Today's guest blogger is Tiffany Mitchell a Senior Lecturer of English at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. When assigning multimodal assignments, instructors may feel overwhelmed by all the options and choose to use simple templates that can limit students’ creativity. Alternatively, some instructors may offer too many format options and end up with a hodgepodge of assignments, rubrics/expectations, and file types that can confuse students. At different times, I've fallen into both categories, but I’ve learned that the most effective and engaging projects find middle ground between being limitless and being limited. The important thing is that the instructor is comfortable with what’s assigned and that students have fun and learn the skills and purposes behind these assignments.   Here are some ways to travel the multimodal middle ground…   1) Let them fly free but know where they’re flying. As with any assignment, students should have enough room for free expression but enough structure and guidance to keep them on task. Even with carefully crafted assignments, students can misinterpret instructions and go off the beaten path. The best way to establish middle ground for this is to do check-ins. Just like the writing process includes check-ins via drafting, revising, and redrafting, the multimodal process should have the same: Discuss students’ multimodal plans before they begin designing. Ensure that they understand the expectations and are working towards them. Check-in with them at regular intervals throughout the project to make sure their work is still on task. See if any design plans or outcomes have changed or if they need help with the technology they are using. The goal of check-ins is to maintain a sense of what students’ multimodal creations will look like in their finished states, so that there are no bizarre, inappropriate, or completely off-track designs.   2) Encourage exploration but know how to help. We’re really good at teaching students how to critically think, read, and write because we’re really good at these things ourselves. The same should be true when teaching multimodal assignments. For some instructors, knowing how to teach students the multimodal composition process is the most important aspect of the assignment. We know the process well, so we can always help with that. For other instructors, teaching the students how to use the technology for the assignments is on equal footing with teaching the multimodal composition process. When this is the case, it’s wise to keep at your disposal a cache of tech tools that you know how to use well. In my classes, teaching the process and how to use the tech have always gone hand in hand. Encouraging students’ multimodal exploration has occasionally caused concern when students wanted to use technology that I was not familiar with. I was comfortable teaching the process, but I feared not being able to help with the tech. My concerns dissipated when students were quite comfortable with the tech they wanted to use, even if I wasn’t. Whichever approach an instructor takes with these assignments, we must remember that the ultimate goal is to teach the process, so the tech should bend to our wills and support what we do, not the other way around.   3) Simple is fine; boring is not. Simple formats can be amazing with proper ideas and guidance, but too often students see a simple format and think it also has to be boring. Students frequently question the rhetorical value in doing an assignment that seemingly fits better in an art or graphic design class than an English class. Beginning with simple formats that offer a hybrid between text and graphics is an easy way to get students to see the rhetorical value in reformatting textual information into multimodal formats. To help them break out of the boring: Ask them how they would rhetorically respond to what they’ve created. Ask them what they’d like to see within that format’s parameters. Ask them if it speaks to them, and if so, how? If they think it’s boring, ask them how they think their audience would respond. If they don’t respond well to what they’ve created, show them design features for color, font, borders, images, etc. Teach them how all of those things work together to make the whole thing amazing, then they’ll shift away from boring and towards spectacular.   4) Pre-select one or two genres to make management easier. As described above, a multimodal assignment with a single format could become boring without proper guidance but having too many options might overwhelm students. Multimodality can come in so many forms; an instructor might be inclined to let students pick any form of multimedia that fits the rhetorical situation. I was this instructor. At one point, I had to use four pages of expectations to cover all of the potential formats my students used. It became a muddled mess that was challenging to juggle.   I simplified by pre-selecting the genre(s) the students could use. By simplifying, I could: Offer more detailed help Develop clear expectations/rubrics Engage with and assess and their final products better. Selecting a genre for students but letting them decide their formats within that genre helps them consider the rhetorical choices they make, which reinforces the composing process.   5) Establish expectations/rubrics but be flexible. Regardless of the format options, students should always have clear expectations for the assignment. Having clear expectations does not, however, mean being inflexible. In fact, multimodality necessitates using flexible assessment for final drafts because there are so many components to consider: color and font choices, spatial design, length, content, images, audio, and video, among so many others.   How to assess these compositions is worthy of a much deeper discussion, which I will explore in my next blog post. Stay tuned for more to come. And in the meantime, comment below and let me know what you’ve learned about creating parameters for multimodal assignments. ... View more

There is a terrific article in the March issue of NCTE’s Council Chronicle by Trisha Collopy, laying out both a rationale and some practical strategies for incorporating challenging and complex readings in community college classrooms at all levels. Much of the content in the article will resonate with integrated reading and writing (IRW) instructors; we know that deep reading will make a difference for our students—as they discuss “reading that matters” (12).   But I would suggest that such readings also offer an opportunity to revisit our approach to grammar (where we so often resort to decontextualized sentences, prescriptive rules, and worksheets – none of which seems to have a demonstrable effect on the quality of student writing). What if we invited students to consider language structure as a reading strategy, a means of reading closely, constructing meaning, and interpreting rhetorical moves and stances? What would that look like? What would it require for instructors?   I’d like to explore the instantiation of a “reading for grammar” pedagogy over the next few weeks. The foundation of such a pedagogy, however, rests on a linguistically and rhetorically consistent definition of grammar. Perhaps what is needed is a set of threshold concepts to frame and undergird the pedagogy, akin to Adler-Kassner and Wardle’s Naming What We Know.    Here is a first attempt at such a list, garnered from studies in applied linguistics, language acquisition theory, and the composition classroom. I would welcome an opportunity to revise, expand, and refine the list as others share expertise. Grammar is a rule-governed system for producing and interpreting language. All speakers possess a grammar; speakers may access multiple grammars for different purposes. Grammars are neither “good” nor “bad.” The specific rules of grammar are derived from the habits of communities of practice. Grammars change. Knowledge of a word includes knowledge of the grammatical structures in which that word participates. Academic/written grammars are acquired; they are not native to anyone. Conventions of written language are arbitrary. Grammatical knowledge can be both tacit and explicit. Speakers working within a particular grammar make choices. The effectiveness of a grammar choice is related to the listener/reader’s ability to interpret that choice. People make judgments about others because of grammatical choices. People establish and maintain identities through the language choices that they make. Grammar is informed by previous experiences with language in a variety of discourse communities. There is no such thing as complete mastery of academic grammar. (Or perhaps there is no such thing as a common academic grammar.) Educated speakers can disagree about practice (Oxford comma, “healthful” vs. “healthy”). Grammar is contextual, rhetorical, and meaning-driven. What else? I would love to hear your thoughts.   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

When students compose assignments, I expect them to pay attention to accessibility in addition to the usual issues of content and format. After all, even the most brilliant document will be unsuccessful if readers cannot access it. When students are turning in PDF files, the basic process is to create the document in a word processor and then use that word processor file to generate a PDF. To guide this process, students can use any one of dozens of checklists and resources for help. In particular, the Checklist for Making Accessible Microsoft Office and PDF Documents from Johns Hopkins is thorough and includes links to additional information. The information in such checklists can be overwhelming, however, especially for students who resist the additional step of ensuring accessibility. To simplify the process, I focus on these three steps in my instructions to students: Use built-in tools for document styles. Word processors have built-in style templates for a document’s title, headings, and lists. Screen readers  – software applications that assist sight-impaired users access what is on the computer by means that are not sight-dependent  – look for these templates as a key to the organization of a document. If the document has created its own style markers (say, using a bold, 12-point font for primary headings), the screen reader won’t recognize that information as headings. Beyond making documents accessible for screen readers, the built-in tools create a professional design without any extra formatting work. Choose meaningful names for hyperlinks. Screen readers read all of the links in a document in a kind of menu. These links are read without the surrounding text that provides their context. To ensure that your readers find the right hyperlink, use the name of the document that a hyperlink connects to, rather than vague text like “Click Here.” Because of the way that screen readers read the links, “Click Here” doesn’t make sense since the context is missing. Basically, readers have no idea where “Click Here” will take them. Use Save As PDF... and never Print to PDF. If a PDF does not include text (words and other characters), screen readers don’t know how to interpret the information. That’s the problem with the Print to PDF command: it saves an image of the document rather than the text. The resulting PDF may look the same to someone with sight, but the screen reader can’t use it. Additionally, any special features like embedded hyperlinks will be gone in a document created with the Print to PDF command. Instead, always use the Save As PDF command, which maintains text recognition and features like embedded hyperlink. For extensive information on how to save your documents, I recommend PDF Accessibility: Converting Documents to PDF from WebAIM. Microsoft also has instructions on how to Create Accessible PDFs. There is much more that can be done to make a document fully accessible, but this bare minimum goes a long way toward ensuring that someone gets at least the basics of what the document is trying to communicate. For other ways that I address access, you can read details on how I tell students about accessibility in my courses as well as how I ask students to crowdsource accessibility documents for the course. Do you have any activities or instructions that you use to talk about accessibility with students? Tell me about them in the comments below. I’m always eager to find new resources I can use in class.     Photo credit: There are 60 million people with disabilities in the US banner by Yahoo! Accessibility Lab on Flickr, used under a CC-BY-SA license. ... View more

For the past several weeks, I have been meeting with faculty from across our university. The meetings have been part of an effort to build a Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) emphasis at our institution. When originally asked to be part of this effort, I was a bit surprised. WAC was not a term I typically applied to my teaching or my own research on community partnership/literacies. Yet as I talked to faculty from Geography, Psychology, and Mathematics, I was struck by the overlap in our goals as teachers committed to creating classrooms where writing was an important part of the learning process.   In fact, it seems that my emphasis on Writing Beyond the Curriculum might actually be deeply enmeshed with the goals of Writing Across the Curriculum. As a result, I found myself rethinking how key frameworks from community partnership/literacy might allow me to more freely build amongst courses and programs across the university.   Research Communities One of the tenants of community literacy is that every community has its own unique way of studying and framing solutions to problems. The belief is that if we listen deeply enough to how communities cite evidence, we will see patterns of argument and action through which we can form productive partnerships. Our work as teachers is to enable students to hear these latent community strategies, instead of imposing their own viewpoints. These same pedagogical values of rhetorical listening can frame research within classes across the curriculum. Instructors in every class need to find ways to teach students to hear the strategies of their disciplinary community, to see how evidence is gathered, and to develop a productive conversation. Indeed, unless such an engaged conversation is developed, it is not clear the student has actually come to understand the values and goals of that discipline.   Writing Communities As students engaged in community partnerships continue to work in a community, they must also consider what forms of writing are seen as important to a particular neighborhood. In the process, they must think through what types of questions those genres support as well as how they might work with the community to expand genres and conversations to create new possibilities. Similarly, for university faculty, a key goal becomes demonstrating to students the affordances of the genres which mark their discipline, the questions such genres support, and how those questions push the limits of convention. Indeed, teaching students how to both inhabit and expand the possibilities of a discipline’s ways of writing becomes the way to initiate them into the creation of new forms of knowledge.   Addressing Communities Producing writing designed to circulate and be read in a community necessarily implies a sense of audience. One of the struggles students in community projects often face is that for most of their academic careers they have not actually had to address a real audience. Instead, they see writing as something transactional between the student and the professor. The reality of real readers in a ‘real’ community causes them to take much greater care with their writing, develop a much more nuanced sense of language, tone, and style. There is a sudden need to make sure each sentence produces the intended results, functioning in harmony with community goals. It could be argued, however, that university classrooms should offer a similar sense of urgency and importance to writing. Students are not so much addressing a professor, but addressing a field, a discipline. Often, this is not the framework of a typical assignment. If classroom writing was reoriented along a community partnership axis, assignments could be restructured in ways that ask students to develop a sense of the community being addressed – the issues and stakes in using one term over another, how each term locates them differently in a community debate. Bringing in community partnership/literacy pedagogies, that is, might enable such an attention to writing to emerge within any university classroom.   Changing Communities Inherent in almost any community partnership/literacy effort is a sense of needed change. Whether the change is as small as a tutored student’s manipulation of sentences or as large as a struggle against gentrification, there is a sense that the status quo is incomplete. That a better world is possible. Lessons learned by students in community partnerships include how to understand what type of change and scale of action is necessary, what skills need to be brought to the task, and how to assess success/failure. These lessons are also inherent in any university classroom – an attempt to demonstrate the value of endlessly seeking a more accurate sense of the issues at hand, a constant learning of the skills required for this to occur, a need to assess the success of the effort. So if “producing change” became a framing narrative of the course, students might be able to better understand the stakes, the scale of the work at hand, and find value in the work being asked. They might see themselves as part of a collective effort, no matter how small their role, to create change dedicated to a deeper sense of truth, a better framework from which to guide their actions outside the classroom.   Of course, there is much more to say on these connections, more time needed to connect community partnership pedagogies to the work of writing across the curriculum. And in a discussion devoted to learning with and from communities, a single authored blog post seems a bit of a contradiction. It is out of this context that on Thursday, April 19 th at 3pm EST/12pm PDT, I hope you will join me at a Bedford/St. Martin’s sponsored conversation on this very issue – how writing communities can support writing across the curriculum. If you are interested, you can register for the webinar here.   I would love to learn from your insights and to begin a dialogue which can bring these seemingly distinct parts of our field into productive alliance for our students. ... 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Today's guest blogger is Amanda Gaddam, an adjunct instructor in the First-Year Writing Program and the School for New Learning at DePaul University. She holds a B.A. in English with a concentration in Literary Studies and a M.A. in Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse with a concentration in Teaching Writing and Language from DePaul, and her research interests include first-year composition, adult and non-traditional students, and writing center pedagogies. I think I’ve been doing multimodality wrong—or at least, I’ve been doing it the same way that I’ve always done it since I began teaching years ago. When creating opportunities for multimodality in the classroom, I have focused primarily on the outcome and how students can fulfill an assignment objective by incorporating multiple or alternate media in their final product.  It only recently occurred to me, during a conversation with a student about her writing process and the challenges of stagnation, that multimodality might also be effectively integrated as part of the writing process, even if the final product looks like a traditional academic essay.   If creating multimodal texts helps communicate ideas in rhetorical ways tailored for particular audiences, then multimodal prewriting and revision activities may also help tailor the writing process for a writer’s individual needs, challenges, and strengths. The goal of the follow suggested multimodal writing activities is to encourage students to embrace the constructive value of multimodality during the drafting and revision processes, instead of just in its expressive value in an end product.   Background Reading The St. Martin’s Handbook Chapter 3: Exploring, Planning, and Drafting Chapter 4: Reviewing, Revising, Editing, and Reflecting The Everyday Writer (also available with Exercises) Chapter 8: Reflecting Chapter 22: Making Design Decisions EasyWriter (also available with Exercises) Chapter 6: Learning from Low-Stakes Writing Chapter 11: Creating Presentations   The Activities The following activities are merely suggestions to get you and your students thinking about how to incorporate multimodal writing into the writing process. There are countless options out there to which students may respond, and those options may also depend on your classroom, your schedule, and your assignments. I recommend that you follow up on these activities with a post-writing reflection component to encourage students to evaluate the effects of multimodal drafting and revision on their work.   Free vlogging For a multimodal twist on free writing, challenge students to set a ten minute timer and record themselves talking through their early ideas, questions, and/or issues related to their writing topic. As in written free writing, they should try to continue talking for the entire ten minutes—even if they run out of things to say or veer off topic. Not every minute of the video will be useful once they review the footage; however, by first verbalizing their ideas and subsequently evaluating them, students will gain a better perspective on where they’re at in the writing process, where the roadblocks and questions remain, and what they need to do to forge ahead. In the reflection component, you might ask students to compare their experiences with traditional free writing and free vlogging: In what ways are each effective for you? Ineffective or challenging? How might you incorporate this activity in future writing projects?   Interactive outlining Many students are tied, for better or for worse, to traditional outlining because it was required in high school or middle school composition courses. Fans of the traditional outline might consider using Prezi to create an interactive outline that highlights the relationships between ideas through movement and visual connections. For reflection, consider asking students to comment on the idea of “flow,” a buzzword often used in relation to writing and revision, but rarely defined. Interactive outlining may help students more clearly conceptualize what they mean by “flow” and how they might revise and reorganize their work to more effectively incorporate it into their final essay.   Reflexting One of my greatest challenges as an instructor is not knowing what students do with or think about my written comments on their work. Part of the issue, I think, is that sometimes students don’t know what the comments mean or don’t take the time to adequately engage with the feedback before revising their work and submitting it.   Ask students to use a free, online text message conversation generator like https://ifaketextmessage.com/ to create a conversation between your written comments and their reactions, questions, and plans for revision, all texted from their phones. Encourage them to embrace the genre by using emojis, gifs, and discourse-specific language rules to create their responses. Doing so will force students to engage with each and every comment, better equipping them to create a plan for revision. In the post-writing reflection, ask students to think about the degree to which they incorporated your comments compared to previous feedback experiences.      Reflection The activities suggested here and the countless other opportunities out there for incorporating multimodality into the drafting and revision processes are easy to fit into your existing course structure because they can complement nearly any scheduled writing assignment. Instead of just giving students time to draft, encouraging (okay—requiring) them to try something new and different might help them adopt practices that actually work, rather than those which are merely familiar. Perhaps most importantly, utilizing multimodal composing in this way allows both you and your students to expand preexisting definitions of pre”writing” and create essays with more depth and creativity. ... View more

  We’re at that point in the semester when students are hitting Maximum Anxiety about Grades. The corollary for instructors is Maximum Anxiety about Grading All The Things. Here’s a cure for both ills: sharing the responsibility for evaluation with students. I’d argue there’s no better measure of whether students understand your assignments and course goals than giving them the meta-cognitive opportunity to evaluate their own work with the tools you use as an instructor. After all, our hope is that long after students leave our classrooms, they will still be able to evaluate and strengthen their own work.  I’ll suggest two strategies I use to structure student self-evaluation in my classes, and I hope you’ll share your own strategies in the comments.   Strategy One: Cover Letters In our chapter on effective peer review of drafts in From Inquiry to Academic Writing, my co-author, Stuart Greene, and I recommend asking students to write cover letters for drafts of their papers for two reasons: It provides a chance for a writer to reflect on their perceptions of strengths and weaknesses of that particular draft, and it offers a conversation guide to others in their peer workshops. We offer this model for an early draft, which could be adapted for your purposes.  What is your question (or assignment)? What is the issue motivating you to write? How have published writers addressed the issue you discuss? What is your working thesis? Who is your audience, and how do you want them to respond? What do you think is working best? What specific aspect of the essay are you least satisfied with at this time? What kind of feedback do you especially want today? (p. 355) This line of questioning moves students from the disempowered position of “hoping to figure out what the instructor wants” to the empowered position of evaluating what they are achieving in their writing, with real readers in mind. Our experience is that these cover letters tell us as much about students as writers as the drafts themselves. Later drafts might call for cover letters shaped by general writing concerns of the course (integration of quotations, organization, addressing counterarguments, etc.).  Polished drafts might call for exactly the kind of self-reflection that all thoughtful writers should consider: What is your unique perspective on your issue? To what extent do the words and phrases you use reflect on who you believe your readers are? Does your style of citation reflect accepted conventions for academic writing? What do you think is working best? What specific aspect of the essay are you least satisfied with at this time? (p. 363)   Additionally, I ask students to explain what they are trying that is new in a draft, as a reminder that as writers, we all ought to keep stretching. (I reward risk-taking — even if the results are less than stellar — provided students can name and evaluate the strategy.) Students are sometimes nervous that pointing out their own weaknesses will steer me to problems I might have missed on my own. However, I remind them that their ability to point out where they need to grow is a significant goal of the course.                                                                                                                   Strategy Two: Using your rubric for self-grading and comments Our second strategy is a simple one: Hand your grading rubrics to your students and give them the opportunity not just to evaluate and comment on their writing, but to grade it as well.  If you have ever tried empowering students to grade themselves, you know there might be a few outliers who claim their work is stronger than it is, but by far the majority of students are either on target or low-ball their own grades.  Once students have a chance to take ownership and weigh in on their work, the context is laid for you as the instructor to agree with them, or to point out strengths that they might have missed. I don’t know a single instructor who looks forward to grading All The Things.  Empowering students to share ownership in the evaluation process helps them approach their writing from a strengths perspective rather than a deficit one, which is more clearly linked to what we know — that learning to write is a process. Our institutions may require us to enter a column of grades at the end of a semester, but if we invite students to share in the evaluation conversation, they will see that the letter grade is a mere stand-in for the much richer process of learning to write. Meme generated at imgflip.com, original drawing by Allie Brosh. ... View more

In 1971, Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin reconfigured a popular British sitcom featuring a bigoted working class patriarch (Till Death Do Us Part) to create America's All in the Family. A massive hit, All in the Family continued on not only to top the Nielsens for five years running but also went a long way towards mediating the racial, generational, and sexual conflicts that continued to smolder in the wake of the cultural revolution. A new kind of sitcom, All in the Family (along with other such ground-breaking TV comedies as The Mary Tyler Moore Show) provided a highly accessible platform for Americans to come to terms with the social upheavals of the sixties, thus contributing to that general reduction of tension that we can now see as characteristic of the seventies. The decade that came in with Kent State went out with Happy Days.   So the recent reboot of Roseanne in a new era of American social conflict is highly significant. Explicitly reconstituting Roseanne Barr's original character as an Archie Bunkeresque matriarch, the revived sitcom raises a number of cultural semiotic issues, not the least of which is the question as to whether the new Roseanne will help mediate America's current cultural and political divisions, or exacerbate them.   In short, we have here a perfect topic for your classroom.   To analyze Roseanne as a cultural sign, one must begin (as always in a semiotic analysis), by building a system of associated signs—as I have begun in this blog by associating Roseanne with All in the Family and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. There are, of course, many other associations that could be made here within the system of American television (Saturday Night Live, Family Guy, and The Simpsons loom very large here), but I'll limit myself now with the association with All in the Family because of the way that, right off the bat, it reveals an important difference—and semiotic significance is always to be found in a combination of associations and differences—that points to an answer to our immediate semiotic question.   This difference emerges from the well-known fact that Norman Lear was quite liberal in his politics and intended his show to be a force for progressive television, while Roseanne Barr is an outspoken conservative—a situation that has already produced a good deal of controversy. Consider C. Nicole Mason's Washington Post piece "‘Roseanne’ was about a white family, but it was for all working people. Not anymore," a personal essay that laments the Trumpist overtones of Roseanne Barr's new character. On the flip side of the equation, the new Roseanne has been an immediate smash hit in "Trump Country," scoring almost unheard of Nielsen numbers in this era of niche TV. Pulling in millions of older white viewers who prefer the traditional "box" to digital streaming services, the show is already reflecting the kind of generational and racial political divisions that burst into prominence in the 2016 presidential election. As Helena Andrews-Dyer puts it in the Washington Post, "The ‘Roseanne’ reboot can’t escape politics — even in an episode that’s not about politics."   Thus, while it may be soon to tell for certain, I think that the new Roseanne will prove to be quite different from All in the Family in its social effect. Rather than helping to pull a divided nation together, the signs are that Roseanne is going to deepen the divide. I say this not to imply that television has some sort of absolute responsibility to mediate social conflict, nor to suggest that Roseanne's appeal to older white viewers is in itself a bad thing (indeed, the relative lack of such programming goes a long way towards explaining the immediate success of the show). My point is simply semiotic. America, at least when viewed through the lens of popular culture, appears to be even more deeply divided than it was in 1971. Things have not stayed the same. Roseanne isn't Archie Bunker, Trump isn't Nixon, and everyone isn't laughing. ... View more

  Today's featured guest blogger is Colleen Kolba, Digital Teaching Fellow at University of South Florida.  “I was not excited to read this book,” says a student, holding up a copy of Morgan Parker’s There are More Beautiful Things than Beyoncé before our Introduction to Literature class starts. The poetry collection is the first book we’re tackling this semester. “But then she quoted Kendrick Lamar right off the bat, and I was like, I know this! I know what song this is from.”   My student is referring to Parker’s epigraph, a line from Lamar’s “A.D.H.D.”: “The president is black/ She black.” Already, my student has access to one of the cultural conversations that the poems exist alongside. I know this. His words play over in my head, and I think, this is why I start my poetry units with contemporary poetry.   Many of my Introduction to Literature students are nervous about poetry. It’s the kind of literature that they oftentimes see as locked behind a gate and only with the right key or code can they unlock a poem’s “secret meaning.” They view poetry as an elevated form of writing, in contrast with prose writing, which they view as “casual” (a terribly vague word that, when I press for greater specificity, usually means accessible or colloquial or language that’s familiar). While I question their use of the word casual, it highlights students’ relationship with poetry. That it’s prose’s buttoned-up, stuffy counterpart, guarding a lock box filled with the secrets   However, contemporary poetry offers students the opportunity to redefine their relationship with the form. If they can understand how their own positioning within history and a culture (a familiarity with the allusions Parker makes to Lamar’s body of work, or references to the Black Lives Matter movement) allows them to read, interpret, and understand a poem, then they might be more prepared to turn to poems from other periods. When they gain confidence reading contemporary poetry, they’re positioned to be better readers of older words. They’re less intimidated by poems from other time periods if they understand that at one point, someone was able to read that poem not because they had unlocked a secret code, but because they had the cultural context to do so.   Perhaps here is where teachers might worry that this method invites students to dismiss older works because they come from a different context. However, I get sort of excited when a student says, “I don’t get it because the poet’s references aren’t relatable to me.” These kinds of comments offer a perfect segue into a discussion about what it means to be an empathetic reader and why poetry and literature matter. I’ll ask the student (and the rest of the class): “What if I assign a poem written yesterday by a person with a completely different gender, race, socioeconomic status than you? And the experiences they relate in this poem are nothing like what you’ve ever experienced? Is it not worth reading? Or trying to understand?” The student, as well as a few others, will say: “I would try to understand.” And so I prod further: “Why would you try to understand?” At which point, they’re a little bit cornered: “Because it’s good to hear and try to understand different perspectives and experiences.” We enter a discussion about how reading poetry from other eras can help humanize experiences that are different from our own, which then will usually spiral into a wider conversation about how poetry and literature can make us better people.   By unlearning some of the expectations that they have of poetry—that it’s inaccessible, it’s too formal or lofty for non-English majors—students can gain more confidence in their ability to read poetry, which will in turn make them better and more enthusiastic readers. ... View more

In the age of screens and social media, with everyone talking (often at the top of their lungs), it’s easy to forget that silence can be a powerful communicative act. Think of Edvard Munch’s silent The Scream, or the horrifying silent scream in Mother Courage. Cheryl Glenn has written eloquently about silence (See Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence) and its wide range of uses and powers. I also think of Mary Belenky and her colleagues’ influential book, Women’s Ways of Knowing. In the first edition of that work, they referred to “silence” as the stage of knowing when women are completely dependent on powers external to them. But in the second edition, they changed “silence” to “silenced.” That added “d” changed everything; it’s one thing to be silent, another to be silenced.   During the last month, we have heard from many young people who are responding to the Valentine’s Day murder of seventeen people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida. Almost immediately following the tragedy, students began raising their voices, using the media skillfully to underscore their outrage and enumerate their demands for school safety. Their voices were echoed across the country, from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles, leading to a national school walkout and a March for our Lives on March 24, held in Washington DC but with sister marches occurring across the country. These young people demanded to be heard, staring down state legislators as well as members of Congress and speaking their own truths to power.   They also knew that silence can have power: we could see it in the dramatic pauses they inserted into their speeches. But no one used the rhetorical power of silence more effectively than Emma Gonzalez, a senior at Douglas who took the mike on March 24, announcing that it had taken all of 6 minutes and about 20 seconds for the shooter to end seventeen lives, calling out the names of the dead and noting all the things that they would now “never” be able to do. As the New York Times reported, Gonzalez spoke for just under two minutes on Saturday before tens of thousands of demonstrators at the March for Our Lives rally in Washington, describing the effects of gun violence in emotional detail and reciting the names of classmates who had been killed. Then she said nothing for four minutes and 26 seconds. The huge crowd was absolutely silent as Gonzalez spoke, and they remained silent as she herself fell silent. Early on in the silence, some began to chant . . . but those chants quickly faded away as the crowd stood in mute testimony to those lives lost. As Cheryl Glenn has said, silence can be a powerful rhetorical act, and on March 24, Emma Gonzalez proved the point in her moving, riveting, silent call to action.   I think it’s worth pointing out to our students that they too can be powerful users of silence, in class discussion, in oral and multimedia presentations, even in their writing as they leave certain things unsaid or use punctuation, line breaks, and white space to signal silence.   Sometimes silence can speak much more powerfully than words.   Credit: Pixabay Image 2591660 by StockSnap, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

Since I am currently teaching technical writing, progress reports are on my regular list of assignments this term, but I also use them in both my first-year composition (FYC) and my digital media classes. The assignment works well in the middle of a longer project, be it something like a research project in FYC or a documentary video project in a digital media class. At its most basic, the progress report is a simple genre with an organizational structure that makes sense to students. I ask students to focus on three sections: Section 1: Tell me what you have done Section 2: Tell me what you still need to do Section 3: Tell me how you will get the remaining work done and let me know about any of your concerns Students can often accomplish the task in a quick one-page document. The activity works well as an in-class writing exercise, since it requires no research and has a set structure with clear requirements. When students work on progress reports outside of class, I can step up the expectations. For instance, I frequently ask students to include a calendar or a table that shows their remaining milestones or to add specific information that shows their progress. One of my favorite additions focuses on using visual elements in their progress reports to demonstrate something about the work they have completed or the work they plan to complete. To explain the expectations for this visual addition to the assignment, I post the following description and example on the course website: Visualize Your Progress You can often show trends and comparisons with graphical elements better than with text descriptions. Consider the difference between describing the performance of a stock or a portfolio during the last year and showing that performance with a line graph. Here’s an example from the Student-managed Endowment for Educational Development (SEED) 2016 Annual Report [an investment portfolio managed by a student at Virginia Tech]. Which seems easier to read and process to you? Text Description The portfolio performed relatively in line or slightly below the respective benchmark until the final quarter, as shown in Exhibit 1. We included the Consumer Price Index as a preservation of spending power benchmark to monitor changes in our real returns. From mid-November to year-end, the portfolio significantly outperformed and finished 2016 with an active return of 5.13%. In order to calculate our risk-adjusted return, we incorporated our portfolio’s beta of 1.2 and historical average for yields on the 1-Year Treasury note (1.84%) in order to compute a CAPM-based implied alpha. This calculation resulted in an implied 2016 alpha of 3.11%. Line Chart For my money (pun intended), the line chart is much easier to understand quickly. In many circumstances, you will include both a text description and a graphical representation, which helps ensure accessibility for all readers. The point of today’s post is that the graphical version is not just an illustration. It is critical to showing the reader information about the topic. Think about how you can add graphical representation of information in your progress report. The infographic How to Think Visually Using Visual Analogies from Anna Vital to see a collection of charts and graphs you can use to communicate information. Once you explore the options, add a pertinent visualization to your progress report. After this reviewing this information, students have improved their progress reports by adding visual elements like pie charts and timelines as well as photos and screenshots that show their work. It’s definitely one of my favorite class activities because it takes students from reflective text descriptions to considerations of visual rhetoric in just one class session. Have you tried an activity that teaches students to make and use visual elements in their writing? Please share your ideas in the comments below. I’d love to hear about what works for you.   Image credit: Graph from the Student-managed Endowment for Educational Development (SEED) 2016 Annual Report. ... View more

Teaching basic writing involves imagining more accessible classrooms for students that account for hearing losses of all kinds. That is, the loss of audible sound, and the signs of loss or trauma that may be inaudible and invisible for us, but not necessarily for our students. What if the seemingly glazed look, the head on the desk, the fingers busily at work on phone screens do not signify boredom or disrespect?  What if we, as teachers, learned to read “inappropriate behaviors” as part of a system of cognitive dissonance, a frustration with the incongruity of home, school, and working lives? What would it mean to think of hearing loss as the absence of audible sound, and also as listening to loss as expressed through audible and inaudible actions of our students? HEARING LOSS: Several years ago  I began to notice the benefits of universal design at conferences that I attended. For instance, I watched emotions unfold on the faces of the sign language interpreters at general sessions and discovered a dimension to language that I had not imagined before. At a meeting of the CCCC Committee on Disability Issues, I learned about CART and felt more relaxed reading the captions. I added closed captions to videos we watched in classes, as well as at home and in the office. Then I noticed in class that the steady hum from the projector seemed to muffle sound in the classroom. Students’ voices grew softer. I wondered if the changes were issues with auditory processing, a difference that can be associated with depression. But rather than self-diagnose, I visited an audiologist who confirmed moderate hearing loss. Universal design and the consciousness around accessibility gleaned from Disability Studies helped to ease the way.  Indeed, this is the purpose of accessibility, to create inclusiveness, to transform the stigma of difference. In a more accessible world, seamless transition is precisely the point. LISTENING TO LOSS: The writing process may involve dealing with emotional self-disclosures that students will rightfully not wish to reveal to teachers or classmates. This semester I am attempting to honor this wish while still offering students access to emotion through other means. In reading and writing about the works of Gloria Anzaldúa, James Baldwin, and Terry Tempest Williams, students can identify with the emotions of loss and resilience without having to write about such events in their own lives. At the same time, if students do make the choice to disclose their experiences, they are offered a resonant perspective for comparison and exploration. In practice, writing about “difficult times” often appears as writing that needs more development, specific details, and extended analysis. After reading through a recent round of rough drafts, I composed a letter to students that offered suggestions for riding out the storm. Here is a key recommendation: Be as specific as possible throughout the essay. Rather than saying “times are difficult,” mention specific events that SHOW your perspective on why times are difficult. Here are some examples (insert your own experience or opinion in place of these statements, and of course, as ever, only what you feel comfortable sharing): Tornado drills and school lockdowns made me feel unsafe in the classroom. The startling differences between the troubles of Oakland, California, and the fantastic beauty of the uncolonized nation of Wakanda, moved me to tears. Throughout the second half of Black Panther, I wept openly. The #metoo movement helped me to better understand my own situation because so many people openly discussed pain that had once been silenced. I invited students to consider my “English teacher” style as an example and not as a model, further suggesting that students explore their own styles of academic writing. In discovering how our style grows and changes over time and through particular genres, we also can gain access to hearing our own loss. By hearing the losses of others, we bear compassionate witness to experience in the lives of students and colleagues, no matter how different those lives may seem from our own. In recognizing hearing loss, I gain new perspective on the lives I encounter, moving closer to softer voices, and learning along with students to be as specific as possible to carry the weight of difficult times. ... View more

Jeanne Law Bohannon is an Assistant Professor of English in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Kennesaw State University. She believes in creating democratic learning spaces, where students become stakeholders in their own rhetorical growth though authentic engagement in class communities. Her research interests include evaluating digital literacies and critical engagement pedagogies; performing feminist rhetorical recoveries; and growing informed and empowered student scholars. Reach Jeanne at: jeanne_bohannon@kennesaw.edu and www.rhetoricmatters.org At this time in the semester, students are often researching for essays, literature reviews, and academic blogs. And yes, they are struggling to evaluate and cite valid sources – especially the multimodal ones. Like many instructors, I have found in recent years that students, particularly digital natives, seem to prefer using multimodal sources, such as webtexts, chat forums, videos, podcasts, and even memes over traditional print sources.   This year, a few colleagues and I conducted a study of first-year students as part of the Learning Information Literacy Across the Curriculum (LILAC) Project, seeking to describe students’ information-seeking behaviors in electronic spaces when researching academic papers. One of LILAC’s most interesting findings was in two parts: 1) Students privileged multimodal sources (videos, podcasts, etc.) but did not know how to evaluate or cite these sources; and 2) Students consider multimodal sources that include videos and images, not just webpages, when they seek information online for academic research.   So, the question becomes: How do instructors advise students to use multimodal sources and cite them correctly? If we look at MLA 8 formatting, we find multiple ways to cite common multimodal sources. The foundational rule for citing these types of texts is to make sure that readers/viewers/listeners can find the original piece. Digital readers need to be able to click through to find listed sources easily and follow working links. Today, I want to share a mini-lesson on interacting with students as they cite them.   Evaluating Multimodal Sources – Multi-level Activity Instructors don’t need to be tech experts to guide students through multimodal source evaluation, interpretation, and synthesis. Using Lunsford’s book sections detailed below, instructors can help students frame discussions on why evaluating multimodal sources is especially important in an information age, where digital natives obtain and process most of their daily information digitally.   Background Reading for Students and Instructors The St. Martin’s Handbook: 12d, “Evaluating Usefulness and Credibility”; 12e, “Reading and Interpreting Sources”;  12f, “Synthesizing Sources” The Everyday Writer: 14a, “Understand the Purpose of Sources”; 14c, “Evaluate a Source’s Usefulness and Credibility”; 14d, “Read Critically and Interpret Sources”; 14e, “Synthesize Sources” EasyWriter: 14a, “Evaluating the Usefulness and Credibility of Potential Sources”; 14b, “Reading and Interpreting Sources”; 14c, ” Synthesizing Sources”   Assignment Parameters Instructors can use dialogue and a flipped class model to engage students in deep conversations and understandings of the credibility of multimodal sources using a two-part assignment.   Part I. Ask students to find a Youtube video that they can argue has ethos and one that might not. Using the criteria found in The St. Martin’s Handbook (section 12d), The Everyday Writer (section 14c), or EasyWriter (section 14a), students rank each source on a scale of 1 (doesn’t meet criteria) to 3 (exceeds criteria). Ask students to explain their rankings first in a discussion forum in your LMS and then to the class as “experts” on these multimodal sources. As the flipped class facilitator, the instructor can guide reflections on students’ rankings and source-choice while allowing students to attain competency in both arguing for their choices and presenting those choices to an audience. Part II. Assign students in groups to review the examples of credible multimodal sources below. Ask each group to interpret their source(s) and compare/contrast them to the sources students found on their own in Part I of the assignment. Ask questions like “How do the sources address challenges of audience and argument (logos, pathos, ethos)? Why do some of the sources rank higher in evaluation criteria than others? How can writers determine the validity of multimodal sources based on these criteria?” As an additional exercise, have students complete citations for their sources based on the MLA citations of the examples given here.   Examples of multimodal sources to be used in a mini-lesson Citation examples constructed by Jeanne Bohannon Citing a TedTalk video: As with all multimedia, include the URL if you have it. Titles of TEDTalks are in quotations; the website name is in italics. Always include the talk date and the speaker.   Example: McWhorter, John. ”Txtng is Killing Language. JK.” TEDTalks, February 2013, www.ted.com/talks/john_mcwhorter_txtng_is_killing_language_jk.   Citing a YouTube Video: The key here is understanding the difference between an author and an uploader – they are not always the same.   Example: “The Language Hoax: A Talk with John McWhorter.” YouTube, uploaded by Santa Fe Institute, 7 June 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXBQrz_b-Ng.   Citing a podcast: Remember to name the page where the podcast is found, as well as the podcast sponsor and date the podcast was recorded.   Example: McWhorter, John. “What’s the Deal with Eleven? On the Etymology and Pronunciation of English Numbers.” Lexicon Valley: A Show about the Mysteries of English, Slate Magazine, 23 Jan. 2018, www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2018/01/john_mcwhorter_on_the_etymology_and_pronunciation_of_english_numbers.html?wpsrc=sh_all_dt_tw_top.   Citing a blog post: Similar to a webpage, except use screen names in brackets when available. Also, include both the post’s date and the date you accessed it.   Example: Andrea A. Lunsford. “About Those Speech Bubbles.” Bedford Bits, Macmillan Community, 8 February 2018, community.macmillan.com/community/the-english-community/bedford-bits/blog/2018/02/08/about-those-speech-bubbles. Accessed 26 January 2018. Citing A Tweet: In place of an author’s name, use the Twitter handle instead. Treat the tweet as an article, in quotations. Remember to also include the timestamp. Date accessed is optional. Example: @Bedford_English. "Andrea A. Lunsford encourages readers to think ‘About Those Speech Bubbles,’ as she considers the question of how to represent emotion, mood, or stance in a medium without sound." Twitter, 10 February, 2018, 9:00 a.m., twitter.com/Bedford_English/status/962325401120006146.   Citing a Comment on a Post or an Online Forum: In place of an author’s name, cite the username instead. Insert the phrase “Comment on” before typing the article in quotations. Also, include the URL.   Example: Patricia Emerson. Comment on “Summer-Time Multimodal Mondays: Digital Drop-ins for Visual Analysis and Meme Crafting.” Bedford Bits, 15 July 2016, 10:14 a.m., community.macmillan.com/community/the-english-community/bedford-bits/blog/2016/07/11/summer-time-multimodal-mondays-digital-drop-ins-for-visual-analysis-and-meme-crafting.   Citing an Image, meme, or GIF: It is important to note that when citing an image in any electronic space, you should include the web source where the image is actually found. Similar to citing a work of art, an artist’s name goes in place of an author’s name. The key additions are the URL and the date that the site/image was accessed. When citing a meme or GIF, include the username of the GIF creator as the author.   Example: Fairey, Shepard. Peace Elephant, 2011. michael lisi/contemporary art. www.artnet.com/artists/shepard-fairey/peace-elephant-a-b6HijriOcr8VeFB7sC4Gkg2. Accessed 11 February 2018.   Example: @jerseydemic. “Close-up Cat.” Giphy. giphy.com/gifs/jerseydemic-l3q2up9FZPFncIt1e. Accessed 12 February 2018.   Help for Instructors Thinking about Multimodal Source Evaluation Students learning in the 21 st century research, read, and write in electronic spaces every day. In fact, according to the LILAC Project findings, more than 73% of students surveyed reported that they conducted their research online as a first choice. Additionally, only an average of 18% of these students reported that they are comfortable with their online source evaluation and citation skills. These numbers, collected over a five-year period with more than 400 students across diverse institutions, represent an exigence for instructors to teach students how to effectively and accurately source and cite the diverse texts they find in online and electronic spaces.   When instructors work with students in evaluating multimodal sources, we often tend to approach that practice drawing on our traditional experiences. An alternative practice might include similar considerations, such as audience and purpose, while incorporating electronic genre, non-traditional syntax, and social context as additional categories of evaluation.   Instructors can also draw on the expertise of librarians and work with these colleagues to model evaluation of sources for students. LILAC’s longitudinal study of information literacies indicates the need for a partnership between instructors and media specialists in teaching students both how and why to evaluate and cite multimodal sources for academic and public writing. ... View more

Logos, ethos, and pathos as modes of persuading an audience have been the basis for the study of rhetoric since at least the time of Aristotle. Logos is logical appeal; pathos is emotional appeal.   School shootings are a very emotional subject, most directly for those who lose loved ones and friends and those who survive a shooting, but also for anyone who can relate to the fear and anguish of being in either of those positions. Commentators point out that we have heard of school shootings so often that they don’t have the emotional impact they used to have. The outspokenness of some of the survivors of the recent shootings at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, however, gave a different tone to the follow-up. The survivors were grieving, yes, but they were also angry. A dominant voice for the Stoneman Douglas students in the immediate aftermath was Emma Gonzalez, who loudly declared the arguments against gun safety BS. When Gonzalez gave her speech at the March for Our Lives in Washington that grew out of the indignation of the students, it was praised for its power and its emotional appeal. Wise beyond her years, Gonzalez used the power of silence to move her audience and those who heard the speech later through the news or social media. After she called the names of those who died at her high school, she stood in silence until the clock had ticked off six minutes and twenty seconds, the length of time the shooter was active in the school. The minutes dragged as her audience wondered what she was doing. Yet her point about how many lives could be taken in a relatively short time resonated with millions of listeners.   The situation itself appeals to our emotions, as the death of young people almost always does. Added to the grief is the anger that more sensible gun laws that might have prevented the tragedy have not been passed—even in Florida in the days immediately following the shooting, as Parkland survivors looked on from the gallery of the statehouse.   More shocking than anything said by any of the Parkland students, however, have been some of the things said about them. Leslie Gordon, who was running for the Maine State House, called Gonzalez “a skinhead lesbian” and her classmate David Hogg a “moron” and a “bald-faced liar.” Mr. Gordon has since withdrawn from the race. Fox News correspondent Laura Ingraham tweeted that Hogg was “whining” about college rejection letters he had received. Ms. Ingraham has lost about a dozen advertisers since then and suddenly announced that she was taking time off for Easter. Adam Rosenberg, writing for Mashable, laments, “We've entered into a brutal era for politics, one driven more by emotion and ‘us against them’ convictions rather than the rational dissemination of conflicting beliefs. In this era, everyone is vulnerable to attacks, including mass shooting survivors who feel compelled to argue for more of a common-sense approach to gun control legislation. It doesn't matter that they're teens.”   The response some have had to the survivors is where the third mode of persuasion, ethos, comes in. Ethos is ethical appeal, appeal to an audience through the credibility or character of the speaker or writer. Critics like Gordon and Ingraham were clearly revealing more about their character than about the students they were discussing when they launched their attacks. The reaction to those attacks shows that at least some in their audience do not like what they are hearing.   Image Source: “Bullet Holes” by Tom Driggers on Flickr 3/24/18 via Creative Commons 2.0 license ... View more

Kendra L. Mitchell is the first Director of the Writing Across the Curriculum Program at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University. With fifteen years of writing center experience, Dr. Mitchell desires to create a quilted legacy of the teaching, learning, and research occurring in the silos of most HBCUs. As a teacher-scholar, her current research interests include writing program administration, translanguaging, and Afrocentric pedagogies. She was a 2015-16 U.S. Fulbright grantee to South Africa, where her teaching helped shape her current interests. She explores these ideas in her latest chapter, "'African American’ Anglophone Caribbean Writers in an Historically Black University Writing Center."     Drawing on black rhetorical traditions, I would summarize the Symposium on Teaching Writing and Rhetoric held at Howard University in two words: we churched. Since Beverly Moss has already done the scholarship that destabilizes the dichotomous relationship between the black church and academia and Geneva Smitherman’s life work has illustrated the sacred-secular continuum, my summary of this second iteration of this needed symposium is apropos. Before my co-laborers in the field assume I have neglected the Edited American English we have been taught to revere, I will assure you: I still got it. The polemics of these comingled language varieties was not lost on this symposium’s participants. Senior scholars such as Nathaniel Norment stressed the need to teach Edited American English to HBCU students but through culturally relevant approaches. Brother David presided over our collective with care as he passed the mic to Keith Gilyard, the acclaimed “rhetorical power player,” who presented the notion of paying dues, making the mic sound nice. We heard testimonies concerning ways to conduct meaningful assessments of our classroom and co-curricular practices. Many shared the struggle with negotiating administrative initiatives and thus assessment measures with practical learning gains. We also took a critical dive into the history of the Atlanta colleges boycott of NCTE in the 1940s and examined its correlation to the 2018 CCCC boycott, parsing out the oversaturation of social media and new technologies’ pseudo-participation as insufficient replacements for physical black bodies in safe spaces. Wellll. Our lead vocalist, Dr. Adam Banks, belted a new rhetorical melody that affords us with a new vision for Students' Right to Their Own Language (SRTOL) for the digital age that centers black digital culture just as our predecessors did for students’ oral and written discourse in the last four decades. Our panels on technology and activism as rhetorical tools proved just that. Say so. In the spirit of a new day, technical professional communications scholars challenged the relationships between PWIs and HBCUs. Specifically, Temptaous McKoy extended Banks’s call to technical communications beyond predominantly white institutions to HBCUs: “If we’re going to change the field wouldn’t we wanna go to where the black folks are.” She urged us to become keen students of our students’ ways of knowing and learning: “We gotta stop dismissing the ways our students learn.” Church. Preach. The closing panel of HBCU scholars brought it home with the founding symposia board and some scholars who point us toward what’s next. Important points, ranging from challenging scholars at PWIs studying black students to make space for those scholars at HBCUs who are doing the work on a larger scale, to reconsidering community and familial wisdom and valuable mentorship for first-generation college students, proved to make the mic sound nice. I rounded out the discussion with a proposition for translanguaging as an interdisciplinary approach to writing on our campuses. It was clear to all that teaching in this context was more than the tale of the overworked, overburdened, and underpaid teacher-scholar. Teaching and researching these schools is a calling, one to be celebrated and understood. Now that we bear witness to one another’s journey, we will continue to Speak on it! Can I get a witness?! To continue the conversation on teaching writing and rhetoric at HBCUs, join the The English Community and follow the HBCU Forum‌ to participate. Let's keep this momentum going. ... View more

As readers of this blog know, I have long been a faculty member at Middlebury College’s famed Bread Loaf School of English, a MA program in English (language, literature, writing, rhetoric) aimed primarily at high school teachers. Over the decades, it’s been a huge privilege to work with teachers from all over the country (and some from beyond our shores), and especially to be associated with the Bread Loaf Teachers’ Network (BLTN), launched 25 years ago by the inimitable Dixie Goswami. I believe this is the first electronic teacher network, and it works to support teachers and their students, to provide resources, to encourage research and publication, and to hold meetings at the state and local level.   In turn, BLTN helped to launch the Next Generation Leadership Network, made up of middle and high school students at various sites around the country (I wrote about this exciting initiative in The Next Generation Leadership Network). One of these sites is on the Navajo Nation, and in late March, with funding from the Ford Foundation, Rex Lee Jim, Ceci Lewis, and their colleagues hosted the Hazhó’ó Hólne’ writing conference in Window Rock, AZ. (As Rex explained to me, the Navajo title translates to something like careful, purposeful, intentional, and beautifully crafted talk.) The conference’s subtitle, “Food for the Body, Mind, and Spirit: Creative Juices for Creative Expressions,” described the conference well: for two and a half days, we wrote, talked, sang, chanted, and performed. I came away exhilarated, instructed, and humbled (as I so often am) by the wisdom and grace of these young people.   In addition to the Navajo Nation group, students (and teachers) came from Atlanta, Georgia; Middlebury, Vermont; Louisville, Kentucky; Lawrence, Massachusetts; and Aiken, South Carolina. All were fiercely and passionately engaged; all were articulate; all were highly aware of the needs of their own communities—and all had plans for how to meet those needs. During our time together, we did workshops on graphic design, on writing effective op-ed pieces, on poetry, on blogging, on food metaphors and their meanings, on the crucial importance of water, on nature writing, on performance, and on the “lost art” of letter writing (students brainstormed about very important letters, including MLK’s "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Phyllis Wheatley’s letter to George Washington, Paul’s Epistles, the Declaration of Independence, and the human letter of Henry “Box” Brown, who literally mailed himself to freedom in a wooden crate). We also listened to and explored traditional Navajo stories, songs, and prayers, presented by Rex Lee Jim.   Outside of our sessions, we talked together about environmental and social issues, such as the need to substitute water for sugary sodas, the need to plant and maintain gardens of fresh vegetables and fruit, and the need to act locally to elect officials responsive to such needs. As we concluded, everyone wrote a brief paragraph about what each had gained/learned during the weekend. Reading these when I got home not only brought the conference back to the center of my attention; it also electrified me, filled me with hope for a future led by these brilliant, engaged, and wise young people.   And that’s really the greatest gift of teaching in general and teaching writing in particular: working with and learning from brilliant, engaged, and wise young people.   Credit: Pixabay Image 1986107 by rawpixel, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more