I’ve written often about what I take to be the deeply performative nature of writing: from the collaborative performances associated with much workplace writing; through the years of the Stanford Study of Writing, from what my students called “performing for a grade" to a full-blown, three-hour Hip-Hopera written, choreographed, directed, and performed by a student in her senior year; to these students’ insistence that good writing always involved a performance, an act of “making something happen in the world.”   My grandniece Audrey agrees. An eighth grader in public school, she has been getting assignments that invite her to think of her writing as embodied and performed. Most recently, while studying about the American Civil War, her history teacher asked students to imagine a person alive at the time of the war, to place that person in a specific time and place, and to create a day-by-day diary or journal that person might have kept. This assignment captured Audrey’s imagination, and she thought hard about it for days, trying out several possible diarists before she eventually came up with Jane Puckett, who lived from 1836-1866. She traced Jane’s family tree back several generations and showed how the families included soldiers fighting on both sides of the civil war.   As I read and viewed this lengthy journal, I was struck by how Audrey helped bring Jane to life through her diary, using reported speech and dialogue along with vivid descriptions and illustrations, and also how she performed her understanding of the complexities of the war and the fateful and often fatal choices people had to make during that time.   The imaginative journey this assignment invoked involved trying to step into the past and embody someone else’s experiences, speaking and writing without anachronisms (not always successfully!). Audrey was acutely aware of the challenges she faced: “He’s the hardest teacher in the whole school; I’ll be lucky to get a C.” But she persevered, choosing a free handwriting font to type up the entire diary on 8 1/2 x 11 sheets of paper cut in half and using tea to give the look of an old, slightly stained manuscript. Then she bound the pages, including illustrations, in leather covers tied with a leather cord. All in all, a pretty impressive performance, I thought.   As this example suggests, young writers today have a strong sense of the performative qualities of writing, one that didn’t seem available to me when I was a middle schooler. At any rate, I am very happy to see that next year’s CCCCs meeting will focus on the theme of Performance-Rhetoric, Performance-Composition. You can also see some scholars speaking to this theme in a video, where one person quotes August Wilson as saying “Performance is embodied knowledge.”   I hope to attend next year’s meeting, where I expect to both deepen and expand my understanding of what it means to perform rhetoric and composition. In the meantime, I plan to ask Audrey to talk more with me about how she and her 8 th grade classmates think about such acts.   Image Credit: Andrea Lunsford ... View more

Last week, I reviewed several word cloud generators and suggested a few ways that you can use word clouds in the classroom. This week, I am sharing some ways that you can use word clouds in your classes to engage students directly in the learning process. The ten active learning strategies below ask students to move beyond the absorption of ideas typical of a lecture-based class to deep engagement with the ideas and development of relevant content area and critical thinking skills. 1. 25-Word Summaries With 25-word summaries, students summarize (or otherwise discuss) their reading in 25 words or less. Students must concentrate their ideas and make every word count. Once students submit their summaries, combine them in a single document, and generate a word cloud that reveals the 25 words that students mentioned most. For nonfiction readings, the resulting word cloud can show the main points of the reading, significant facts that are included, and key issues that stand out for students. For fictional readings, the word cloud can reveal significant features from the reading, such as themes and symbols. The word cloud below is the collected response to the discussion question “What are the main themes in A Raisin in the Sun?” For accessibility purposes, include the table of word frequency, which screen readers will be able to read.   Word Frequency family     21 african     16 people     14 dream     10 dreams     10 abortion       8 act       8 knowledge       7 raisin       7 africa       6 2. Icebreakers with Survey Responses Choose your favorite icebreaker question: What’s your favorite food? What’s the last book you read? What kind of texts have you written in the workplace? Ask students to respond with online survey software, like Poll Everywhere or Mentimeter. Both of these tools allow you to present the survey responses in a word cloud, so you do not need any additional software. The cloud appears on the survey website as the responses are added. 3. Directed Paraphrase Check students’ comprehension by asking them to paraphrase the most recent lesson or activity that the class has completed. Encourage students to put the content of the lesson into their own words, rather than parroting back what they have seen or read in the class. Collect all of the responses in a single document, and generate a word cloud of the most commonly repeated words. Share the cloud with the class and ask them to consider why certain words showed up and why others were missing. Be sure to ask them to comment on how well the word cloud represents the lesson or activity they paraphrased. 4. Prediction Before students read the next section of an article or chapter of a book, ask them to suggest what they think will happen next. As with other activities, gather the responses in a single document and create a word cloud, which will identify the most popular predictions. Ask students to discuss why certain predications were popular, connecting to the available evidence from the reading they have completed. 5. Muddiest Point Ask students to write down whatever is most unclear about the lesson, in a word or two, before leaving the classroom for the day. Collect students’ responses and assemble them into a single document, from which you can build a word cloud of the points that most students noted. Open the next class session with the word cloud, and address the concepts that students have identified. 6. Focused List Build a focused list by asking students to respond to a question about a topic. This strategy can be used to stimulate prior knowledge by asking a question such as “What have you learned about the topic already?” Give students time to brainstorm a list of concepts that they recall, and create a word cloud of the ideas they have shared. Use the word cloud to extend discussion of prior knowledge by asking students to explain the concepts that appear in the word cloud. 7. Version Comparison As part of a research project, ask students to find two articles on their topic, ideally two that focus on different perspectives. Have students make a word cloud for each of the articles and then compare the two clouds. Specifically, ask which words that the two versions have in common as well as what their most significant differences are. Have students determine which of the most frequently used words communicate facts and which communicate opinion. If there are terms in the word clouds that students have not found elsewhere in their research, encourage them to examine these words further as they relate to the topic. 8. Role Play Again, set up a survey using online survey software, like Poll Everywhere or Mentimeter, but this time ask students to answer from another perspective. In literature courses, you can ask students to answer as they think one of the characters would respond. The activity can be used as a Prediction activity (#4 above) by asking students to predict what someone in a reading might do next or a decision the person would make. For any reading that students complete, they might respond as the author would. If you are studying argument, students can answer as someone on a particular side of the issue might. These role-playing surveys will result in interesting word clouds that reveal how well students understand whatever they are reading or studying. 9. Quiz-Style Games For this activity, you create the word cloud yourself. You could choose keywords from a text and manufacture a cloud, or paste in the text of a reading to create a cloud. Ensure that your cloud does not include the title of the piece or other words that would make the source immediately obvious. The word cloud above for A Raisin in the Sun would work for this activity. Use the resulting word clouds to quiz students: By looking only on the cloud, can they identify the piece that the cloud represents? Students could work individually or in teams to propose their answers, similar to a game show. This activity would work particularly well as a review exercise before an exam. 10. List-Cloud-Group-Label With this modification of the List-Group-Label strategy, you can stimulate prior knowledge as you introduce a reading, a unit of study, or a course theme. Write a word or phrase related to the subject area on the board. For instance, if the course will explore popular culture, you might focus on the word popularity or the phrase popular culture itself. Have students brainstorm related words and phrases using online survey software, like Poll Everywhere or Mentimeter (or in an open Google Doc). Make a word cloud of students’ responses. Next, arrange students into small groups, and ask each group to examine the word cloud closely. Groups can add or remove words or phrases as well as decide on whether particular items on the list should have been larger or smaller in the word cloud. Once they have considered the words, ask groups to arrange the words into several related subtopics and to provide a label for each subtopic. Have groups present their subtopics to the whole class and explain their arrangement. The whole class can compare the different subtopics that groups have created. Later in the course, after you have begun your exploration of the reading, unit, or theme, ask students to return to the labeled groups of words and consider how well they relate to the topic as it has evolved during the course. Final Thoughts As you can see from these ten ideas, word clouds can be a versatile tool in the classroom. They can be used for analysis, description, summary, and more. Perhaps my favorite thing about these uses of word clouds is that the results are always different. Although my classes may study the same topic or readings from one term to the next, the way that they create and analyze word clouds is always unique—and every so often, they reveal an idea that surprises me. What are your thoughts on word clouds now that you have seen some ways to use them? Do you have additional strategies to try? Would you complete one of these active learning strategies in a different way? Tell me your thoughts in a comment below. I can’t wait to hear from you. ... View more

Before the beginning of the spring semester, as I planned our assignments for the course, I tried to imagine where we might be by the end of the semester. I thought of skills to be practiced and outcomes to be measured, and I also considered multiple means of fostering persistence and resilience through the processes and products of writing. Through these means, I returned to a genre I had used in the past, the graduation speech. The end of the semester and the end of the school year can be a difficult time for many students in ways that they understandably may not be willing to share with us. They may struggle with intersecting issues of community and family, with food insecurity and racism, with the need to hold several jobs and to take a course overload to try to accelerate their education. In other words, the end of the year is a time when students need to keep most focused even as low energy levels may impede concentration. What to do? At the end of the semester, through the #redfored movement, public school teachers demonstrated against prolonged state defunding of K-12 education. The demonstrations began at the end of the last week of classes, impacting our community economically, politically, and emotionally. School defunding began during the recession of 2008, and accelerated over the ensuing nine years, or for half of the time that my traditional-aged first-year students had been alive. In the early part of the recession, in the first year of his presidency, Barack Obama had been invited to give a graduation speech at our institution. The speech became controversial, as described in the links connected to the assignment, when some people suggested that the President had not yet accomplished enough to earn an honorary degree. President Obama decided to speak at graduation anyway and wove the controversy into his remarks that demonstrated an exemplary understanding of kairos, or the rhetorical circumstances of the situation. Because this story held local interest for my students, I offered the speech as a reading to help understand the genre of the graduation speech. Also included was a website that listed fifteen themes and other suggestions for composing graduation speeches (see the link below). But the main point of assigning the graduation speech as a final assignment was to give us an opportunity to imagine the future in a positive light. Students not only needed to write a speech, but also to envision themselves as graduating and being chosen to address their classmates. They had to consider the kairos that had produced such circumstances, and to focus on what it would mean to arrive at that historical marker in their own lives. In the conclusion for their speech, one student wrote: Take this speech as a lesson, pass it down to others, give them courage, and give them confidence. Tell them they can do it, those 4 little words mean a lot to people. Makes them push that much harder. Be the one to make the difference in someone’s college experience, and college career. That’s what I am here to do today, you guys don’t need this, you already made it. Give this to others and help them be better, you could be the difference maker. Under the intense pressures that students endure in the culmination of their first year experiences, offering courage and confidence to others can be a significant gift not only to students’ sense of community, but also to students’ developing sense of themselves as writers. As this student suggests, that gift can make all the difference. PROMPT FOR GRADUATION SPEECH Take what you have learned and experiment with a different genre: a speech that you have been invited to deliver to your college graduating class Revise the letter that you wrote to a younger audience as a speech for your class and audience members at your graduation Include your reading from earlier writing projects as references See this link for a list of 15 themes and suggestions for writing graduation speeches. Choose one of these themes for your graduation speech. Look at former President Obama’s 2009 graduation speech at ASU-Tempe for another example. See these links for the transcript, the video, and the historical background of this speech. Music educators performing in the #redfored band at the Arizona state capitol in Phoenix on April 30, 2018. The writing on the drum says: “The true neighbor will risk his position, his prestige, and his life for the welfare of others.” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.       Photo by Susan Naomi Bernstein ... View more

An arrest in connection with a series of rapes and murders in California by a perpetrator known variously as the Golden State Killer, the East Area Rapist, and the Original Night Stalker promises to bring closure for victims and victims’ families who have been waiting since the 1970s and 1980s. The accused, Joseph DeAngelo, was found through an unconventional method. As millions in recent months sent their DNA to be tested to trace their genealogy “just for fun,” law enforcement officers went to an open-source genealogical platform to find first DeAngelo’s family and then DeAngelo. (They used “discarded” DNA from DeAngelo to make the final match with DNA from victims.) Advances in DNA testing have made thousands of convictions possible and have freed innocent men and women who were convicted before today’s testing methods were developed. Use of a genealogical site to catch a criminal elicited a perhaps unexpected criticism. Those who submitted their DNA for testing hardly thought that it could be used for that purpose. Is it legitimate—is it legal, even—for the DNA samples to be used as they were used in the DeAngelo case? There is an interesting parallel between the questions raised about the use of DNA samples submitted for one purpose being used for another and the whole Turnitin.com controversy from a few years ago. Many universities and a smaller number of high schools use Turnitin.com to locate plagiarism in student papers. One reason for the site’s effectiveness is that every paper submitted to be checked becomes part of the database that is checked, and so on and so on and so on. Several lawsuits grew out of students’ anger at how their work was being used without their permission. They could not pass the course the paper was written for without submitting it to Turnitin, but once they submitted it, their original work was then used by Turnitin to make profit. Some students argued that they were coerced into signing away permission to the use of their work under threat of a failing grade in the course. The fact that some even wrote their protestations into the permission form did not change the outcome of at least one court case that was decided in favor of the defendant. Students are warned constantly, as are we all, to be cautious about what they post on the Internet. Pictures taken at a drunken Spring Break party can come back to haunt them when they apply for a job. Intimate photos shared with the love of their life can become “revenge porn” when the relationship sours. The Turnitin.com lawsuits were an interesting reversal in which students did not want their work to become part of a huge digital database. The difference between Turnitin and the site used by police in the DeAngelo case, GEDmatch is that, rather than being required to use it by schools (who pay for access to the Turnitin database), users of the genealogy site chose to use it, for free. An article from the Los Angeles Times tellingly called “Cracking the Golden State Killer case: Clever detective work or a violation of privacy?” explains that with GEDmatch, “consenting users upload test results from a variety of genealogy websites and cross-reference their findings to discover relatives who might have tested with different companies.” In response to the DeAngelo case, GEDmatch made this statement: “While the database was created for genealogical research, it is important that GEDmatch participants understand the possible uses of their DNA, including identification of relatives that have committed crimes or were victims of crimes. If you are concerned about non-genealogical uses of your DNA, you should not upload your DNA to the database and/or you should remove your DNA that has already been uploaded.” Clever detective work or a violation of privacy? Maybe both. The Times article warns, “Ruth Dickover, director of UC Davis' forensic science program, described law enforcement's approach as a glimpse into a future in which virtually all genetic information is accessible to the government.” The larger genealogical sites, 23andMe and Ancestry.com, try to shield the privacy of their customers. Neither has given law enforcement access to customers’ DNA, and both state their intent to resist doing so in the absence of a search warrant or court order. The danger comes when the customers themselves share their DNA results online, which is what they do with GEDmatch. We can applaud the success of law enforcement in catching a killer and rapist, and most of us do not have to worry about our DNA revealing a skeleton in our closet, but we have to remember that once we make the decision to make our results public, we are doing so not just for ourselves, but for all of those who share our DNA as well.   Image Source: “DNA representation” by Andy Leppard on Flickr 10/5/06 via Creative Commons 2.0 license ... View more

A happy event at Ohio State last week got me thinking about the importance—and wide variety—of writing spaces. I was in Columbus for a meeting of the English Department’s Alumni Advisory Committee (I got my Ph.D. at OSU in 1977) and to my surprise and delight, the meeting concluded with the official opening of a newly renovated graduate student lounge, to which I had contributed. Here are some photos of the new space: Pretty nice digs—and certainly a far cry from the space graduate students lay claim to in the 70s. As I talked with the graduate students gathered there, they spoke of the significance of this space, a “room of their own” for a quiet coffee and chat, a small group meeting—or for writing. One student said her shared office was always full of students and teachers conferring and thus fairly hectic: “it’s impossible to think straight in there,” she said. But this fairly quiet new space, with its large windows, good light, and welcome atmosphere, felt like a place she would enjoy writing and reading and thinking, as well as enjoying the company of her fellow students. This discussion reminded me of how many young people today have few if any comfortable or welcoming writing spaces available. When students are living at home, in both high school and college, such spaces are scarce. In Bronwyn LaMay’s terrific ethnographic study Personal Narrative, Revised: Writing Love and Agency in the High School Classroom, she describes in detail the living conditions of some of her students and they are not conducive to writing, to say the very least. College students often tell me that they prefer to write in a space with lots of other things going on—music, multiple windows open on their devices, other people, all multitasking. But I have no evidence to suggest that such writing spaces are productive and a lot of evidence (especially about noise and multitasking) that they are anything but. Of course, I’ve taught and written long enough to know that one person’s productive writing space is another person’s site of writing block. So, I’m cautious when talking to students about where they do their best writing, since the answers inevitably vary widely. But one response they have in common is that the space needs to feel like theirs, a place that is all for and about them. Once they discover such a space, they tend to stick with it. So last week, as I helped inaugurate the new space at Ohio State, I was wishing for safe, welcoming, productive spaces for all writers. And I think it is well worth talking with our students about what constitutes such a space—and helping them make a plan to claim such a space for themselves. Image Credit: Andrea Lunsford ... View more

In my last post, I suggested a set of threshold concepts about grammar that could support a “reading for grammar” pedagogy; in such a pedagogy, grammar is explored inductively and descriptively through interactions with complex and challenging texts.  The concepts I proposed address the nature of grammatical systems and the critical importance of those systems in meaning-making activities. Those activities—and the choices of readers and writers engaged in them—have implications for identity and social positioning.   However, practically speaking, how does this translate into classroom practice? I think it begins with noticing—simply bringing syntax and the conventions of written language into the students’ range of attention. My hunch that noticing initiates growth in grammatical awareness comes from years of interacting with students who, in reading class texts or their own work, responded to questions about specific linguistic features in this way: “I didn’t see that.” And while it is easy to attribute that response to carelessness or laziness, I don’t think that fairly captures the task students face in reading, particularly students who have not been afforded extensive reading opportunities (except for perhaps the mind-numbing readings assigned in the preparation and completion of standardized tests). After years of teaching composition (and with training in linguistics), I am certainly going to have a different experience with a text than my students do. I have developed an awareness of multiple linguistic features; my eyes scan for these automatically, and I interpret them rapidly. But I am not so adept in understanding how to “read” a soccer match, for example. Hundreds of details immediately evident to my students—aficionados of fútbol—escape my notice. “I didn’t see that.”    My soccer analogy reminds me that I cannot push students headlong into noticing during our first encounter with a text, just as I wouldn’t try to pay attention to intricate player formations at my first soccer match. I would need to settle in at the stadium, figure out how to get to my seat, match teams and uniforms, and make sure I could see the goals at either end of the field. Students also need time to situate themselves as readers of a text.   But once we have spent some time with a text, I can invite my students to notice how the author is using grammar. I try to select an interesting grammatical feature of the text:  subject-verb agreement, commas, parallel structure, subordinate clauses, colons, use of quotes, verbal complements, verb tenses—anything that contributes in some way to our understanding of the text. Then I ask the students to notice that feature (having chosen only one). I might point it out in a couple of paragraphs, and then ask students to notice where else it is used and annotate those instances.    My temptation is always to rush through this noticing; it would be easier for me to point out the instances and move quickly into explanation and practice (activities that I will discuss in future posts). But I am learning to resist this temptation and give my students time to notice for themselves, without moving in to correct what they “didn’t see.”  (Even with something that seems as obvious as periods as markers of terminal sentence boundaries, students may not be adept at noticing quickly. To combat the “5 sentences per paragraph” pseudo-rule that some students have been taught, I will ask them to count the number of sentences in one or two paragraphs of a reading we have done.  Invariably, students do not agree on the number the first time. As they check their counts with others in the class, I hear the phrase again and again: “Oh!  I didn’t see that.”)   Noticing and annotating take time, and given the hectic pressure of accelerated courses and packed syllabi, it can seem that we don’t have luxury for these activities in class.  But I think noticing is essential for the development of close reading skills, grammatical awareness, and the ability to revise and edit one’s own work. I have found as students practice, an important shift takes place: not only do they notice the textual features I have asked them to see, but they also begin to notice other characteristics of the text—and lexical and syntactic awareness increases.    In the next post, I will look at activities that build on noticing. In the meantime, your comments and questions are welcome. 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

Today's guest blogger is Kim Haimes-Korn‌, a Professor in the English Department at Kennesaw State University. Kim’s teaching philosophy encourages dynamic learning, critical digital literacies and focuses on students’ powers to create their own knowledge through language and various “acts of composition.” She likes to have fun every day, return to nature when things get too crazy and think deeply about way too many things. She loves teaching. It has helped her understand the value of amazing relationships and boundless creativity. You can reach Kim at khaimesk@kennesaw.edu or visit her website Acts of Composition. Many of us find ourselves in larger class settings and look for new ways to encourage critical reading and writing. In one of my other Multimodal Mondays posts, Five for the Drive, I identified 5 easy ways that I have used Google Drive in my classes. I first came up with these assignments when I found myself teaching a literature class that had 35 students. The writing teacher in me wanted my students to write daily reflections on their reading selections and share those ideas with others. Although this worked for years, students often considered it a burden and it required quite a bit of reading and evaluation on my part. I decided it was time for a new model. First, I had to figure out what I considered important when it comes to critical reading: I want students to forge strong interpretations in which they connect their ideas to ideas in a text. I value it when students are text-specAific and can support their ideas through significant passages in a text. I encourage dialogic thinking as students discuss their ideas with others to help them move beyond their own thoughts and interact with the ideas of others. I want them to complete this interpretive work before we arrive in class so that our class discussions are purposeful, interesting, and substantiated. It is with these ideas in mind that I came up with this series of critical reading assignments. Background Reading The St. Martin’s Handbook:  Ch. 7, “Reading Critically”  The Everyday Writer (also available with Exercises😞 Ch.9, “Critical Reading” EasyWriter (also available with Exercises😞  Ch.7, “Analyzing and Reading Critically”   Assignment Series Collaborative Discussion Teams: Assign students to a collaborative discussion team that they will work with through the term. This is a place for them to try out ideas, engage in thoughtful conversation, and create interesting ways of looking at texts through active interpretation. This series of assignments trains them to be strong critical readers – skills they use in our classes and across the curriculum. Set up a Team Space: Each team will have online space and create an accompanying folder on the class Google Drive that includes the following sub-folders: Schedule of Facilitators and Weekly Questions and Passages   Example of Question and Passage Template      Students post weekly questions and passages to Google Docs: For each reading selection, all students in the group are required to post 3 significant, thought provoking questions and one interesting passage, reference or quote to the weekly Google doc. In some instances, I ask them to include more than one passage. The purpose of these questions is to open up discussion and to help students consider the deeper, multiple meanings in the texts we read. Students include their names next to their submissions. Students create a new document each week and curate their ideas of the course of the semester.   Example of Student Questions and Passages: Emerson Weekly facilitators: Students create a calendar of facilitators that will appear as an administrative document in their folder. All members will take several turns facilitating the team (through your LMS or through Google chat or other discussion software). The facilitator starts the thread by looking through the weekly posts to choose a question/passage or two or encouraging conversation and connected ideas. They should start a new thread for each selection, designated by the author’s last name or the title of the selection. In this online discussion, we look for quality conversations, which means that all members actively engage with the subject matter through bringing in their own experiences, ideas, and specific connections to our readings and class discussions. It is also the facilitator’s responsibility to frame and contextualize the questions to make sure that the conversation remains lively and connected.   Example of Facilitated Discussion   In-Class Discussion: By the time students arrive in class, they have already posed interesting questions, grounded their ideas in text-specific passages, and engaged in discussion with others. These exercises then become reference documents for engaged, full-class discussion. Students can access them on their devices and choose particular ideas and passages to share with the class. I have them do different things with their discoveries. I often have students copy them in class to another collaborative document on Google in which teams quickly transfer their questions and/or passages. All students and teams contribute their ideas towards an immediate visual aid for discussion.   Example of Collaborative Passages for Full Class Discussion   Reflection on the Activities I was originally motivated to create this series to manage larger classes and still encourage critical reading strategies. Now, I use them across my classes because they promote the kind of close reading that students often resist. Evaluation is easier because I am not reading full essays and can easily check for quality participation. Students also weigh in on the evaluation twice during the semester and report on their teammates’ participation and the significance of their responses. I also ask them to reflect, in writing, several times during the semester and read across their work from these collaborative discussions. I am not trying to say that these methods should replace exploratory, essay, or research writing. On the contrary, when students curate their ideas along with textual connections, they are more prepared to expand upon them in other writing projects. The most satisfying result is the quality of our class discussions. Every student participates and has a chance to have their ideas heard (which sometimes gets lost in full class discussion). Students always have available references to share with the class and are ready to contribute to the larger dialogic conversations.   Let me know what you think in the comments. ... View more

I have been talking with my students about the integral role that writing plays in building community and practicing democracy. Our discussions have followed the mapping exercise I described in my last blog entry. They drew maps to shed light on the lack of access to goods, services, and educational opportunities – where literacy happens – in economically depressed communities. The spatial inequality represented in the maps they drew led to questions about policies that have affected the lack of equity we witnessed: how have policies affected the built environment that surrounds us and what actions can we take to mitigate the effects of poverty on children and families? How can what we write frame conversations that prompt residents, educators, and policymakers to engage with one another to create access to what children and families need?   Addressing these and other questions has opened up spaces to discuss the ways writing is about creating relationships and changing conversations from problems to possibilities. Peter Block’s Community: The Structure of Belonging has provided a useful frame through which to understand the importance of using writing – especially stories – to invite disparate groups to the table, so to speak, and engage with one another. For Block, writing serves as an invitation to strengthen the fabric of communities by creating a sense of belonging. Individual transformation is not the point as much as imagining collective responsibility, relatedness, and forward action. Moreover, building community is also about seeing assets in a community, including people. Thus community change is not simply about identifying deficiencies and problems that need to be solved.   Block’s ideas have challenged some of the ways April Lidinsky and I have written about writing as conversation and the strategies for entering a conversation of ideas: understanding what writers have written before, what they may have overlooked or ignored in addressing a problem, and using writing as a way to fill gaps. These are useful ways to think about writing and Block’s formulation simply broadens the metaphor:   If we want a change in culture . . . the work is to change the conversation – or more precisely, to have a conversation that we have not had before, one that has the power to create something new in the world. This insight forces us to question the value of our stories, the positions we take . . . and our way of being in the world. (p. 15)   In this light, conversation can be broadly conceived and includes all of the ways that we use image and text to communicate in meaningful ways to one another in the different public spaces we inhabit.   Block goes on to explain that some stories we tell ourselves can limit our imagination and the possibilities before us. For example, my students and I discussed the extent to which policymakers and educators often place blame on individuals and the deficits that characterize children and families living in poverty. We shift the conversation by asking questions about the causes of poverty and by identifying the assets in a community that can increase social capital and civic engagement. The shift in conversation is from one of problems and fear to one of possibility and restoration. Thus the stories we tell are those that give meaning to our lives and enable us to lift up our voices.   In our writing, my students and I have framed the conversation in ways that Block has inspired: what can we create together to foster inclusion, relatedness, and perhaps reconciliation? Moreover, how can we use all forms of rhetoric as an invitation to ensure all voices are heard in building community and in ways that allow community members to take ownership in creating something that really matters? What new stories can a community create together that can become part of the public debate regardless of the current political context? How can we heal the fragmentation of communities and incivility as active citizens?   The conversation we enter, then, is the step that my students and I agree makes an alternative future possible. And entering conversations is the step toward active citizenship in communities where we are accountable to one another. Image Source: “7-Eleven” by Mr. Blue MauMau on Flickr 5/17/16 via Creative Commons 2.0 license ... View more

Though there have been some very high profile participants in the "movement" (can you spell "Elon Musk"?), I am not aware that the #deletefacebook movement is making much of a real dent in Facebook's membership ranks, and I do not expect that it ever will. For in spite of a seemingly continuous stream of scandalous revelations of Facebook's role in the dissemination of fake news and the undermining of the American electoral system—not to mention the way that Facebook, along with other digital titans such as Google, data mine our every move on the Internet—all signs indicate that, when it comes to America’s use of social media, the only way is up. Even the recantations of such former social media "cheerleaders" as Vivek Wadhwa (who have decided that maybe all this technological "progress" is only leading to human "regression" after all) are highly unlikely to change anyone's behavior.   The easiest explanation for this devotion to social media, no matter what, is that Internet usage is addictive. Indeed, a study conducted at the University of Maryland by the International Center for Media and the Public Agenda, in which 200 students were given an assignment to give up their digital devices for 24 hours and then write about their feelings during that bleak stretch, revealed just that, with many students reporting effects that were tantamount to symptoms of drug withdrawal (a full description of this study can be found in chapter 5 of the 9th edition of Signs of Life in the USA). To revise Marx a little, we might say that social media are the opiate of the masses.   Given the fact that our students are likely to have lived with the Internet all of their lives, it could be difficult, bordering on impossible, for them to analyze in any objective fashion just how powerful, and ultimately enthralling, social media are. It’s all too easy to take the matter for granted. But with the advent of digital technology looming as the most significant cultural intervention of our times, passive acceptance is not the most useful attitude to adopt. At the same time, hectoring students about it isn’t the most productive way to raise awareness either. All those “Google is making America stupid” screeds don’t help at all. So I want to suggest a different approach to preparing the way for a deep understanding of the seductive pull of social media: I'll call it a "phenomenology of Facebook."   Here's what I have in mind. Just as in that phenomenologically influenced mode of literary criticism called "Reader Response," wherein readers are called upon to carefully document and describe their moment-by-moment experience in reading a text, you could ask your students to document and describe their moment-by-moment experience when they use social media. Rather than describing how they feel when they aren't online (which is what the University of Maryland study asked students to do), your students would describe, in journal entries, their precise emotions, expectations, anticipations, disappointments, triumphs, surprises, hopes, fears (and so on and so forth) when they are. Bringing their journals to class, they could share (using their discretion about what to share and what not to) what they discovered, and then organize together the commonalities of their experience. The exercise is likely to be quite eye opening.   It is important that you make it clear that such a phenomenology is not intended to be judgmental: it is not a matter of “good” or “bad”; it is simply a matter of “what.” What is the actual experience of social media usage? What is it like? What’s going on? Only after clearly answering such phenomenological questions can ethical questions be effectively posed.   Not so incidentally, you can join in the exercise yourself. I’ve done it myself. You may be surprised at what you learn. Credit: Pixabay Image 292994 by LoboStudioHamburg, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

While reading stories from my students this semester I noticed in many pieces there was a clear tension between two characters, but no other elements of conflict. In our individual conferences, many students expressed a desire for deeper and richer stories beyond the single line of conflict. “It feels like my story is missing something,” one student said. Both in conferences and in class, I encouraged my students to draw out a third element in their stories—a character, a weather pattern, an object—that bears significance to their stories and pulls at desires of the two characters already on the page. Then the stories have three central elements in conflict, a triangle of tension as one of my own creative writing instructors called it. While my students understood how adding a third element to their stories would be effective, the question many of them asked was “How can I do this?” In response, I led the class in a guided story exercise of five steps. Each step built on the next to encourage students to pay attention to conflict and to go looking for trouble. After each step, I gave students a few minutes to wander on the page and see where the prompt took them before moving onto the next. I used “you” in each step to encourage students to get in the mindsets of their characters. First, I asked my students to place themselves or a character in a room.    Where are you?    What are you doing? Then, I drew their attention to another figure in the room.    There’s another person in the room with you.    What are they doing? I turned toward dialogue, asking students to listen to their characters.    What do they say to you?    What do you say back?    What are you doing while you’re talking? I finally asked them to look for another figure in the scene.    You may have already noticed this, or you’re just noticing now, but someone or something else is in the room    with you two.    Who or what is it?    What do they say or do?    What do you say and do? Finally, for the closing of the exercise, I encouraged students to explicitly consider elements of conflict and tension in the scene.    What do you want?    Who and what is in your way? When students came up for air at the end of the exercise, shaking out their hand cramps, I saw the pages of their notebooks were filled. As a class, we discussed the benefits of the exercise. One student said she’d forgotten to look for a third character when she started writing, so she was grateful for the prompt to pay attention to one. Another student found the open-ended nature of the prompts useful, so that he had authority over where he sent his characters. Yet another student found the closing part of the exercise, the question of what her character wants, to be a powerful question to ask each of her characters to make sure they all had something at stake in the piece. My students almost unanimously asked for more guided story prompts, with the condition they receive even more time to write than the fifteen minutes I had set aside. I’m eager to develop more of these exercises to support other fiction skills, such as creating turns, developing a clear setting, and tuning ears to dialogue. ... View more

It seems like every year around this time I find myself way behind in my journal reading: something about the spring, I guess. But recently I’ve had a chance to begin catching up, thanks to some long cross-country flights. Two issues of College English kept me busy and thinking hard: every essay had good lessons to teach, and I came away from these two issues admiring the current work in our field as well as the editors of CE.   The January 2018 issue featured compelling essays by Abby Dubisar (on MADD and activism), Crystal Colombini (on hardship letters and the politics of genre), Kim Owens (a fascinating look at the ethnic studies classes that were outlawed in Arizona), and Lois Agnew (on “cancer wars” in the U.S. from 1920 to 1980). These essays led me to reflect on how I was reading them and how my reading practices (or habits) shift according to how engaged I am, what my preconceptions and biases are, and what I already know about the topic.   And these reflections set me up for the review in this issue, Kelly Blewett’s “In Defense of Unruliness: Five Books on Reading.” I love the notion of “unruly” reading, taken from Mariolina Salvatori and Patrick Donahue’s Stories about Reading. In their discussion, they reject the “students can't read” and “reading is a problem” arguments in favor of acknowledging that “students have capacities and abilities we have yet to pay adequate attention to.” So in spite of the doom and gloom reports that say students can’t read proficiently and that pleasure reading is “dead,” what I see around me is quite different. Students today are reading constantly, on all manner of devices, and they are writing up a storm as well. It’s just that the kinds of reading they are doing doesn’t seem to “count” for many people, which is just more proof that we aren’t yet paying adequate attention to what young people are actually doing.   Blewett takes this approach in reviewing five very different books on reading, which “collectively bring to composition studies a reclamation of the complex and elusive nature of reading which is surprise-provoking, possible, self-reflexive, and interperetive.” This review sent me looking for books I hadn’t heard of, like Peter Mendelsund’s What We See When We Read, “a book comprising words and images that explores how readers visualize prose” and offers insights about the mysterious and always partial nature of reading. Certainly this review is worth reading, and re-reading, so that’s part of my recommended reading.   The most recent issue of College English (March, 2018) contains only three essays, but all three were fascinating to me. Chris Mays’s essay on creative nonfiction and the controversy over how much such work must adhere to the “truth” is thorough and thoroughly provocative. Bethany Mannon’s piece on three ways of looking at and engaging with the Afghan Women’s Writing Project renewed my commitment to what Maria Lugones calls “world traveling,” and showed how digital storytelling projects can further that goal. And Cynthia Lewis’s report on a course she teaches on “Radio Shakespeare” took me inside the experience she and her students had as they prepared The Merchant of Venice for broadcast: just learning about the logistics involved—from voice coaching and use of special sound effects to the intricacies of interactions among members of the cast—left me wanting to be part of such a class myself.   All this reading has also left me wondering what more I can do to bring active, engaged, delightful, unruly reading into more classrooms. I’d very much like to hear from those who have ways of doing so. Leave a comment below! Image Credit: Pixabay Image 1869616 by Pexels, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

Ideally, every video that I upload to YouTube has closed captions and a transcript. Unfortunately, things are not always ideal in my world. When I have time, I have been using Screencast-O-Matic to add captions to the videos that I make for my students. Here’s an example video that I made to show students how a new blog commenting system works. Viewing Tip Click the closed caption icon that is shaped like a box with lines of text in it, in the lower right band where the controls are, to see the captions on this video. The icon is shown in the image below, all the way to the left. Video Link : 2224 To make the captions on this video, I used the speech-to-text capability built into Screencast-O-Matic Pro. Unfortunately, you do have to upgrade to use the speech-to-text tool, but the cost is an economical $18 annually. The tool created a rough draft of the captions, but I had to go through and edit them by adding words and phrases that it missed and correcting things that it misheard. The whole process took a little over an hour, which may not seem bad until you consider the length of the video. The video is only 3½ minutes long, so I spent about twenty times the length of the video to make the transcript. Now extend that time commitment to a 10 minute video, and you need to plan at least three hours. That’s quite an undertaking for something that will only result in 10 minutes of curriculum material. Fortunately, YouTube includes a setting that allows a video creator to crowdsource the captioning for the videos that she uploads. From my perspective, it’s the most important setting on YouTube. Just follow the instructions to Turn on & manage community contributions and anyone can add captions to your video. The system allows you to review, change, or reject the captions. I already have an assignment that invites students to crowdsource transcripts. This YouTube setting facilitates their contributions to the course smoothly, and as a bonus, it reduces the work I have to do since the captions are added directly to the videos. In addition, students can contribute by adding to existing captions if they notice a correction is needed. I still plan to create captions for all my videos, but it’s nice to know that these alternatives exist. Do you have suggestions for improving the process of providing transcripts and captioning for video and audio content? I would love additional ideas and assignments. Please tell me about your ideas by leaving a comment below. ... View more

“Avoid Exaggeration…. When you’re writing for readers who don’t know you well, it’s important to show that you’re reliable and not overly dramatic. Readers have a sense of what the world is like. Exaggerations tend to affect them much the way insults do: they begin to mistrust the writer.” In some contexts now I can feel a bit silly about having written that advice in Mike Palmquist’s and my new textbook. Academic writing is not one of those contexts. Fields that involve statistics, for instance, have strict rules about what does or doesn’t constitute exaggeration, and researchers are trained to respect them reflexively. They write things like “X intervention led to a 2.5 percent increase in Y, but that result is not statistically significant.” That is, they don’t just present the information they’ve gathered; they also acknowledge its significance. When it doesn’t mean much, they make sure to point it out. In less quantifiable disciplines, a writer might want to argue, say, that Lyndon Johnson was “the greatest civil-rights advocate of all time,” or she or he might quote an authority as having said that. But academics rarely state such things in passing as though they were settled fact. They know that doing so would undermine their credibility. Outside academia, obviously the rules against exaggeration fly out the window. All the same, I feel strongly that here too avoiding exaggeration pays off. The speech that the Parkland shootings survivor Emma Gonzalez gave on February 17 at a gun control rally in Fort Lauderdale is a case in point. The speech was widely described as emotional and powerful. And yet it covered a lot of information, including: The House of Representatives did not observe a moment of silence for the Parkland victims, as is generally done after mass shootings.  “In Florida, to buy a gun you do not need a permit, you do not need a gun license, and once you buy it you do not need to register it. You do not need a permit to carry a concealed rifle or shotgun. You can buy as many guns as you want at one time.” Australia had one mass shooting in 1999, introduced gun safety laws, and hasn’t had one since. “Japan has never had a mass shooting. Canada has had three and the UK had one and they both introduced gun control.” President Trump’s electoral campaign received $30 million from the NRA. If you divide that dollar amount “by the number of gunshot victims in the United States in the one and one-half months in 2018 alone, that comes out to being $5,800.” “President Trump repealed an Obama-era regulation that would have made it easier to block the sale of firearms to people with certain mental illnesses.” Gonzalez presented other things, too, as facts—but those are most of the major ones. Given how prevalent false assertions are, I rooted around online to see if I could find out whether any of them were exaggerations. (Some of the results of my research can be found in the links above.) There are certainly websites and transcripts and videos that claim Gonzalez was exaggerating or worse. For instance, NRA board member Ted Nugent had this to say on a nationally syndicated radio program after Gonzalez spoke at the March for Our Lives rally in Washington D.C., on March 24: “These poor children, I’m afraid to say this and it hurts me to say this, but the evidence is irrefutable, they have no soul.” And after the host showed him clips from the speech, he responded, “The dumbing down of America is manifested in the culture deprivation of our academia that have taught these kids the lies, media that have prodded and encouraged and provided these kids lies.” All of that’s obviously opinion, not fact. (“The evidence is irrefutable” that Gonzalez and other young activists have no soul?!) Numerous other partisan discreditings of her facts have themselves been discredited—and around it goes. But what I wanted to find out is whether websites that are respected across the political spectrum, such as centrist news and fact-checking sites, “called BS,” to borrow Gonzalez’s memorable phrase, on specific information she had shared. Politifact reports that the information about gun purchases and permits in Florida “tracks with” material from the NRA itself, but calls the claim “You do not need a permit to carry a concealed rifle or shotgun” “probably the weakest line of the speech.” It explains, “There is no permit available to carry a concealed rifle or shotgun, because concealed carry of those weapons is not allowed.” Snopes.com, another fact-checking site, rates the assertion that Trump repealed the Obama-era regulation only “Mostly true,” inasmuch as it’s a simplification. And that’s about as much truth-stretching in the speech as numerous credible sources seem to have been able to find. Gonzalez’s speech was emotional and powerful because it was factual. There’s no denying that it’s possible to exaggerate widely and often and still succeed in public life. But if ever there was a teachable moment to show your students how much words can matter—specifically words from young people like them, and specifically accurate words—Emma Gonzalez’s Fort Lauderdale speech would be it. Do you have questions about language or grammar, or are there topics you would like me to address? If so, please email me at bwallraff@mac.com. Image Credit: "How to Spot Fake News" by IFLA on Wikimedia Commons, used under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license ... View more

In talking to my students about the common logical fallacies, I stress that it is not as important that they are able to label a fallacy as it is to recognize when there is a problem with the logic in a given statement. The list of fallacies in our text and in every other argument text on the market, with variations, is useful for alerting them to what can go wrong with logic, but knowing the difference between a straw man and a red herring is less important than recognizing that the logic is skewed. That applies to seeing fallacies in what they read and hear, and also in what they write. You don’t have to look far in today’s newspaper or online news or listen too long to the news to hear logical fallacies. Our hope is that news reports will present facts and that commentary, where cases are built for or against interpretations of those facts, will be clearly labeled as commentary. Unfortunately, the line between hard news and commentary has become increasingly blurred. All it takes is comparing the coverage of an event by CNN and by Fox News to see that. Any controversial topic brings out flawed logic. The more controversial the issue, the more flawed the logic is likely to be because when emotions get involved, they can outweigh reason. Bias can change the way a story is covered simply because of what is included and what is left out. To be fair, reporting the facts alone of a case often includes a person’s stated reasons for his or her actions, and these reasons often include their own faulty logic. A fight breaks out aboard an airliner because one person is afraid to sit next to another because of the color of the other person’s skin or the clothes he is wearing. That’s a hasty generalization. To assume that to limit the sale of automatic weapons will lead to taking away everyone’s guns is a slippery slope. To justify one politician’s indiscretions because another politician is equally guilty of indiscretions illustrates the two-wrongs-make-a right fallacy. (They don’t.) For years, advertisers got away with false use of authority. An early ad claimed, “More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette.” Actors who played doctors on television advertised all sorts of medications and cures. In an interesting recent play on that tradition, a group of television doctors admit in a series of Cigna ads that they only play doctors on television, but that they still want you to get an annual checkup. Is Marie Osmond or Jennifer Hudson any more qualified than any other user of a weight-loss program to argue for its efficacy? The claim to authority is only valid in such a case if the celebrity actually used or uses the product. In the political sphere, President Trump has actually been accused of ordering attacks on Syria as a red herring to draw attention away from the Stormy Daniels story. His administration has been compared to the early days of Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, which most would classify as a false analogy, but some would not. Is blaming Hillary Clinton’s loss of the presidential election on a letter written by James Comey a post hoc fallacy or not? These examples are enough to suggest that students won’t have to look far if they are asked to bring in examples of logical fallacies from the news or from advertising. The class can discuss what is wrong with the logic and why. They can start to think about where logic goes wrong and maybe start to notice flawed logic when they see or hear it. Peer critiques of their argumentative essays can point out flawed logic that is so hard for a writer to see in his or her own writing. The terms matter much less than an eye or ear attuned to errors in reasoning. Image Source: “I Can Be Persuaded” by Martha Soukup on Flickr 10/30/10 via Creative Commons 2.0 license ... View more

In April 2014, I had the great pleasure of attending the First Symposium on Teaching Composition and Rhetoric at Historically Black Colleges and Universities. With the theme of “Let Our Voices be Heard,” the symposium was held at NC A&T and sponsored by publisher Bedford/St. Martin’s. Shortly after the symposium, I wrote about it, focusing on a powerful and provocative keynote address by Vershawn Young. (I also gave a keynote but didn’t need to talk about that!) As always happens when I get to visit an HBCU, I learned a ton–especially from the talented and vocal students who attended.   Everyone at that first symposium left hoping for another one, and this year our wishes came true: again sponsored by Bedford/St. Martin’s, chaired by David Green, and held at Howard University and at the United Negro College Fund offices in DC, this Symposium on Teaching Composition and Rhetoric at HBCUs: Remembering Our Pasts, Re-envisioning Our Future certainly lived up to my high expectations. Keith Gilyard closed out the first day with his keynote, “Paying the Price to Make the Mic Sound Nice,” in which he urged all of us to begin with who our students are, not where they are, and to put autobiography and an exploration of the “I” at the center of our teaching and writing. In Gilyard’s view, progressive education is characterized by “rigorous and democratic development of ‘I’” and by exploration of the social/political world our students inhabit.   The other conference keynote was delivered by my fabulous colleague Adam Banks. In “Hold My Mule: Black Twitter, Digital Culture, and a Renewed Version of Students’ Right to Their Own Language (SRTOL),” he offered a holistic view of what it means to “do language work,” demonstrating the influence of GIFs and memes especially in articulating and disseminating black culture. Arguing that if technology and technological issues are a key area of inquiry and if “Black expressive culture is on the rise, the goals in composition classes must change.” A renewed vision of SRTOL, then, would put an emphasis on Black language and rhetorical practices that go “far beyond the linguistic”; would go well beyond print; and see remix as an indisputable part of Black culture. These new foci would help us to completely rethink intellectual property (which, as Larry Lessig has long argued, we absolutely must do) and to create pedagogical and social spaces where young people can “come with the remix” as accepted and valued practice.   These very brief summaries don’t do justice to the rich talks given by Gilyard and Banks: for more from them, you can pre-order their forthcoming book, On African American Rhetoric.   While no open conflict erupted, it was clear that not everyone at the symposium embraced these “newfangled” ideas, and there were those who advocated adherence to standard edited English, citing a 2010 study that found that 58% of those using AAVE have writing problems and 73% have reading problems (see Abha Gupta, “African-American English: Teacher Beliefs, Teacher Needs, and Teacher Preparation Programs”). In spite of a lack of unanimity, I came away reminded, once again, that English has always been a plastic language, shifting and changing shape as it absorbed new features from many other languages and from many dialects. And there’s nothing I’d love more than a “renewed vision of SRTOL!”   Every panel I attended during the conference left me instructed and inspired. From Corrie Claiborne and Jamila Lyn’s description of a program they developed to work with young men at Morehouse around issues of gender and of sexual harassment, to ALEXANDRIA LOCKETT’s exploration of “Gender Politics of Excellence at HBCUs,” to Kendra Bryant’s forceful evocation of “Black Student Writers in the Social Media Age,” to Khirsten Echols’s “Turning the Page, Shifting the View: Considering HBCU Literacies,” and to a very powerful closing roundtable on the “Challenges and Triumphs of HBCUs” (featuring a searing testimonial by Faye Spencer Maor on why her work at HBCUs has been central to who she is and why she is where she is today) as well as Jason DePolo’s haunting reminder that “faculty working conditions [which are sorely lacking at most HBCUs] are student learning conditions.”   I could go on and on about this remarkable gathering, and I am grateful for the opportunity I had to learn from all these remarkable scholars. Best of all, I learned that there will be a THIRD symposium on HBCUs, this one to be held at Morehouse College in the Fall of 2019. You know I’ll be there! To view the full program from this year's symposium, visit the https://community.macmillan.com/community/the-english-community/hbcu-forum?sr=search&searchId=8a6ebc3f-57df-495a-93f4-68af7459b4af&searchIndex=0‌. ... View more