The terrible, heartbreaking morning of September 11, 2001, I was preparing to welcome a new class at Stanford as well as preparing to greet the students I’d invited to participate in a five-year longitudinal study of writing. Waking up to the grim news left me, like everyone else, in a haze of shock and grief and sorrow: how could I believe what I was seeing on television as the planes blasted, over and over again, into the towers. We immediately made plans to delay the opening of fall term that year, thinking that students might not be able to get to campus, or not want to get to campus during such a time of national mourning. But since our term begins fairly late in September, we were able to open on time, and to welcome this group of students, many of whom had lost friends or loved ones, all of whom were trapped between the horror that gripped the nation and the excitement of opening a new chapter in their lives. Well over a decade later, I wrote to a number of the student participants in The Stanford Study of Writing, asking them to reflect on their first days at Stanford, in the wake of 9/11. Here are some of their voices today, on the 17th anniversary of the event. I remember visiting my high school on the morning of September 11, for the last time before leaving for Stanford. My sister and I had been numbed by the news, but we went anyway to visit our former teachers. Then one of the things that is strong in my memory about that first week on campus is the acute desire I felt to establish myself as both who I thought I was, and someone more like the others. . . I came to Stanford to meet people, to discover new things, and most of all to learn. I . . . just wanted to sit in my room and read or write in my “electronic diary” as I called it at the time. –SK I remember being depressed every morning waking up to a country at war. I remember being very angry and I was not anti-war at first. I’d say I’m still not into anti-war protests as I think it’s much more productive to be pro-peace as opposed to anti-war. –EL When the first plane hit the World Trade Center, I was asleep on an old twin mattress on the floor of my sister’s room. M paternal grandfather was visiting, so he had my nominal bed and I was relegated to the mattress purchased for me when I was about 3. . . . Intellectually, I comprehended the event as a tragedy, but for the most part my emotions were muted. To me, the mass outpouring of grief had a hint of social manipulation to it . . . –CS Like me, I think a lot of people had been home alone [on 9/11], most of their friends having gone off to college already, when the news hit. I am guessing it would have been a relief to talk and listen to actual people in place of sensationalistic news coverage. What I did feel strongly for a while was a sense that history, which had left me largely untouched to that point, had somehow started again and was setting into motion events that had the potential to be world-changing (in retrospect, and with the benefit of all that I learned at Stanford, I find this feeling problematic in a number of ways). –AC The President pointed his finger to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda that night, as well as to the Taliban in Afghanistan. He announced the new Department of Homeland Security. He said, “Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.” He said we would fight the War on Terror, and that it would have “decisive liberation of territory and a swift conclusion.” I realized this meant we would go to war. I was scared. –SA The thing about the atmosphere of the country in September of 2001 that I remember is the intense xenophobia that was present in some places. For me, that was perhaps the most surreal thing. I simply couldn’t imagine how you would assume that all Muslims, all Arabs, or all people that wear turbans, were terrorists. Maybe as the sole representative of a minority in my high school, it was simply a given in my world view that everyone is an individual responsible for their own actions and a group can’t be blamed for the actions of an individual. Everything we did at Stanford about tolerance and not being judgmental during Orientation just seemed redundant to me. Looking back now, I understand how naïve I was in that way . . . but I still haven’t given up my sense of optimism. I think it’s one of the things that keeps me going as a teacher: I know that somewhere in their hearts, my students are good people. . . . –HS As we welcome the class of 2022, the last class made up primarily of students born before the devastation of 9/11, it seems worthwhile to think about the reflections from these students of the class of 2005, looking back on that momentous day. Here’s to them, and to the class of 2022. Image Credit:  Pixabay Image 2403465 by MonieLuv, 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. A student in my Composition and Literature course told me that she had trouble relating to Emily Grierson in William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily.” She just “didn’t get” the story.   “She’s an old woman from a weird family. And she killed somebody.”   “Is Emily Grierson really that far removed from the average person?” I asked. “To somebody, each of us is old. And if we really think about it, aren’t most of our families weird in some way?”   A collective murmur of agreement engulfed the classroom.   “Okay, I may be old to my little brother,” she conceded, “and you’re right about odd families. Mine is definitely strange. But I’ve never killed anybody. I’m not a villain.”   “But have you ever been angry enough, hurt enough to at least think about killing another person?”   The tendency to expect our students to regurgitate what we tell them about the literature, instead of helping students make personal connections, abounds in education. While this approach to the literature is not completely without merit, demanding broad acquiescence to our ideas and beliefs is one way we rob students of their ability to relate to the literature on their unique terms.   Of course this method does not mean students have free reign to interpret works any old way. No, “A Rose for Emily” is not a happy love story. Emily Grierson’s life is not one held in high regard for our emulation; her life, however, does represent elements of humanity that most of us face, problems with which we find ourselves wrestling, on a regular basis. Don’t we, after all, want to teach the literature in a more personalized way?   When I was 18 or 19, relating to the death of an old woman who had been sleeping with the corpse of the lover she murdered was a stretch of my imagination. The same applies to our students now until we allow them to struggle with their own lives and experiences in terms of the broader human condition: everybody ages, most of us fall in love, we hurt when we’re betrayed, we seek some form of revenge.   Our students experience an inherent longing for acceptance and validation, and it’s that same longing that compels Miss Emily to take Homer’s life. Is she a bad person? No worse than the rest of us. Does she give in to her momentary desire for some aberrant sense of retribution? Yes, but we’ve all probably at least considered doing the same thing.   Each person who reads the story can relate to the struggle to overcome momentary urges that, while at the time may seem perfectly acceptable considering a vulnerable emotional state, ultimately carry with them legal or moral repercussions that will result in a far greater struggle in the long run. That’s a key lesson our students should know.             As we provide students the freedom to relate to characters, not only the protagonists,  but the antagonists, too, in ways that make those universal struggles relevant, we empower students to move beyond a read-the-story-and-answer-the-questions mentality that permeates our profession. Sure, students may answer the assigned questions that accompany the readings, but do they actually care about how they’ve responded? Or, do they simply do the work in order to meet the requirements of the assignment? That’s really the core of our struggle as educators – creating relevance.             In the end, more students have something in common with Emily Grierson than they do Homer Barron. Homer may be the one who gets the poison, but Emily, like all of us, struggles with and succumbs to her desire to become whole after her fall. Once we give our students the autonomy to relate to the villain in the same ways we encourage them to find common ground with the characters we deem morally or ethically “good,” we help them realize that each of us has the potential to be the villain and commit a crime as egregious as murder. From Emily Grierson’s mistakes, though, we can all learn how to better manage our urges and begin to recognize each other’s basic humanity. ... View more

While canvassing my neighborhoods as a candidate for the local school board, I ended up discussing with a parent the difference between reading on a screen and reading a book. It’s reasonable to think about the differences at a time when young people and adults typically shift from one media environment to another about 27 times an hour. We skim for information, and are easily distracted by alerts and responses to a new email or Twitter post.   The urgency to integrate technology in classrooms has been motivated by what educators believe will most engage students, since they are already immersed in screen culture. I have heard others argue that access to technology will enable students to function as citizens. It is this idea of citizenship that matters to me because I think schools should help students use the knowledge they acquire as participants in their communities. I’d even say that I’d like school to foster in students a sense of how learning can be used in the service of the common good.   But I wonder if the allure of technology ignores some important questions about how media affects what and how students read? If researchers are correct, then youth are at best taking in bits of information without processing this information very deeply.   How students process information matters a great deal if we expect them to become citizens in a world where the very idea of “truth” has been challenged and where we need to work together with compassion, empathy, and understanding in order to create a safer world for everyone. It is important, as Maryanne Wolf acknowledges in Reader Come Home, that technologies not cause us to lose sight of the real-time relationships that demand our attention. It is important to humanize individuals who are different than we are in our efforts to make a difference in the world.   I worry that the adoption of technology often precedes deep consideration of what we want students to do and the kind of people we want them to be: citizens who are deeply invested in things that matter, who understand the value of taking on the perspectives and feelings of others, and develop a questioning habit of mind based on sustained inquiry.   I’d like to think technology can serve as a tool that fosters students’ ability to be empowered. But it is only a tool. Students also need to practice citizenship in supportive environments where students see that learning is an integral part of what it means to be human. As Martha Nussbaum reminds us, then, “It is . . . urgent right now to support curricular efforts aimed at producing citizens who can take charge of their reasoning . . . to explore and understand their own capacity for citizenship” (Cultivating Humanity, p. 301).   What kinds of curricular efforts are others making to create spaces for the kinds of reflection that authors as diverse as Maryanne Wolf, Martha Nussbaum, and Sherry Turkle call for? What are some ways to encourage our students to read deeply in order to develop a sufficient knowledge base to respond critically to what they are reading? How do others encourage students to read patiently, to resist binary thinking, and pass over into others’ experiences as empathetic readers who value complexity? How do we quiet students’ minds amid the avalanche of information that competes for their attention in what feel like increasingly brief moments of contemplation and stillness? These are pressing questions for me because democracy and citizenship require us all to have such moments of contemplation and stillness if we are to make responsible decisions.     Image Credit: Pixabay Image 1910184 by Wokandapix, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

Over the summer, I moved across the country, from the southwestern United States back to New York City, and from full-time lecturer back to work as a term adjunct. These changes have allowed me to pay close attention to new classroom situations, and the necessity of reexamining my approaches to teaching in order to fit ever-changing circumstances. My work with charting such shifts began on the second day of class as I reconsidered an activity I had adopted a few years ago, the File Card Discussion: A Beginning-of-Semester Activity. Two years ago, I wrote about this activity because I appreciated its relevance for building classroom community, especially for students who appreciate alternatives to traditional class discussion. In the File Card Discussion, students worked individually to come up with questions about the course syllabus. Those questions, written at the beginning of the second day of class, were submitted to me anonymously, and I spent the entire class period clarifying writing and reading assignments, due dates and extended deadlines, grading criteria, and other course policies. This activity was intended to familiarize students with the course syllabus and with the work of the course as described by the syllabus. But on the first day of class where I am teaching this fall, in each of the locations where I am teaching, the synergy felt different. The first day was spent diving into the work of the course, engaging briefly with the syllabus, then moving into the first reading of the year. Students seemed eager to engage with one another, and with the work of the course. So on the second day of class, the File Card Discussion very quickly became Ask Me Anything. For Ask Me Anything, I invited students to: Form groups of 2-4 members. Introduce themselves to each other. Compose 4 or more questions as a group, attending to individual questions as well as to questions that the group shared. The questions covered a much broader range of subjects than anything I had tried in recent years. Students asked not only the usual questions about the course, but also questions about the readings, and questions about my own schooling. They wanted to know about my favorite books and authors, and why I felt so strongly about writing. Students also were interested in my reasons for choosing James Baldwin’s “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity” as our first reading. (See Why Is Writing So Hard? A Writing Assignment for Difficult Times) Additionally, I added a culminating activity for the first week, Exit Tickets. In the last several minutes of class, Exit Tickets ask students to: Reflect on the first week of college, including our writing course and other experiences, inside and outside the classroom. Respond in writing to the question: What did you learn this week? This activity has two goals. First, student often will be asked to make sense of complex ideas in a short amount of time. Exit Tickets provide students with an initial experience to process those ideas in writing. Second, I read the Exit Tickets carefully to see what themes emerge from the students’ brief writing, often no more than a sentence or a quick paragraph. From these themes, I will become better able to plan future course activities. At the end of each class, students left Exit Tickets on the table, and I eagerly awaited the train ride home to consider and absorb their thoughts and concerns. From this early work, our classroom communities would begin the arduous journey of learning and growing together as writers. ... View more

If you are interested in introducing FYW students to primary research methods, An Insider’s Guide to Academic Writing provides an overview and general definitions of qualitative and quantitative methods appropriate for students in a first-year writing class. If you are new to teaching qualitative or quantitative methods to students, it can be a bit intimidating to be sure. I’d like to write today about a fun, low-stakes activity I have my students do the first few weeks of the semester to begin a conversation about research methods.   Interviewing I enjoy having my students interview one another during class early in the semester. Recognizing that most students are more tech savvy than I am, I ask them to practice recording one another using a semi-structured set of interview questions. It’s remarkable to watch a class begin to discuss how they’re going to record the interviews, whether on a laptop or on mobile devices, and then to watch them learn socially from one another about the best way to upload the audio files to our  course shell once their recording is complete (we use D2L at the University of Arizona). If asked, I’ll step in and offer advice and tips about how to do the recording and uploading, but for the most part I give them just enough direction to get them started, provide the questions and activity objective, and then let them learn from one another by just jumping in there and giving a recording a shot.   Below you’ll see a set of semi-structured questions I’ve asked students to use in the past as they record themselves interviewing one another: Usually they pair up with a partner, and I ask them to leave the room and find a quiet space somewhere in the building to conduct the interview. Once they record their interviews, they upload the audio file to our  course shell. This then allows us to listen to the interviews in class. It’s a great conversation starter, and FYW students find the use of technology as well as listening to their audio-recorded voices played back in class fun, funny, and entertaining. There’s usually quite a bit of positive emotions and laughter with this activity.   You may notice that some of the questions in the table above are intended to begin a conversation about Writing in the Disciplines (especially Q. 1 and Q. 2). Q. 3 is intended to draw on their funds of knowledge and to position students as experienced and knowledgeable writers who have succeeded in the past.   By using these recordings in class as conversation starters, I’ve learned a lot about the expectations and support that faculty in other disciplines have provided to students in writing contexts. The recordings also reveal a great deal about students’ perceptions of effective teaching practices as well as their past experiences with writing.   Coding and Interpreting Once we have these interviews archived digitally, students can access the audio files and listen to them to take notes. I ask students to listen to multiple interviews and note any themes or keywords or phrases that begin to emerge from the data.   A student may end up with a list of words or phrases like “feedback,” “peer review,” “tutoring,” “assignment sheet,” “rubric,” “drafting,” “meet with teacher,” etc.   Typically this is about as far as we’ll take it in a FYW class. I might write some of the keywords that emerge from multiple students’ interpretations of the interviews on an eraser board, and we’ll use that as a bridge to talk about effective writing processes and what the expectations are for our course. Later in the semester, we’ll return to interviewing more formally as a research method they can use in collecting data on a research topic of their choosing. These early recordings thus scaffold toward more formal interviews they may record for a grade later in the semester as part of a research project.   If you have tips or suggestions you’ve used, please feel free to share your ideas in the comments below. As always, I’m grateful for your time and interest, and if you found this blog helpful or informative, please comment, like, and share it!   Thanks so much, all. ... View more

Today's featured Bedford New Scholar is Daniel Libertz‌, who is pursuing his PhD in English with a concentration in composition and rhetoric at the University of Pittsburgh and expects to finish in 2019. He teaches Writing for the Public, and he will be serving as Composition Program Assistant in 2018-2019. He has also taught Seminar in Composition at Pitt, a reading course at the United States Military Academy, composition at Howard County Community College, and English courses at the high school level. His research interests include quantitative rhetoric, public rhetoric, social media writing and algorithms, and writing program administration. Toward the end of his book Introducing English: Essays in the Intellectual Work of Composition, James Slevin presents a letter responding to a former student who has become a teacher. Maggie asks Slevin a question he has been asked many times: “What should she do to prepare her students for writing in college?” (246). Slevin says he never felt he gave a satisfactory answer to this sort of question. It is a complex question that, I assume, all of us continually think about throughout our teaching lives. After all, implicit in this question is how the writing in college is “different” from writing in high school—and for that matter, how writing in college is different from writing anywhere else. One of the more difficult, slippery concepts we all have to confront as writing teachers in higher education is figuring out what we mean by “academic” writing. What is it? How do we teach it? Should we teach it? Do we do enough to acknowledge the inherent value judgments and political nature of the way we teach academic language or address its close ties to whiteness? These are big, difficult questions, but what I like about Slevin’s response to Maggie is that it focuses on academic writing as intellectual work, something that can occur in any genre, under any conventions, or in any language. Slevin writes that what matters is evidence. By evidence, Slevin does not mean having a thesis or using direct quotations. It is not about accumulating material. It is about what is done with material, and what is “done” depends on language. For Slevin, “the excitement of the academic life—of academic writing broadly conceived—is in the making of stuff (data, events, passages from a text, the work of other writers) into evidence” (246). Language is the tool that turns “stuff” into evidence—what Ann Berthoff calls (channeling I.A. Richards) a “speculative instrument” for making meaning out of, well, “stuff.” I agree with Slevin that if there is anything that makes writing in the academy somehow different from writing in other places (though, not exclusively different as there is writing in many places that does what Slevin advocates for) it is how we use evidence to make knowledge through “supporting, testing, and complicating” our ideas (252).To put this idea into classroom practice at a very practical level, I like to have my students think about this at the level of the sentence. One way I do so is by asking them to find two sentences in any text that they have read for another class that they feel is certain and uncertain, respectively. I like the idea of having them look at texts outside our own classroom so that they see, explicitly, that academic writing very much resides outside of their composition class (and, hopefully, such a move helps to transfer this idea about writing to their other classes). Students can choose any text from another class—a textbook, a journal article, a blog post—if the sentences they choose convey certainty or uncertainty for them. During the next class, we talk about the reasons students selected their sentences, and we put them up on the board. Several items typically come up: word choice (e.g., obviously, really, probably, very, possibly), sentence type (e.g., short, simple sentence vs. longer, meandering sentences), syntax (e.g., position of a qualifying dependent clause), etc. We usually focus on the rhetorical aspects of such moves at first: why does a short, punchy sentence “sound” certain (e.g., multiple clauses may undercut the strength of a direct statement)? Why do words like “really” and “very,” sometimes, ironically, make the sentence sound less certain? Do qualifying clauses ever make a sentence, counterintuitively, sound more certain by building the writer’s credibility as well-read? Ken Hyland, for instance, notes that the use of hedges and boosters have a range of effects in academic writing: to show conviction, to show solidarity with an audience of peers, to differentiate between opinion and data-based knowledge, to express deference for peers. As much as these moves are matters of persuasion, it is difficult to untangle them from matters of making knowledge. For Slevin, this would mean that we can and should look to such moments in our sentences to ask ourselves what we know and what we are trying to know—that is, how we are making sense of our “stuff,” of our evidence. Does the use of “really” or a sentence with three dependent clauses tip us off to anything we are struggling with knowing as a writer? Sometimes the use of the word “very” or “obviously” is used for stylistic emphasis. Sometimes a sentence with a series of qualifying dependent clauses adds necessary context to a complicated topic. Sometimes, too, these moments at the sentence level are a “tell” that more work is needed for a writer to turn stuff into evidence, in Slevin’s sense. During the remaining time in class, I ask students to make these considerations while looking back at an in-progress piece of writing to find one sentence that they feel shows certainty or uncertainty. I then ask them to spend some time thinking about how those sentences might represent a larger pattern of thought in their draft. Finally, I ask students to rewrite that sentence to make it more or less certain, followed by partner discussion about how it does or does not fit into the ecology of their larger paper. By the end of the lesson, my hope is that students—via a notion of certainty—begin to see how the ways they choose words and arrange sentences can have an impact on the way they are makers of knowledge. To view Dan’s activity, visit Writing with Certainty in the Disciplines: Sentence Confidence. To learn more about the Bedford New Scholars advisory board, visit the the Bedford New Scholars tab on the Macmillan English Community. ... View more

Yet another tale of professorial indiscretion on social media making the rounds prompts me to reiterate what I regard as one of the cardinal benefits of the semiotic approach: viz., that it can lead one beyond the obvious surfaces of cultural phenomena to their more nuanced (and often subtly concealed) significations. And this matters in these days of take-no-prisoners political controversy, as America divides further and further into two hostile camps that can no longer even communicate with each other without invective.   The indiscretion I am referring to involves a Rutgers University history professor's Facebook screed about gentrification in Harlem, which has been widely reported in the mass media, as well as on the  news source Inside Higher Education. As IHE reports, Professor James Livingston is in hot water over a post he put up a few months ago. Here's IHE's quotation of the controversial post (warning: salty language ahead):   OK, officially, I now hate white people. I am a white people, for God’s sake, but can we keep them -- us -- us out of my neighborhood? I just went to Harlem Shake on 124 and Lenox for a Classic burger to go, that would be my dinner, and the place is overrun by little Caucasian assholes who know their parents will approve of anything they do. Slide around the floor, you little shithead, sing loudly, you unlikely moron. Do what you want, nobody here is gonna restrict your right to be white. I hereby resign from my race. Fuck these people. Yeah, I know, it’s about my access to dinner. Fuck you, too.   After Facebook deleted the post, Livingston returned with the following (again from IHE😞   I just don't want little Caucasians overrunning my life, as they did last night. Please God, remand them to the suburbs, where they and their parents can colonize every restaurant, all while pretending that the idiotic indulgence of their privilege signifies cosmopolitan -- you know, as in sophisticated "European" -- commitments.   OK, to start with, I do not intend to get involved in any way with the obvious (right there on the surface) political elements in this saga of a white professor's denunciation of the white patrons (and their children) at a Harlem eatery. I also do not want to argue the free speech implications of the matter. Everyone else is doing that already. Rather (and I hope my readers at Bedford Bits will appreciate my focus), I want to look at an important rhetorical element in the story that not only is being disregarded but is being misconstrued as well. Call what follows an exercise in "rhetorical semiotics," if you will.   To begin with, the reactions to Livingston's posts have parsed exactly how you would expect them to: conservative media (and individuals) have (to put it quite mildly) denounced Professor Livingston, accusing him of racism, while more liberal voices tend to emphasize that what he wrote is protected free speech. Well and good: we can expect such disagreements. But what really caught my attention is the claim, both from the reporter of the story and from a number of the comments that follow, that Livingston was clearly being satirical. First, the IHE reporter: "Right-wing media and Rutgers University didn't find Livingston's satire very funny." A number of the comments to the story took it for granted that the posts were satirical too. For example: "Weird reaction to Livingston’s FB posts by almost everyone, including Livingston himself. . . .The charge of racism requires taking literally what is clearly satire." But is it really "clearly satire?" Consider another comment: "The problem is that so many people in academia are so disconnected from reality that it's not actually clearly satire. Poe's law definitely applies here." Now, Poe's Law is the dictum that things on the Internet are so weird that you can never know for certain whether someone is being ironic or not. And indeed, as another comment observes: "If it's satire then it's really badly done. I don't believe it's actually satire." Frankly, I think that everyone is chasing the wrong trope. Livingston's second Facebook post, cited above, makes it pretty clear that he means it about his aggravation over urban gentrification. So what I think is involved in the initial post is really hyperbole—that is, the deliberate overstatement of one's case in order to more effectively make a point. Except that in this case that hyperbolic wink was lost on a lot of people, thus further widening the gap between an already miserably polarized society. Thus my point is that words matter, that they have semiotic as well as semantic significance. If, in the currently highly inflamed environment (the system in which we can situate Professor Livingston's remarks), one wishes to make a political point, one isn't going to make it effectively by using easily misconstrued—not to mention hyperbolic and inflammatory—language (heck, it isn't even immediately clear from the posts that Livingston is mostly complaining about the behavior of little children). If you want your point of view to be politically effective—and, perhaps even more importantly, not backfire—trollish language isn't going to cut it, especially when the keys to the kingdom (i.e., electoral power in America), are ultimately in the hands of that roughly one third of the electorate that identifies as politically "independent," and which is neither clearly on the right nor on the left. If you want them on your side, you can't assume that the language that works inside your socially mediated echo chamber is going to work outside it. So while I fear that it is no longer possible for either "side" today in the great divide to reach the other, it behooves anyone who wants to win over any part of that uncommitted "center" (if we can call it that) to keep in mind that, thanks to the Internet, the whole world is always watching, and weighing, what you say.     Photo Credit: “Gentrification Zone” by Matt Brown on Flickr 8/25/17 via Creative Commons 2.0 license. ... View more

Today's featured guest blogger is Tammy Powley, Professor at Indian River State College.  Wouldn’t it be great if the first day of your creative writing course started with an inspirational talk given by a famous author like Amy Tan? That and similar questions came to mind when I received department approval to develop my college’s first  creative writing course. This began my web journey as I looked for video resources to help supplement and inspire my creative writing students, and now Amy Tan greets my students during their first week of class. Throughout the semester they also hear from Billy Collins, Gwendolyn Brooks, Eudora Welty, Alice Walker, and many other authors.   Amy Tan arrives thanks to TED.com, which it a site best known for commenting on technology, education, and design, but in “Where Does Creativity Hide?” Tan examines how she personally creates, where her ideas might originate, and how life events affected her writing. Tan is a wonderful presenter. She is funny and easy to understand. My students watch this 22 minute video, and then I ask them to reflect, to examine their own approach to creativity. This is one of the earliest writing assignments in the course, a very simple response, but it starts them thinking and writing. This site also offers videos by some entertaining and thought-provoking poets, for example “What Teachers Make” by Taylor Mali and “The Danger of Silence” by Clint Smith. So, while TED.com is full of presentations from technology gurus, there is also plenty to glean from this site for creative writers and liberal arts studies. An added plus to this site is the inclusion of a transcript for each TED talk, and I have found the hyperlinks I use in my  course shell are also accurate and not prone to change, an issue that can come up whenever using free  content.   YouTube is more popular with Internet readers than TED.com and full of possible content. It requires a different approach when researching for curriculum, but I feel it worth considering since many educational institutions and similar organizations have free resources through this site. A few videos I have discovered useful over there for my writing students include “Write What You Know” presented by Nathan Englander and “Revising, Rewriting, and Overcoming Obstacles” by Sinead Moriarty. Writing instructors, however, should be prepared to spend more time culling through content on YouTube because there is the added task of determining if the person who posted the video is actually the owner of the content. Additionally, if the channel owner changes something (and it has been my experience that this occasionally happens) then links could be disabled at some point. Therefore, it is important to check links regularly for a course to ensure they still work.   Finally, one of my favorite video sources is  but not necessarily available to everyone on the World Wide Web. It is a database called Films on Demand, and many colleges and universities subscribe to it. The information available through this database seems to be endless, and I especially like that I am able to combine content from it with a book or e-text. For example, in one assignment I ask students to examine the basic ideas concerning plot and structure, and I bring in Edgar Allan Poe as an example. We look at his story “The Cask of Amontillado” and watch one of the film versions of the story provided through Films on Demand. This brings in more writing opportunities as I ask students to answer another response question: Did you feel the tension building, and were you surprised at the end? Then, they are given an opportunity to rewrite the story and bring it into the twenty-first century but keep the original sequence of events.   By combining videos with traditional curriculum sources such as handouts and textbooks, I am able to layer my learning strategies and provide a method for visual learners to engage in what may seem like abstract ideas to many of them. TED.com, YouTube, and Films on Demand are three resources that can help writing instructors create an engaging and encouraging environment, whether a course is taught  or in a traditional face-to-face setting. ... View more

This fall, I am designing new assignments for the  Technical Writing courses that I teach. During the coming weeks, I will share the different assignments and activities with you all. The first step in my process was to determine these basic kinds of assignments I would ask students to create: Correspondence (to include letters, memos, and email) Technical Description User Documents (or Instructions) Short Proposal White Paper (a report for non-experts) Progress Report Poster Presentation My next goal was to create an overarching theme for the assignments. In addition to unifying the assignments, the theme allows students to become familiar with one writing scenario that they work with during the entire term. This strategy enables students to jump into writing more quickly, rather than spending time figuring out the background situation for each assignment first. Naturally, there are still rhetorical parameters for students to analyze for each activity, but the information from one assignment helps them determine the details of the next. For the theme to work, it must support all of the assignments I had planned for students from a range of backgrounds. Students in the course are studying areas such as engineering, computer science, forestry, wildlife conservation, dairy science, and building construction. I needed to find a way that all these different careers would interact and write similar kinds of documents. My solution was a business incubator that would bring together all these students to help them launch a new business. Not every student plans to go out into the world to create a new business; but the scenario is familiar enough that they are able to play along and imagine how they would work in the situation. In my posts for the coming weeks, I will share the different assignments and how they relate to the theme. This week, I want to share the basic details for the theme and activities that the class will focus on this term. One local parameter that you need to know about is the Virginia Tech motto Ut Prosim, which translates to “That I may serve.” This motto drives a lot of service projects and outreach at Virginia Tech, so it was a natural addition to the incubator scenario. Students are very familiar with the motto, so I do not need to explain it in the course documents. Here is the Writing Projects Overview, which explains the overarching writing project theme to students: Writing Projects Overview In this course, you will write a series of connected projects that you will submit in two batches (Portfolio 1 and Portfolio 2). As explained in the Grading Policies and Standards, these portfolios are collections of the original writing that you do in the course, such as memos and reports. As we begin on these projects, I want to explain how the projects are connected. The full details on these projects will be included in the relevant Canvas modules. What goes into the two Portfolios? Portfolio 1 will consist of four shorter pieces: Info Sheet Correspondence Project Technical Description User Documents Portfolio 2 will focus on research-based documents, which will be a bit longer and/or more complex: Short Proposal White Paper Progress Report Poster Presentation So how do the projects connect? All of the projects will relate to your membership in a fictional business incubator, the Ut Prosim Incubator. The projects you will complete for your portfolios will be documents that you create as a member of this incubator. You will create a business and then write the pieces for your portfolio from the perspective as a starting business owner. You will collaborate with other members of the incubator and contribute materials to the endeavors that the incubator undertakes. What is a business incubator? According to “Incubating Success. Incubation Best Practices That Lead to Successful New Ventures” (2011), business incubators are “designed to accelerate the successful development of entrepreneurial companies through an array of business support resources and services, developed or orchestrated by incubator management, and offered both in the incubator and through its network of contacts” (15). There is much more to what an incubator does and how it works, but for our purposes you just need to understand that it is a place the provides support to help beginning companies succeed. So what will companies in this incubator do? Naturally, starting a company is a complex endeavor that involves many decisions, specific legal and financial work, and a significant amount of planning. For this class, we will assume that most of that work is already done. We will generally assume that your company is happily chugging along, doing whatever it is that your company does. That might be making a product, providing a service, researching innovations, and so forth. You will define the work that your company does, but beyond that you will not need to worry about that part of the scenario. You will focus more on creating some technical writing documents that relate to the company you create. What makes the Ut Prosim Incubator special? Our make-believe incubator was founded by some well-established and successful Virginia Tech graduates who wanted to give back to younger graduates by helping them get started in the business world. They have created a program that supports any kind of company with the one requirement that the company participates in the special projects that the Incubator undertakes as a whole. These special projects relate to the mission of the Ut Prosim Incubator to reach out and work in ways that support others. The founders of the incubator have extended the university’s motto, Ut Prosim (“that I may serve”) to their own mission and motto, “that I may serve through my business.” To clarify, the incubator asks that member companies participate in programs that support causes like sustainability, environmental stewardship, mentorship of young entrepreneurs, and public outreach and education. How do the writing projects relate to the Ut Prosim Incubator? Project Short Description Info Sheet You will create a short information sheet that introduces your company to others in the incubator. There will be a specific list of information to provide, including your company name, what it does, and your company’s typical customers. Correspondence Project You will create guidelines that your employees will use as they communicate with others inside and outside the company. The goal is to ensure that your company’s letters, memos, and emails have a uniform appearance and style. Technical Description You will write a technical description related to your field (such as a tool that is typically used or a process that is part of your industry). The description will be part of a diversity initiative to interest local students in STEM careers (STEM = Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math). The description will relate to a task that local middle and high school students will complete as they shadow someone in your company. User Documents You will also write the user document that students will use in the diversity initiative described above. You will provide step-by-step details on how to complete a simple and appropriate task that will help local students learn more about what someone in your career does. Short Proposal You will write a short research proposal that presents the topic you will explore for your white paper. Your proposal should explain not only what the topic is but how it relates to the incubator goal of public outreach and education. White Paper You will write an informational report for non-experts that presents details on a specific issue related to your company and the work that it does. Your white paper will tie directly to the incubator goal of public outreach and education. Specifically, the incubator founders want to provide a library of documents that inform readers about how science, technology, and engineering work. Progress Report You will write a progress report that updates incubator staff on the work you have done on your white paper. Poster Presentation You will design a poster presentation, based on the details in your white paper, that will be part of a poster session that the incubator sponsors for the local community. Like the white paper, the presentation will focus on the incubator goal of public outreach and education. As an extension, additional investors and clients also attend the session, so you have the potential to make critical connections for your business.   So that’s the overarching plan for the term. Everything is in progress, but I’m not far enough along yet to have any feedback from students. I will share more when I do, and next week, I will share the first assignment that asks them to write a memo with the basic details about their companies. In the meantime, if you have any feedback or questions about the course, please leave me a comment below. I’d love to hear from you.   [Photo: Incubator-9128 by graibeard on Flickr, used under a CC-BY-SA 2.0 license] ... View more

One of the eight threshold concepts that frame my FYC and co-requisite courses is this:  uncertainty, difficulty, and confusion are normal parts of a writer’s growth. Upon reflection, I think I would add that these nouns also characterize an experienced writer’s process (the meandering path that led to this particular blog post, were it made visible, would provide substantial evidence to support this assertion).    And yet, even having articulated this principle within my classroom (and particularly in the readings I assign), I find that I am still very quick to minimize or undermine uncertainty for my students, especially in the early days of their college writing careers. And I suspect in doing so, I am also minimizing an opportunity for learning.   A classroom conversation this week illustrates my tendency. I had asked students about thesis statements, and their answers were typical: It’s the last sentence of the first paragraph in the essay. It’s just a summary of what you say. It’s the plan for the essay so the reader can follow. I was told it had to have a certain format. It can’t announce the topic. It can’t be too broad or too narrow. It should answer a question. You should know what it is before you start writing. Using their text as a guide, students talked about weak and strong thesis statements and identified problems in samples that needed to be “fixed.” The students seemed pleased with the exercise: it was straightforward and clear—thesis statements either work or they don’t. There was only a slight ripple of consternation when I suggested that thesis statements need not be presented in one place, worded a specific way, fully developed at the outset, or stated explicitly. Despite making these comments, however, the activity of evaluating and improving thesis statements (and reading about “common problems” with a thesis) implied the opposite: thesis statements are certain, clear, and predictable.       Later that same day, I called my daughter, who has just begun a Ph.D. program in English. For some time, she had been reworking an MA project as a book chapter. She commented on how frustrating the process had been for the first several days (perhaps even weeks) of her work. But, she was thrilled to announce during our talk that her initial musings and reflections had finally led her to a thesis, and she now feels confident the chapter will come together. I could hear the energy in her voice: she had a thesis, and while it might still need some tweaking, her sense of the potential impact of the paper (and her ability to write it) was striking.    Consider the differences in these thesis-focused conversations: for many of my students, a thesis is primarily a component of a written product – a component that will be assessed by expert readers, possibly as ineffective, inappropriate, or misplaced. In short, my students view the thesis as something they can “get wrong” and thus something that must be nailed down immediately – and preferably without any changes. My daughter, on the other hand, views her thesis as a means to control and develop her writing. She discovered her thesis via invaluable but messy exploratory writing (which no one sees or grades), and she is harnessing the power of that thesis to guide the development of her work. While the thesis will surely be subject to the critical reflection of her future readers, she can use those responses to further define and refine her theoretical stance.  It is, in short, a mode of learning, a means to agency and control in her writing—and her thinking.   I see a similarity in the ways my students conceptualize a thesis and their understanding of grammar: both are seen as a toggle switch, set to either the right or wrong position, not as opportunities to learn, make choices, or express meaning. The anxiety produced by the desire to get it right leads me (far too often) to let students bypass the messy process of thesis-building (or sentence construction) by issuing a judgment and recommending remedies quickly. They invariably do whatever I suggest. I know better, but I have a competing desire to relieve anxiety, especially for students whose previous academic experiences have been demoralizing and disorienting.   In a workshop for our faculty at the start of this term, we were challenged to apply practices of “Transparency in Learning and Teaching” or TILT (a faculty professional development initiative led by faculty researchers at UNLV) with our assignment design.  For me, this fall, that means finding ways to make “useful confusion” explicit for students and helping them recognize the value of uncertainty in the process of discovering and refining a thesis. Transparency about the value of uncertainty means challenging the binary terms so often used to talk about the thesis (right/wrong, strong/weak, broad/narrow). It also means asking more questions during writing conferences, and acknowledging the frustration of working with a murky thesis in initial drafts. My hope is that students will come to accept uncertainty and confusion—anxiety-inducing as they may be—as a means to extended possibility and power in their writing, just as experienced writers like my daughter have.      In what ways are you helping students re-imagine uncertainty and confusion as platforms for writing development? Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post?  Join the Macmillan Community to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! ... View more

The recent disappearance of Iowa college student Mollie Tibbetts attracted national media attention. That in itself reflects the politicizing of crime coverage. Would the disappearance of a young woman of a different color in different circumstances have received the same attention? Since Tibbetts’s body has been recovered and a Mexican immigrant has been charged with her murder, her death has been even more politicized. Republicans have tried to get political mileage out of the fact that she was allegedly killed by an illegal immigrant who had presented falsified documents to his employer. His fear that his deception might come to light when Tibbetts threatened to call the police may have been a factor in his decision to kill her, but her death too easily becomes just one more example used to prove the stereotype that all illegal immigrants are rapists and murderers. Tibbetts’s father has declared that his daughter is no one’s victim. In fact, at her funeral he thanked the many people in the Latino community for their help in searching for her. He doesn’t want his daughter, in death, to become a pawn used to legislate for President Trump’s border wall and more restrictive immigration policies. It is not surprising that even more recently John McCain’s death has been politicized in ways unheard of when other prominent politicians have died in office after years of service. McCain was respected by many—even many who did not agree with many of his positions over his years in the Senate—because of his military service and the five and a half years he spent as a prisoner of war. President Trump, however, so disliked Senator McCain that he ignored numerous calls to make any statement at all about McCain’s death beyond one brief tweet. He was more or less forced to finally make a more formal statement and to extend the time that the flag was flown at half mast to honor McCain’s death. Trump had to be forced to get past the memory of McCain giving a thumbs down to the President’s healthcare bill. He had made his disdain for McCain clear long before that when he refused to label McCain a hero because, in his view, a hero was one who didn’t get caught. The respect given McCain by both Republicans and Democrats in spite of this disdain led to the decision to allow his body to lie in state in the rotunda of the nation’s capital. Senator McCain himself was not above using his funeral to make a political statement. How often in our history has a prominent politician left behind the request that the President of the United States not attend his funeral or that a Russian dissident serve as a pallbearer? Kelli Ward in McCain’s home state of Arizona may have best proved that the politicizing of death can be carried too far. On a bus tour shortly before McCain’s death, Ward wondered on Facebook if the McCain family had timed the announcement that he was discontinuing treatment for his brain cancer to hurt her campaign. The voters let their feelings be known when Ward went down to defeat in Tuesday’s primary.   Image Source: “Half Mast” by Matt DiGirolamo on Flickr 5/26/08 via Creative Commons 2.0 license. ... View more

Now that summer is winding down, I’ve been reflecting on how I’ve spent these too-short weeks, the hyphen between student terms when I always hope to refresh myself and my ways of being in the world. How am I spending my time – and do I approve of what I find? This summer, I did have a glorious two weeks when I turned off all devices and headed to Bergen, Norway, to cruise the spectacular coast of Norway and then sail down to the Lofoten, Shetland, and Orkney Islands before landing in Greenwich. For those weeks, I read mysteries, walked the decks, rode the exercise bike, hiked through tiny villages, marveled at fjords, listened to classical music and jazz—and studied the sun, moon, and stars. The long, long Norwegian twilights brought sensory delights and calm, an inward turning that felt restorative. But it took a while to get there. In fact, on the fourth day of this voyage I thought I was “coming down with something” until I realized: I was relaxed! Four days to slow down, give my racing brain a break, and ease into a space of peace and reflection. I was ready to come home, to resume the usual pace of my life, to plunge into 12-hour days of writing and reading and work. But oh, the glories of those two weeks: they are with me still. Thus my first hope for every teacher of writing is that summertime brought you some respite, some relaxation, some deeply felt pleasures—no matter how brief. As summer begins to lean toward fall, however, I enjoy what to me is the best time of the year: the beginning of a new school term with the new class of frosh (the class of ’22 this year!). So my second hope for every teacher of writing is that this fall will find you, refreshed and renewed, ready to plunge into the work we all share and love. In the last ten or twelve days, I’ve been visiting with teachers of writing across the country as they prepare for fall term—at Texas Tech, Loyola, University of South Carolina, Northern Illinois University (just for a start); I even got to experience the excitement of the new students, which was electric and contagious. In all cases, I found teachers working together to craft outstanding syllabi and challenging assignments, to select and analyze readings, to consider assessment methods, to mount pedagogical experiments of several kinds, and to develop activities that engage students in challenging and productive work, and that guide them in the processes of inquiry and discovery and in the pursuit of writing about the most galvanizing issues of our time responsibly, ethically, and respectfully. Teachers everywhere are also focusing on thinking critically and rhetorically, on teaching students to be their own best fact checkers who are able to assess the information that bombards them daily and to learn to give their attention to those sources that are truly worthy of it. At every school I visited, I argued that we and our students stand at a very significant crossroads this fall, one that demands our very best efforts to sort out truth from lies, information from disinformation, and mere hype from credible statements. In my view, our students need our guidance and wisdom perhaps more than ever before. As we need theirs. Here’s hoping for a rewarding year of teaching writing, reading, and presenting! Image Credit: Andrea Lunsford ... View more

Today's guest blogger is Audrey Wick‌, a full-time professor of English at Blinn College in Texas. There, she is a writing teacher who writes. Readers can connect with Audrey to learn more about her projects at audreywick.com or on Twitter and Instagram @WickWrites. The start of the semester is an exhilarating—if not exhausting—time for college instructors. We juggle course prep, schedule changes, new policy implementation, technology updates, committee work, and much more before students ever appear in our classrooms on day one. One unique challenge is adapting to a new course textbook when required. For new faculty as well as seasoned faculty, change can be stressful. Still, instructors are masters of adaptation. When it comes to Humanities instructors in particular, we’re at the forefront in many ways. After all, we routinely deal with style manual revisions, digital library updates, and technology changes. Like chameleons, we are adept at changing when our surroundings do. New textbook implementation tests a Humanities instructor’s critical and speculative skills. It’s not always easy to overhaul instruction and curriculum once a new textbook is adopted, but it’s an empowering and important process to be in control of what we will teach students. Textbooks support teaching, so easing into a major change and keeping in mind the following tips can help ensure a smoother, more effective process of course building that is, ultimately, as exciting for the students as it is for us.   1) Spend some quality time with the book. Explore it inquisitively, from the table of contents to the index. Consider the chapters. Weigh the importance given to certain sections. Consult ancillary material. Know what’s truly in the book before proceeding to plan a semester around it. 2) Lessen the amount of preparation by not starting from scratch. Whether it’s a former syllabus, an example provided by the publisher, or a template through a higher ed institution, using an existing model will minimize the challenging task of building something entirely from the ground up. 3) Think big picture; add details later. Consider course and program outcomes. Then, identify goals and choose readings/assignments based on what aligns to them. This will help streamline the process of week to week navigation for students. 4) Incorporate personal preference. It’s true: instructors are individuals, each with unique talents, expertise, and interests. So regardless of the text, focus on a few choice topics that are particularly exciting. Peppering those throughout the syllabus will help ensure that individual passion for the subject is sustained—because when instructors are passionate, their students are likely to be too! 5) Avoid trappings of stress. True, deadlines and minimum requirements must be met, though there may be ways to leave a little wiggle room in day-to-day or week-to-week handling of exact assignments, homework, and deadlines. In a first semester teaching with a new text, don’t be too hard on yourself to get everything perfectly aligned from day one.  Change takes time, and just like it takes time for students to adapt to their learning materials, the same is true of instructors. Still, new opportunities are exciting. This year, my department has adopted a new handbook for use with our freshman writers, A Writer's Reference, 9th edition, by Diana Hacker and Nancy Sommers. While I don’t yet have all the answers for how to make the most of the text with my student population, the book is helping me find fresh ways to teach the concepts I love. ... View more

If you’re reading this, I’ll bet you get a kick out of new school supplies. Those of us who teach tend to enjoy the tools of the trade. Sharing our enthusiasm for those tools – even throw-back ones like writing journals – is another way to share our enthusiasm for learning. This semester, I invested in cheerful, inexpensive blank books to add fun to pedagogical self-reflection for my first-year students.   I have written before on the value of students writing cover letters for their essay submissions. That accessible, high-impact self-reflective practice gives students a chance to examine their writing processes and assess their ongoing challenges and strengths. Students continually tell me these self-reflections offer long-term insights as they continue to grow as thinkers, researchers, and writers. So, I’m incorporating this strategy more broadly this semester.    I invested in slim, colorful blank books for students to use as journals (see the photo), and invited them to choose a color they like and to doodle a cover design if they wish. (They have taken ownership with aplomb!) I’ve incorporated in-class writing reflections throughout the semester, carving out consistent 5-10-minute journal times for students to reflect on their learning, or simply to ask questions they might not ask aloud in class. This consistent practice also fosters confidence in students’ own fluency, by requiring that they “just keep writing” during our journaling time. (We consider this the academic parallel to Dory’s reminder in Finding Nemo: “Just keep swimming!”) As most writers know, getting over the fear of the blank page is more than half the battle of drafting.    Here are a few journal prompts I’ve designed that are open-ended, but also give students a chance to practice skills they’ll use in more formal writing:   Reflecting on critical reading for college courses: Write for 10 minutes in your journal, reflecting on how you take notes on your reading to prepare for class discussions. What seems to work best for you, and why? What new approaches have you tried since starting college? What might you do differently, for better results? What questions/worries do you have? Make at least one specific connection -- and quote the text! -- to the class reading from Mindset, "A New Look at Learning."   On starting to gather sources for an essay: Write for 10 minutes in your journal on the sources you have gathered so far for your next essay. What key ideas and authors are most helpful to you at this stage, and why? What gaps do you see in your research? What do you need help with?   My co-author, Stuart Greene, and I have filled From Inquiry to Academic Writing with process-focused small assignments that help students reflect on every stage of the reading, research, drafting, and revision processes. Those exercises are ready for your students to use, or might inspire you to design your own.   However you invite your students to reflect, your response as a more expert writer is important. This need not be time-consuming. Simply affirming that writing is hard work, celebrating breakthroughs, and answering questions students are often too shy to ask in class can go a long way toward helping students feel part of this new academic community. As we all work to retain our students, this extra mode of communication helps us understand them better and teach more effectively, and gets students into the habit of self-reflection that is crucial for lifelong learning and growth.   Can you accomplish this without fun school supplies? Well, sure. But if my students’ throwback thrill upon choosing and decorating their writing journals is any indication, a little bling can add a dose of joy as your semester begins.   Please share in the comments the exercises you use to inspire student self-reflection. (Throwback school supplies are optional!)   Photo Credit: April Lidinsky ... View more

  Jessica Pauszek is an Assistant Professor of English and the Director of Writing at Texas A&M University - Commerce. She is a co-editor of Parlor Press' Best of Independent Journals in Rhetoric and Composition series and Working and Writing for Change. She is also the Director of New City Community Press. Her work explores community literacy practices in connection to labor and class identity, using archival and interview methods.    Vincent Portillo is a University Fellow and a PhD candidate at Syracuse University in Composition and Cultural Rhetoric. His research interests include standardized English, ableism, and labor. He is completing his dissertation, which is an archival project on the history of the Ford English School (1914-1919) at Ford Motors. Vincent is the Consulting Editor and Project Profile Editor for Community Literacy Journal.   Note from Steve Parks: Over these next months, I hope to expand the voices who speak about their community partnership/social justice work. To that end, I have invited Vincent Portillo and Jessica Pauszek to talk about their work with the FED to preserve the publications of Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers. In this short essay, they build on themes of writing communities, engaged partnerships, and course/program design to discuss a community literacy-archival project showing what can be gained through community collaboration and preservation. In doing so, they remind us of the importance of community-led projects, the insights students can gain, and the role of archives in preserving the powerful voices of working-class writers.   Preserving Working-Class Voices in the Archive and in the Classroom In a moment filled with tensions surrounding race, class, gender, and nationalist politics, we argue for the importance of representing/preserving inclusive histories of working-class writing communities, both for students and for the working-class writers themselves.   The FWWCP Archival Project began with the goal of preserving writing produced by the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers, an organization founded in London in 1976. Once told their working-class writing had “no solid literary merit,” founding FWWCP member Roger Mills noted, “We wrote despite people sneering at us, and we created a community.” This community became the “FED,” a network of local, working-class, writing/publishing groups. Throughout its 40+ year tenure, the network expanded to over 100 writing groups across four continents. At the core, the FED was committed to producing social change for disenfranchised working-class writers. Through the FED, members fostered a collective vision of working-class expertise, literacy, and agency. They navigated issues of immigration, language differences, changing economies, social unrest, and identity politics; they challenged a white/male working-class base, pushing the FED to redefine working-class as an intersectional community representing immigrant, women, LGBTQ, and ethnic, and non-English writers.      The FWWCP Collection - Collaboration in the Archive With the help of students and other sponsors, community members have developed an archive of FED publications. Today, the FWWCP Collection is housed in the Trades Union Congress Library (TUC) at London Metropolitan University. The Collection has been brought together through the collective energy of FWWCP/FED members, interdisciplinary scholars, filmmakers, artists, librarians, archivists, undergraduate, and graduate students. (Read more on students’ work here and here.) Throughout, community members and project partners have been gathering publications from under beds, basements, garages; finding a site to house the publications; sorting, indexing, and boxing publications; and finally, this summer, developing reading guides for use with the Collection.   The preservation work is incredibly valuable to members of the FWWCP/FED community. Member George Fuller describes the Collection as a form of “cultural protection.” Aligning with the TUC Library enables the FED to be seen as “not just as a hobby, but . . . as a strong source of power.” Roger Mills describes the need to carry out this cultural protection as a collaborative effort: “[The FED] needed some sort of energy, someone from the outside to say come on, get it together, pull this stuff together physically....Although everyone in the federation valued it immensely...it was lying unrecorded.” Through collaboration, FED writing is now preserved for community groups and university courses to explore intersectional understandings of working-class identity, community-led education, vernacular literacies, and more.   Students and the FWWCP Archive - Learning in Community Collaborative preservation informs our approach and the design of our writing courses. Since 2015, Syracuse University Study Abroad has hosted a Civic Writing course connected to the FWWCP/FED. The course uses FED texts to engage students in a conversation about the goals of “civic” life. We read social and political history of England, theories about literacy, civic engagement, and social change, which helped us consider the impact of FED groups. Further, we attended FED writing workshops with some foundational groups in the greater London area, including Newham, Stevenage, and the East End.   Student Ana Gonzalez described her connection to FED writing and social justice: “[Many FED texts] shared the theme of dealing with and overcoming oppression in day to day life. Most authors that I read were Black and their feelings of isolation and self-doubt in a society that is predominantly White made their words relatable for me.” Other students echoed a felt need for preservation of FED writing. After reading LGBTQ members’ accounts, Michelle Tiburcio wrote, "Preserving works like these can help other people – maybe future students – feel represented and not alone.” The work was also valuable to our archivists and librarian students. For example, Andria Olson describes literacy as a human experience. She noted, “[Literacy] is not bound by the walls of an institution but rather by a lifetime of experience in resourcefulness, determination, and overcoming adversity.” The Collection showcases how marginalized communities can, and certainly have, developed rhetorical spaces to give voice to their struggles, working toward a more inclusive and just vision of writing in community. Further, this community literacy project pushes students to consider how we might value vernacular literacies, knowledges, and “ordinary” lived experience. As we see from student testimony, community literacy belongs in the classroom.   The FWWCP Collection contains numerous English and multilingual publications that explore class, food, gender, mental health, race, sexuality, war, work. You can learn more by visiting the TUC Library. The FWWCP/FED is also on Instagram (fwwcp_collection) and has a Digital Collection. ... View more