you want to talk to me. How individuals can implement these tips Example: Start a sentence or instructions by saying, “Milya...” Why doing these things would help them to better communicate Example: Sometimes I don’t know that people are talking to me because I’m so focused on doing my own thing. How it makes them feel when individuals accommodate these communication strategies Example: I know that the person really wants to talk to me and values what I have to say. Write, Write, Write, Revise, Revise, Revise Students expand the “Do This, Not That” graphic organizer entries to build the first draft of their scripts: Example: When you want to talk to me, start your sentence with my name, Milya. Sometimes, I don’t know that people are talking to me and it seems like I’m ignoring you when I’m really not. Signaling that you want me to be a part of the conversation makes me feel like you value my opinion and want me to participate. Students are put into pairs and given a cut-up version of the transcript of the Young Stroke Survivor with Aphasia: Laura video. After they piece it back together, we have a class discussion about what information each piece of the script contains and why they decided to put the pieces in the order that they did. Based on the order and information the class decides on, we build an outline for what each section of their videos should include: Introduction: name, major, year in school, career aspirations, relevant interests Story: who they are, how they got there, and why they are making this video Tips: 3-5 of their best tips for communicating (either dos or don’ts) with justifications Conclusion: most important takeaway and a thank you Before students begin filming, they peer review each other’s scripts.   Filming/Creating This is the part of the assignment that is most variable depending on what your final product looks like and which technologies you plan to use. Almost all of my students used the cameras on their phones, tablets, or laptops to record themselves. While some edited in additional content, such as pictures or additional videos, most recorded the video in one take and did not use any video editing software to make changes. Scaffolding/Differentiation The number of ways to scaffold and differentiate this assignment are as unique and varied as your students, but here are a few suggestions that worked for mine: Allow students to handwrite, type, or dictate using a speech-to-text program. Provide a list of possible tips for students to choose from. Use additional graphic organizers to help students write their scripts, especially the introduction and the conclusion. Reflection Because this assignment was designed for an internship class, it needed to have immediate, tangible, practical application for the students. More than helping others communicate with them, this assignment was designed to help my students identify and address communication barriers in a proactive, productive way. On the first day of class, one of the things we talked about was how we cannot control how others interact with us, but we can choose how to interact with them. Most of my students feel hurt when they are treated differently, so they were thrilled at the opportunity to help others “treat them normally.” From listening to their struggles—and from struggling myself to find alternate ways of explaining concepts in class—I’ve learned just how much the environments they interact with are not designed for them. As I have searched for resources to assist my students, I realize they have to accommodate others far more often than they are accommodated. While I hope creating this video is indeed a learning experience for my students, I also recognize that by interacting with them and learning to see from their points of view, I may be the one who benefits most from the project. References Pouliot, D.M., Müller, E., Frasché, N.F., Kern, A.S., Resti, I.H. (2017). “A tool for supporting communication in the workplace for individuals with intellectual disabilities and/or autism.” Career Development and Transition for Exceptional Individuals. 40(4) 244-249. doi: 10.1177/2165143416683927 Migliore, A., Butterworth, J., Hart, D. (2009). “Postsecondary education and employment outcomes for youth with intellectual disabilities.” Think College: National Center for POstsecondary Education for Students with Intellectual Disabilities. Vol. 1. ... View more

Milya Maxfield‌'s "Do This, Not That" Graphic Organizer. See https://community.macmillan.com/community/the-english-community/bedford-bits/blog/2018/11/05/multimodal-mondays-talk-to-me-a-tale-of-miscommunication  ... View more

For a number of years I was an active participant, and moderator, on a hobby forum. I was well aware at the time that the experience of forum participation was quite unlike anything else I had ever encountered, and, from time to time, I posted analyses of that experience onto the forum itself. I no longer participate on that forum (it got taken over by climate change deniers and such like—this will be relevant to my following analysis), but I do visit the site to see what is happening there. It's a kind of time travelling experience, thanks to the existence of searchable archives, in which I can see something of myself frozen in the amber of digital memory. But I see something else: namely, some striking signs of what has been happening in this country over the last ten years, not the least of which is the role of Facebook as both symptom and cause of those changes.   I'll start with something I posted to the site at the time when I was first coming to appreciate the affect it was having on me. Here's what I said, way back in 2005:             What an  forum provides is a historically unprecedented combination of carnival and holiday. That is, the ancient tradition of the carnival enabled Europeans to drop their everyday social hierarchies and limitations, to don masks, and enjoy a freedom that ordinary life doesn't offer. Here on Site X, what we are in everyday life doesn't matter at all. The hierarchy here, and there is a hierarchy of sorts, comes from technical expertise, or experience, or sheer  congeniality and cleverness. I'm very glad to note that it does not come from equipment. Many of the high-rung folks on Site X do not own the best equipment. You can't buy your way to the top here—which is a lot different from everyday life. More important is the masked nature of an  forum. Because we can   conceal as much of ourselves as we like, the stakes of ordinary social interaction are lowered. We aren't risking anything, as happens in any ordinary social interaction. This enables us to relax, to be playful, even a bit childish. We can also be more authentically ourselves, which is very refreshing. On top of this is   the fact that while we can interact at literally any time of the day, the virtual rather than spatial nature of that interaction eliminates most risks. In spatial interaction we have to worry about having to see a person again whom we have may made a goof with. Here, we don't risk that. Again, this enables us to relax enormously. This relates to the holiday-like characteristic of Site X. Just as on a travel-related vacation (a cruise, say), one finds oneself making extraordinarily close friendships that rarely last beyond the voyage because one knows that when the cruise is over everything can be erased, on Site X we are on a kind of permanent holiday. We can let our hair down safely, knowing that if too much is revealed or dared, we can always jump ship, so to speak. Since most of us feel this way it makes for an extraordinarily relaxed atmosphere, with most of our defenses down. Our usual defenses make ordinary social interaction fraught with tension; with them down, we are just more fun to be around.   As I read these words now I realize that there is a deep irony in them, the snake, so to speak, in the garden I thought I had found. This irony lies precisely in the anonymity and virtuality of  social interaction, whose benefits can cut two ways. For without the controlling factors inherent in face-to-face and fully-identified human interactions, the Internet is also a place of unbridled hostility and vituperation where people say things they would not dare say to someone else in person.   And there doesn't appear to be anywhere to hide when it comes to those  forums that still thrive, as Amy Olberding's essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education laments. Her title says it all: "When Argument Becomes Bloodsport: Philosophy is mired in wanton pugilism."   Which is where Facebook comes in. Facebook first appeared at a time when all-too-many  forums were becoming cockpits for the ever-increasing political and cultural divisions that are now so visibly tearing at our society. Forbidding anonymity and offering opportunities for  interaction in which everyone could be a site administrator with the power to exclude unwanted voices, Facebook was quickly embraced as a means of escaping the flame wars and troll fests the Net had become. Indeed, on Site X most of my friends ended up retreating to Facebook—where I did not follow due to personal concerns for my privacy (a topic ripe for its own analysis).   So in one sense, Facebook is a symptom, not a cause, of American divisiveness. It offered a way out. But in another, it is a cause: as more and more people have retreated into their own  silos, wherein they can interact only with those people with whom they already agree and be supplied with newsfeeds that deliver only the news and the opinions they want to hear, in the way they want to hear them, the divisions between what is emerging as the Two Americas are only growing. This is not mere correlation, for when a divided people are experiencing a different reality via their social network connections, they are increasingly living in a different reality, making it impossible to understand where the other "side," if you will, is coming from. And this is clearly making things worse.   So we have another spoiled paradise on our hands. And I really don't know where we go from here.   Image Credit: Pixabay Image 390860 by PDPics, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

Today's featured guest blogger is Shane Bradley‌, Administrative Dean, Writing Program Director, and Assistant Professor of English at Erskine College. Anyone reading this old enough to remember the song “Where the Party At” by Jagged Edge? The year was 2001, and I’d just finished what I call my “Middle School Odyssey” – teaching ELA to seventh and eighth graders – and had joyfully made it home to high school English.             I began my high school stint teaching ninth graders, and everybody knows there’s little difference between eighth and ninth graders. So, the odyssey continued. My students urged me to include music in my lessons, and eager to get them involved, I complied. Fridays found us listening to their favorite songs and talking about what we heard.             When one of them played “Where the Party At” that fall, we listened happily, tapped our fingers, and bobbed our heads. Several students sang along with the lyrics, and two were so moved that they broke into dance.             Music is an inescapable component of our lives. We listen to it in the car, from our phones, around the store, at the gym. Our students wear their Beats headphones like old people wear shirts: part of their wardrobe. What I realized early on was that while music takes us places our ordinary, soundless existences can’t, those words, those structural patterns attached to the music also stick in our heads, becoming part of us. With that in mind, I decided to keep “Where the Party At?” as a teaching tool for my high school students.             I try to play the song in my American Literature classes during the first weeks of a new semester. We enjoy the music, but most students don’t sing along because they’re too young or too cool or both. Because I also begin most semesters with a review of what a sentence is, how it functions, and the ground rules for clear academic writing, the refrain in the song – “Where the (da) party at?” – serves as an appropriate example.             “Grammatically,” I ask, “what’s wrong with the song?”             Silence.             “There are three key issues in the chorus that we want to avoid in our writing. Can anyone identify them?”             “They end the sentence with the word at,” someone shouts.             “Yes, and why is that wrong?”             “No object of the preposition,” another student says. “Sounds bad.”             “Good. What else?”             “They don’t say the word the; they say da.”             “Yes, and while saying da may not be that big a deal, do we want to write da in the place of the word the?”             “No,” they laugh.             “There’s one more,” I say.             This one always takes a moment, but someone finally realizes and blurts out, “Hey, there’s no verb in ‘Where da party at.’ It needs an is.”             Music may brighten our students’ days, help them study, and keep their workouts and practices on pace, but it also tattoos on their impressionable brains habits that drive English teachers nuts! Whether we’ll admit it or not, the music our students like doesn’t cultivate the most effective written academic communication.             Instead of beating them over the head with all the bad habits popular music creates, I try to help them recognize the influence music has on our culture. I play another hit from my past, “Run Around” by Blues Traveler from all the way back in 1994. Remember the first lines? “Oh, once upon a midnight dearie, I woke with something in my head.” Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” – “Once upon a midnight dreary.” Honestly, they don’t get that reference any more than they know Poe is responsible for the raven on Baltimore’s helmets.             By the end of the semester, we’ve listened to and discussed a variety of songs inspired by the literature we read. Here are a few: “Ahab,” MC Lars (Herman Melville, Moby Dick) “Tom Sawyer,” Rush (Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer) “Anabel Lee,” Stevie Nicks (Edgar Allan Poe, “Anabel Lee”) “Richard Cory,” Simon and Garfunkel (E.A. Robinson, “Richard Cory”) “Thieves in the Night,” Blackstar (Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye) “Firework,” Katy Perry (Jack Kerouac, “On the Road”)               And while some of the songs might be a bit of a stretch, like Katy’s Perry’s “Firework,” and listening to the songs does require us to read all or part of the works referenced, students do appreciate our efforts.             To my surprise, some of my students are familiar with the band Iron Maiden, and any Internet search of their songs (“Flight of Icarus” and “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” for example) will reveal a strong literary influence. Like the band’s music or not, there’s no mistaking that the members either paid attention in high school or spent a lot of time with their noses in books.             When my students want to know where “da party at,” they know it probably won’t be in my classroom, but what they do know is that we’ll listen to Jagged Edge, laugh, bob our heads, and talk about literary influences on the culture. The odyssey continues.   ... View more

Have you seen the Heineken ad that aired in the UK last year, the one that ended with “Open Your World”? If not, it’s worth a quick look here. I’ve been thinking about this ad a lot during the past couple of weeks, as Trump lurches from one outlandish, chest-thumping, ranting rally to the next, as pipe bombs are delivered to leading Democrats all over the country, as anti-Semitic slurs and threats are hurled, along with murdering bullets, at worshipers. Is it possible, in such times, to open your own world, or to open anyone else’s?   Heineken thinks it is, and in the experiment that the ad reports on, they show how. Six people, with radically opposed viewpoints on everything from climate change to transgender issues, are put into three pairs. The people do not know each other and do not know what the experiment is really about: what they do know is that they have met and spoken with the organizers a bit, and they have agreed to meet and to build something together, using instructions given to them by the organizers. And so the pairs get their marching orders and begin to work, assembling tables and chairs—building things. They chat as they work and get to know each other, sharing sometimes very personal information: one man reveals that he has experienced homelessness, for example. Then they are asked to stand and watch a brief video, which features statements they made when first speaking with the organizers. One pair, a trans woman and a conservative older male, are particularly memorable: on the video, she reveals that she is transgender; he opines that transgender is “just not right.” After they watch the video together, the organizers give them another instruction: take two beers out of a cooler (it’s a beer ad, after all) and place them on the structure they had built together. Then decide whether to sit and talk over a beer—or to leave.   Each pair decides to stay and talk, and during that talk the man who had been adamantly opposed to accepting trans people says “I’ve been brought up in a way where everything is black and white―but life isn’t black and white” and they go on from there, the woman saying “Well, I’m just me.” They exchange information and decide to stay in touch. Perhaps the world has opened a bit for this particular man, and for others who participated in this experiment.   I’m hoping to watch this video with a class of students and ask them to write a reflection on it immediately after and then use those reflections for some class discussion on listening, on really attending to other people. I’d like then to come back to the ad after six or seven weeks and watch it again, and reflect again, this time noting ways in which the students’ attitudes and ways of seeing and hearing and understanding the ad may have changed or become more complex.   I’d also like to ask them to consider what difference it may have made that the pairs were asked to work cooperatively on a project together and that they were doing so face to face, in real time. Can they begin to think of their work in peer review or on collaborative writing assignments as an opportunity to make something together, to build a word-house they can all inhabit? At its best, such work can open worlds. And minds. It’s work teachers of writing are always committed to. Image Credit: Pixabay Image 3737229 by rawpixel, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

G uest Blogger: sara heaser  is a Lecturer of English at the University of Wisconsin La Crosse, where she specializes in basic/co-requisite and first-year writing curriculum, pedagogy, and program development. She is an alum of the Dartmouth Summer Seminar for Studies in Composition Research and is currently in the midst of a qualitative study to explore first-year writing as a space for retention. She can be reached at sheaser@uwlax.edu. I have a four-year-old son who understands the world in basic binaries: good vs evil, happy vs sad, big vs small, and such. So when he asks his big questions—lots and lots of them—about really abstract things, I resort to the most simple, applicable analogy I can think of. Here’s an example. We were reading a book about the human body and he asked about the “weird-looking lines” (veins) inside us. We live in the Midwest on the Mississippi River, so I said that those lines were like little rivers of blood, and that the blood rivers have barges on them, and the barges carry things he needs around his body to where his body needs them. There’s obviously not microscopic chunks of bananas and fruit snacks floating from his stomach to his toes via his veins, but it’s a close enough explanation to appease his curiosity and to reach a level of understanding that he gets, for now. This is a hard part of parenting, negotiating mutual understanding of an unfamiliar concept. The same goes for teaching. As teachers, we collectively live in the same world as our students, sometimes quite literally in the same communities. But this doesn’t mean we share or value common experiences. This is especially true when it comes to writing. The students in my FYW courses are well beyond understanding the world dualistically like my son does, but when it comes to writing, I see them rely on old tropes. I often find their understanding of writing and its processes is limited to playing it safe—they rely on archaic rules that someone told them to follow somewhere along the way in their writing education. And as we know, FYW can sometimes be a student’s first foray into writing for purposes and audiences instead of writing to follow rules--a very unfamiliar concept, indeed. Rules are inflexible; metaphors are interpretative. Introducing metaphors in FYW that imply writing is flexible, unsteady, confusing, messy, frustrating, and such might suggest not only a difference in kind but a difference in understanding of what writing is, as a verb. Some I rely on often: A wacky genius effortlessly producing prose is a mythological trope seen in fictional films. Writing is like cooking. Gather the ingredients as you prepare, adjust them as needed to your purpose and audience. (And this one reminds me of my own role: I’m not the one cooking. The students are. So back off.) Engaging in research is like having a conversation. Sometimes you might not know what the conversation is about, and that’s ok. Just listen for a while. Learning to write well is like learning a sport. It requires repetitive, deliberate practice. Just like you might stretch or lift weights to train for a big race, you might practice combining sentences to train for revising a big draft.   The five-paragraph essay, sad and useless, is a particularly fun target on which to apply metaphor. Even entire rhetorics for FYW invoke metaphor, like Understanding Rhetoric: A Graphic Guide to Writing, which uses “hosts” (the authors) that guide students through a journey of learning about writing. I don’t have extensive data on student response to metaphor or the effectiveness of metaphorical language in composition pedagogy, but I have a teacherly sense that the use of metaphor in FYW plays a special role beyond just explaining what writing is and can be. If shared language is a symbol of intimacy, metaphor is essentially the foundation on which we can build a sense of community. (A metaphor to explain a metaphor—I couldn’t resist.) When I overhear students drop our metaphors in conversations or read them in a reflective essay, I can literally see and hear metaphor functioning to humanize writing and to establish a relationship between writer and audience, between student and teacher, and between the most important relationship of them all, between the novice writer and writing itself.   What metaphors do you use to talk about writing with your students? ... View more

Hearing the Voices of the Immigrant “Caravan” Over the past several weeks, the Trump Administration has been attempting to create an atmosphere of fear around the “caravan” of refugees fleeing the violence of their home countries. Their political and personal suffering has been recast in terms of a “takeover” of our country by “violent and dangerous” individuals. There have even been calls to increase military security along the border.    I want to use this space to simply remind us of the humanity of those attempting to reach safety. Last year, I had the opportunity to publish the memoir SUEÑOS Y PESADILLAS/Dreams and Nightmares by Liliana Velasquez, who left her home at 14 to come to the United States. I am providing an excerpt of her story as one small attempt to remind us of the courage of many of those in the “caravan” and the strength they are bringing to our nation. (Proceeds from Dreams and Nightmares are used to pay for Liliana Velasquez’s college education.)    SUEÑOS Y PESADILLAS: Liliana's Story I Got Rid of My Fear When I was fourteen, I decided to come to the United States alone. I told myself, I’m going to get rid of all of my fear, if I never strive, I won’t accomplish my dream. When I made that decision, I was ready for anything. What was going to happen to me wasn’t important, because many things had already happened there in Guatemala. I made that decision out of desperation, out of the anger I always had, from seeing my mother and father suffering, from seeing parents in my village who didn’t care for their children, from seeing the violence within families and between neighbors—from seeing my poor country. And, as I suffered some of that, I decided to go far away without fear. When I came here I did many things that I couldn’t imagine, without knowing anything. I didn’t have a plan, like where I was going, who I was going to meet up with or stay with, if I had anything to eat or a place to sleep, or where I was going to get money. I didn’t think about those things. I only told myself, I’m going! I didn’t know what I was doing—it was insanity and bravery at the same time.             Fulfilling My Dreams In Guatemala, I wanted to go to school and continue my studies, but I wasn’t able to. I wanted to be someone and overcome what had happened to me, and I decided to make a different life. I didn’t want to get married and have children, like the other young girls in Guatemala, and I had to escape the violence there. My dreams were to live with my brothers in North Carolina and work and help my mom and my sisters.  When they captured me at the border, I felt like my dream had ended. I said to myself, If they deport me, I don’t know what will become of me—I will be destroyed if I return to Guatemala. When I was caught, destiny took me down another path beyond my imagination and changed my life. I came to the United States only to work and be with my brothers. I had no hopes of living with a foster family that would love me, I had no hopes of continuing with my studies and living like a regular girl, of having papers, of having more freedom and respect and opportunities, of not suffering from violence, or of finding so many people who would help me.  Thinking about the future, I am going to keep on fighting and taking advantage of the opportunities that I have. Right now, I’m only focused on my present goals. Eventually, I want to go to a university and study nursing. I will be the first person in my family who has graduated from high school and gone on to the university—who has a career. This hasn’t been easy, it has cost me a lot. In one sense, I’m achieving the American Dream, but a part of me—the part that I love the most—I left in Guatemala. I’m separated from my family there, from the place that I was born. I’ve had to get used to a completely different culture and to new people and have had to determine my own path. It’s been hard, but it’s worth it.  Finally, I Have Told My Story  Since I was a thirteen-year-old girl, I have wanted to tell my story. When I cried in my house in Guatemala, I imagined that the house was a witness to my suffering, and that someday it would testify about what had happened to me. I wanted to express everything that I felt—how I cried because of the separation of my parents, or the abuse and torment that I experienced, and my lack of education. I didn’t think about including my dreams in my story—I only thought about the ways I suffered.   I decided that I had to tell my story. It was very important to me, because there are many people who can’t express themselves, who don’t have the opportunity to tell their story, who have suffered like me. It is my story, but it’s also the story of all the others who have come to this country. Also, I’m telling my story for the people here in the United States who don’t know anything about the life of immigrants—the poverty and violence and lack of opportunities in our countries, and the risks that we take to come to the United States in order to have a better life and help our families. They can’t imagine how we live here, how we suffer, how we try to get ahead and struggle by the sweat of our brow to get what we want. I hope that people who aren’t immigrants see the great difference between their life and the life of immigrants—that they reflect a bit and change their attitude. They haven’t suffered from hunger, they haven’t suffered rape or abuse, they have opportunities to get an education, they don’t live in fear of being arrested and deported. We immigrants came to fulfill our dreams—I want them to understand our dreams. Photos courtesy of Stephen Parks. ... 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.   “Technology is rotting our brains!”   “The screen is destroying our ability to understand what we read!”   “Students are so distracted by technology that they can’t focus on anything let alone researching or reading digitally !”   We’ve all heard these alarmist declarations about technology, and to some extent, they are not overly exaggerated. Multiple studies have revealed that students’ reading abilities have declined over time, and technology likely has something to do with it. Cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, reading scholar and author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of Reading and most recently, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World, argues that screen reading has transformed our brains, negatively impacting our ability to read in a way that invites strong comprehension. Distractions, stimuli, and digital reading practices such as skimming have all contributed to what Wolf calls a loss of “cognitive patience,” a mental state needed for deep, engaged reading. Based on this research, writing instructors must take note of the real possibility that students may not be comprehending digital texts that they read for homework assignments or for research-based writing assignments.   Yet, there are other reasons why students may have difficulty reading and engaging with texts in meaningful ways. Contrary to popular belief, 21 st century students are not all “digital natives” or in other words, adept or fluent with technology. Thus instructors can’t assume students know how to effectively navigate digital texts. In fact, many current students have likely not been taught digital reading practices in elementary or secondary school. A recent qualitative research study I conducted on digital reading practices affirms such a hypothesis. In my study, I discovered that students utilized comprehension strategies, yet almost never engaged with reading strategies specific to digital texts like acknowledging or clicking hyperlinks, acknowledging or engaging with images and videos, and drawing connections between and among modes. The students in my study read digital texts like print texts.     All of this means students need formal instruction in digital reading. Below I offer three pedagogical suggestions for how to teach effective digital reading practices.   #1. Teach Students that Digital Texts are Multimodal Digital texts are comprised of multiple modes—alphabetic, aural, and visual. These modes are vehicles of communication and work to convey meaning and messages individually and collaboratively. Within these modes, there are specific features such as color, hyperlinks, charts, images, and maps. Teaching students how to interact and engage with modes and their features will make them stronger digital readers.    #2. Teach Students that Digital Genres Call for Different Kinds of Engagement PDFs look different from company websites which look and sound different from multimedia scholarly articles. Bring attention to these differences and point out that different genres call for different kinds of reading engagement.   Since writing conventions carry over from print to the web, so do reading practices. Thus one way to teach students how to engage with different digital genres is to ask them to draw on reading habits of print texts that are similar in nature to digital texts. For example, a student may draw on their antecedent reading practices of a print newspaper to engage with a digital newspaper. An instructor could then support them in adapting these strategies to engage with the unique features and rhetorical situation of that digital text.   #3. Teach Students How to Preview a Text and Construct a Reading Plan Much like with a print text, previewing a digital text orients the reader and provides them with knowledge on how to approach reading that text. Ask students to activate their knowledge of digital text features, digital genres, and previous reading practices to preview the text and create a reading plan.   Julie Coiro, in “Making Sense of  Text,” offers one way students might preview a digital text: (1) read the title of the page and site; (2) scan menu choices without clicking on anything in effort to get a holistic sense of the text; (3) make predictions about where each hyperlink may lead; (4) explore interactive features, including pop-up menus and scroll bars; (5) identify the creator and what this information might reveal about the digital text; (6) acknowledge and practice using any electronic supports, such as an internal search engine; (7) and make a decision about whether to explore the site further.   After previewing the text, students can compose a reading plan that clearly indicates how they will approach engaging with the text according to their purpose for reading it. ... 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. Several years ago, I observed a writing class wherein the professor asked students to find a visual that represented their feelings about writing. One student brought in a picture of a young man standing at the top of a cliff. The young man looked terrified as he looked down, perhaps thinking he could tumble off the edge at any moment.   The message was clear: writing is scary.   Writing has historically been known to evoke feelings of fear and anxiety in many people, and our students are no exception. Many of them are scared to write for fear of “not sounding smart” or “not doing it right.” Many of them are scared to share their writing, especially with their peers, because they “stink at writing” or “don’t have any good ideas.”   Fear and anxiety yield all kinds of problems for writers. Some experience dread at the thought of writing; some experience severe writer’s block or paralysis; and/or some just try to avoid writing altogether.   So how can we help our students overcome their fears related to writing?   I orchestrated a brief, but surprisingly very effective activity to help students identify their fears about writing and support each other in facing these fears. The activity helped individual students gain confidence, but perhaps more importantly, it fostered a caring, supportive environment for a community of writers. In facilitating this activity immediately before peer review, students approached each other’s work with a kind of empathy and understanding that they had not previously had.   Step #1: Ask students to take out a piece of paper and respond to the following prompt. What is your biggest fear or challenge about writing?   Step #2: After students finish responding to the prompt, ask them to fold up the piece of paper and place it in a box. Then ask each student to randomly pick out a piece of paper from the box, making sure they do not pick their own.   Step #3: Ask students to write a response to their peers on the same piece of paper. Students may choose one of two options: write a suggestion to help your peer overcome the fear or challenge OR write an affirmation.   Step #4: One by one, ask each student to stand up and read their peer’s response and their response to their peer.      Step #5: After the last person speaks, encourage students to give each other a round of applause.   In my courses, students provided excellent suggestions—ones that I never thought of myself. They also expressed solidarity and support with phrases like “I feel the same way” or “don’t worry, everyone feels like that” or “we’re in this together!” The activity energized the class and encouraged students to engage with each other’s work in a productive and caring manner.    While this activity is useful to orchestrate prior to peer review or peer assessment, there are other instances wherein it would be effective. For example, students may benefit from facing their fears and feeling support from their classmates and professor on the first day of a writing course or at the start of any writing assignment, especially if students are composing in a foreign mode or genre. In slightly altering the prompt language, the activity could be used while students are engaged in the composing process or during the revision stage (What has been, or what do you think will be, a challenge in writing or revising this paper?) The prompt could also be altered to become a multimodal activity: students could draw or bring in a picture that represented their challenges or fears, and then their peers could respond to the visual. ... View more