I must be the last person on earth to get to the Taylor Swift party. I did know that my grandnieces stayed up forever in an effort to get tickets (they finally scored but had to fly to another city to attend it). And of course I have listened to some of her lyrics and had to see her attending Kansas City Chiefs games.  But I finally got my act together and read a number of reviews of the Eras Tour and its accompanying film. And I spent some time studying the Time article following their announcement of Swift as Person of the Year. The article was long, and impressive; I began to understand something of Swift’s history and how that history relates to the absolute devotion of so many fans. About halfway through the article, though, I ran across a link to another piece—on how Time had chosen Swift over so many other people. That article fascinated me: the author, Sam Jacobs, essentially names and describes the criteria that the group used in deciding on Swift. Number of No. 1 albums: check; size of audiences: check; income that rivals some countries’ GDP: check; the “nuclear fusion” of art and commerce: check; symbol of “generational change”: check. And more. As Jacobs explored each of these criteria, he also rendered the experiences of so many concert goers, who claimed their lives have been shaped and changed by Swift and her music.   Taylor Swift at the 2023 MTV Video Music Awards   These articles got me thinking, hard, about who my Person of the Year would have been. I was impressed by the mountains of data produced by Time in support of their choice; in retrospect, might I have chosen Swift as well? And this thought led me to consider what students have to say about this same question: who is their Person (or Persons) of the Year? Would they be convinced that Time had made a good choice? Why or why not? I wanted to craft an assignment that would engage students in these questions. What would students list as the criteria necessary to be named Person(s) of the Year? How do they determine such criteria and how would they support them as most appropriate for choosing the person(s)? And given their criteria, who would that person(s) be? I asked myself these questions and today, March 8, 2024, the first person to spring to mind is Alexei Navalny. Why did he immediately pop into my head? What does that choice suggest about what I value, and why? I wonder who students would think of first, right off the bat?  On this day, like so many lately, I am missing the classroom almost more than I can say: the opportunity to talk with students about such questions—who is your person of the year this very minute, and why—provide so many opportunities for rhetorical thinking, for analysis, for evaluative comparison, for probing of values, and the assumptions that underlie them. I can imagine this as a kind of “assignment of the year,” one we would come back to every few weeks or so to revisit and re-examine and re-think. As always, I know I would end up learning some life lessons along with academic ones. Students have a way of teaching us these lessons—even in our post-pandemic malaise.    Image by iHeartRadioCA, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons ... View more

Writing as a Process of Discovery with ChatGPT Neurodivergent Teaching   Like nursing professor Kim Mitchell, I was initially intrigued by ChatGPT, and to be honest, annoyed as well. ChatGPT seemed like yet another new variable to consider, not unlike inadequate classroom heating and ventilation systems, in returning to in-person teaching in the wake of the pandemic. But I wanted to avoid tapping into the deep anxiety around ChatGPT as an existential threat to my job as a writing teacher. Budget cuts and austerity are actual existential threats. ChatGPT, at least for the moment, just seemed like another new technology I would need to learn. Just as Professor Mitchell has done, I tried an experiment early this semester and broke the process into steps. The steps are a means of organizing my thoughts, and also of explaining to first-year writing students my own processes of learning about AI. Here’s what I did, as recorded in my teaching journal: I asked ChatGPT to write an essay prompt for me based on the initial reading for Writing Project 1. I had to ask ChatGPT to do several revisions. Most of the prompts invited students to write very general essays that could avoid engaging with or even using the course reading for the first essay. In other words, there was a great possibility that the writers' essays would be as generic as the prompts. For example: For several prompts, writers could give the appearance of writing an analytic essay offering little to no engagement with the course reading. When I asked ChatGPT to include a brief narrative component in the prompt, it produced a prompt that could be written as a narrative, again with no engagement with course reading. In asking to add a component on how the 20th-century author of the reading might have revised their work to account for current events in 2024, ChatGPT replied that my request was “too speculative” to use in a writing prompt. I admit that ChatGPT hurt my feelings with that response, but it was very instructive for understanding the limits of AI. Based on ChatGPT’s inadequate responses, I tried to fix my own Writing Project 1 prompt to make it as impervious as possible to the AI’s machinations.  This included emphasizing the speculative section as an important part of the Writing Project. I fed my revised prompt with specific requirements into ChatGPT. ChatGPT returned an extremely general essay that did not address the specific requirements. Although writers asked for model essays for Writing Project 1, I decided to wait to provide sample essays until after discovery drafts were composed.  While conventional wisdom suggests that Gen Z learns best with specific directions, including “models,” I still want ungraded opportunities to wrestle with writing as a means of discovering their own thinking in response to a prompt.  Is this an open invitation to secretly using AI? Even if it is, the next step in the process seeks to ameliorate that possibility.  After discovery drafts were completed, I offered writers grading criteria for Writing Project 1, and two sample essays to grade.  In small groups, I invited writers to discuss what grades they would give the essays, and why. I stressed that the essays were samples, NOT models.  For the two samples, I used the ChatGPT essay and a strong student essay from a previous semester. I did not tell writers that the first essay was composed by AI.  In class discussion afterward, writers and I compared notes about grades. Almost universally, both essays earned “A”s from students.  Both essays were detailed and offered many examples. The first essay (the ChatGPT essay) even used subheadings.  Not surprised with the results of this experiment, I revealed that the first essay was composed by ChatGPT and that it would have received an “F” because it did not follow the grading criteria or the requirements of the prompt: At first glance the essay seemed perfect, with no mistakes. Yet the actual views and feelings of the writer were absent. The audience could not discern the writer’s attitude toward the subject of the writing. The many examples were very general. The essay listed examples rather than explaining specifics. There were no quotes or summaries or paraphrases from the original source.  There were no in-text citations and no Works Cited list. Although it seemed long, the essay was generated in 15-point font, while the requirement specified 12-point font.   So did the experiment “work”? Yes, or, I think it did, at least initially. I hope that I conveyed, with the help of ChatGPT, that writing is more than a finished product. Writing is also a process of growth and discovery, and perhaps the ever-shifting processes of writing are the most difficult lessons to teach and learn. ChatGPT was great at offering products, prompts and completed essays both. But writing as an embodied experience is not (yet?) within ChatGPT’s range.  With that in mind, the experiments–and hopefully the discoveries–continue.   ChatGPT earns an “F”: Notes from my Teaching Journal Photo by Susan Bernstein February 20, 2024   ... View more

Jennifer Duncan has been teaching English for twenty years, first at Chattanooga State Community College in Tennessee and now at Georgia State University’s Perimeter College in Atlanta, GA where she is Associate Professor of English.  For the last ten years, she has focused exclusively on online teaching concentrating on creating authentic and meaningful learning opportunities for students in composition and literature courses.     I love a one-hit wonder! A-ha’s “Take On Me,” Toni Basil’s “Mickey,” and my all-time favorite: “Ice Ice Baby” by a white man who had the nerve to flail around in khaki pants and try to convince us all that he was the voice of the streets (I’ll wait while you Google him). I know that Vanilla Ice was not actually the voice of 1990s Miami, and I know that rap purists hate him. I also know there is not a moment when someone says “I have a problem,” that I will not respond, “Yo, I’ll solve it!”  (After which my children will roll their eyes as their dad comes in with “Word to Your Mother.”) Vanilla Ice represents a memorable moment in 90s music culture, but is certainly not the apex of 90s rap just as AI will not be the peak of writing education. This “brand new invention” is a technological marvel and simultaneously an ethical conundrum.  It is worth talking about and debating and it will change some things, but, ultimately, video did NOT kill the radio star; it just opened the door to the next innovation which led us from Napster to MySpace until we reached Spotify. Like music, technology reflects and impacts society, but the tech that lasts beyond the launch party is the tech that solves a problem. So, what problems do my students face and how might AI be able to address them? And can I use AI way that supports the writing process rather than replaces it? Photo by Igor Omilaev via Unsplash If you struggle to get started with AI as a writing tool, here are three surface-level roadblocks where AI can support students without fully integrating into the writing process, so “stop, collaborate and listen.” Problem 1: Students don’t know how to manage their time. Whether it is work-life balance or just knowing when and how to start a project, students often fail (and cheat) when they start too late, panic, and look for a quick fix. AI Solution: Have students ask the generative AI to create a project timeline for them.  A simple prompt like “Develop a three-week plan for researching and writing an argument on x” will produce a daily schedule with tasks students can check off to keep them on track.  Yes, you could provide this for them, but by having them use AI to generate it, you’re putting the tool in their hands; then, ask them to go through the proposed plan and refine it to fit their needs.  Problem 2: We want our students to pick topics that they love, but they don’t know how to create and refine a writing prompt. AI Solution: Have students ask AI to write them three questions related to the course theme or overall topic. For example, my students write about a food issue related to their culture. I struggle to get them to even identify their culture, but once I do that, they aren’t sure what to say about food other than to talk about what they like or don’t. I require them to ask the AI to provide them three questions related to food within their culture. They get responses like “In what ways can educational initiatives help promote the importance of Cherokee food with the Cherokee community and tradition?” or “How can public schools provide access to halal meals for students?” They aren’t getting answers; they’re uncovering the questions to enter the conversation, and they’re doing it from a place of their control, not mine. Problem 3: Students don’t revise; they just want to “fix” their grammar. No writing teacher would claim that perfect grammar equals perfect writing, but we do know that grammar issues become a student’s focus and that poor grammar will get in the way of their communication. AI Solution: Teach students to use AI as copyeditor: “I want you to serve as my copyeditor. I'll provide you with an essay; make grammar and sentence construction edits using the rules of standard English. Provide me with a checklist of the changes you have made. Now, ask me for my essay:” The AI will provide them with a numbered list of the recommended edits so that students not only get corrections, but you can require them to explain why they accepted or rejected each correction.  This will not change their writing, but it will take care of grammar problems so that those don’t dominate your next writing conference. None of these revolutionize writing any more than Vanilla Ice revolutionized music, but they offer gateway for instructors wanting to experience this innovative moment without fully committing to an unfamiliar genre. Like a 90s mixtape, they offer an easy to digest sample for those curious about the emerging sounds of writing. ... View more

After realizing that I was much too quick to offer my opinion during a brief committee meeting recently, I considered submitting an empty blog and giving it the title “the value of listening.”  But that might be misunderstood to mean that listening has no value—that it yields nothing at all. Of course, that’s not my point. Listening requires an open page, a willingness to collaborate, a choice not to plan the next move. Listening requires that I attend to someone else without planning how to steer everything back to my own insights and commentary.  Listening is resisting the urge to fill the blank page too quickly.  Listening is hard work. It’s especially hard when you are listening to questions that do not yet need your attempt at an answer.  I really needed to listen to the questions of my friends, colleagues, family, and students:  Why are essays valued more highly than well-crafted and pithy Instagram captions? When do we cross the line from writing with tools to letting the tools write for us? What’s the most ethical way to use an AI detector? Do these comments fit better in the Findings or the Discussion section of the article? Photo by Jonathan J. Castellon via Unsplash Where is the original paginated version of this article? I can’t find it in the files. Is what I am seeing in this group a lack of work ethic or a lack of knowledge?  Why are faculty charged so much to have posters printed for conferences? Why do I have to choose between committee meetings and professional development events? Why can’t I count this class for my major and my minor? Can we teach students to be more self-sufficient? Can we teach them to take more initiative?  What am I doing wrong?  Could you send me the link to ___________? Why do we assume that people who are struggling need to try harder? People assume that the technical problems come because I did not follow instructions. Why is that? Why do I have to send screen shots to prove I did what they said, but their instructions did not work? Why won’t my laptop ever connect to the WiFi on campus? Do you have time to look over this with me? Do you think it’s ok if I _________________? Will you criticize me if I complain for a minute? When I stopped trying so hard to come up with impressive answers, I found my thinking stretched, and my desire to listen more—and to read—whetted further.  What questions do you hear when you listen to colleagues and students? ... View more

Some years ago, I had a chance to address all the students taking the first-year humanities class at the University of California at Irvine. I had been asked to speak to the students on matters of style in writing, which thrilled me, though as I entered the packed auditorium, I got a little weak in the knees wondering if I could find a way to speak directly to these students and their concerns. I had some wonderful examples of memorable openings and closings (all written by students) and some examples of very short and very long sentences that demonstrated stylistic verve and came from a very diverse group of writers. So things went fairly well, to my huge relief. In the Q and A session, students asked a number of tough questions, but the one I remember the most came from a tall, athletic looking student, who looked like he night have been a member of a football team. I remember his seeming to rise up forever. Then he took the mic and said “I really like those sentences you showed us. I want to know how to make sentences sing.” Wow. How about that for a great question?! We spent the next five minutes or so thinking about just how to get sentences singing, focusing on various ways to get rhythm working. I can remember heads shaking and the occasional “ahhhh” as someone caught on. It was a moment to remember, and I think of it often as I am plodding along: come on, Andrea, stop and think: how can I make this sentence sing? You can imagine my interest was definitely aroused, then, when I stumbled on Daniel Tammet’s Every Word Is a Bird We Teach to Sing. Tammet, who grew up with autism, is also a synesthete extraordinaire, one of a rare few for whom the senses are intermingled in intriguing and startling days.   Daniel Tammet   Tammet says he was born on a blue day, because for him, Wednesdays are always blue, just as numbers have shapes and colors—and even attitude. “Eleven,” he says, “is friendly,” while “five is loud” and four, his favorite number, is shy and quiet.” In an essay called “Finding My Voice,” Tammet describes being invited to give a public reading at the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford. He decided his reading would be not of a book but of a number, pi. To prepare, he assimilated “its unstinting digits by the hundreds of numbers, until I knew the first 22,514, a European record’s worth, by heart.” On the fourteenth of March [2004] I narrated this most beautiful of epic poems, an Odyssey or an Iliad composed of numbers, in a performance spanning five hours, to the hall. For the first time in my life, I spoke aloud in my numerical language, at length, passionately, fluently. ... As I gathered momentum, acquired rhythm, I sensed the men and women lean forward, alert and rapt. With each pronounced digit their concentration redoubled and silenced competing thoughts. Mediative smiles broadened faces. Some in the audience were even moved to tears. I had found the words [numbers] to express my deepest emotions. Those words were the birds he was teaching to sing, and through them he found his voice. I’m wondering how many of our students might relate to Tammet’s experience, not directly as synesthetes exactly, but as those who have struggled in various ways to find their voices. What helped them to do so? How would they describe their own truest voices, the ones that allowed them to “express deepest emotions”? These are questions I hope we give students a chance to respond to, and we could do worse than to get them thinking about them by sharing some of Tammet’s amazing essays. Take a look—and then share his voice with your students. And ask them how they make their words—and their sentences—sing.   Image via Wikimedia Commons ... View more

  Elizabeth Catanese is an Associate Professor of English and Humanities at Community College of Philadelphia. Trained in mindfulness-based stress reduction, Elizabeth has enjoyed incorporating mindfulness activities into her college classroom for over ten years. Elizabeth works to deepen her mindful awareness through writing children's books, cartooning and parenting her energetic twin toddlers, Dylan and Escher.   I had been teaching for about 12 years before I realized that a pink tote bag would make me a better professor. Before this point, I had been bringing my personal belongings right along with my teaching materials to each class. I teach with a lot of props, so sometimes a giant plush hamburger I use to model quotation sandwiches was packed in my backpack on top of the real hamburger in my lunch bag, or my meditation bells would tangle with my keys, red pens falling into a change of socks. If there was time, I’d separate out my personal materials from my teaching materials before going to my classroom, but sometimes there just wasn’t time. The lack of separation between church and state, so to speak, was making me feel disorganized, not to mention what an extra heavy backpack was doing to my back. Additionally, there was a lot of extra energy spent sorting once I got to the classroom, which distracted me from plunging into the lesson. The idea suddenly dawned on me one day about three years ago: If I kept a teaching bag already in my office, I could leave my personal belongings in my backpack and leave the backpack under my desk, grab my teaching bag, add a few necessary materials, and head to my classroom with ease. I selected a pink and black Rareform bag (made of recycled billboards) to use as my teaching bag since the Rareform brand’s mission brings me joy. When I feel joy, I feel more energetic, and not having to sort through my materials also gives me more energy for my students. The author's pink teaching bag. Separating personal materials from teaching materials is a pretty small gesture, but I also see my pink tote bag as a reminder that it is okay to set small boundaries to gain energy. In addition to placing a separation between my teaching materials and my personal materials, there are other small boundaries I’ve set during the transitions that happen in any given work day. One example is a five-minute space that I have put in place before I start teaching in person. There are two paths to get to my Monday and Wednesday morning classroom and, much like Robert Frost, “I [take] the one less traveled by.” It “has made all the [positive] difference.” The path I take adds five minutes to my walk, but it also means that I don’t run into students in the hallway, which allows me to make the mental transition from being a parent who just dropped her children at school to being a professor. During that time, I am intentional about giving myself positive affirmations, taking some deep breaths, or allowing myself to still think about home matters if needed. Once I’m in the classroom (always a bit early), I can tend very well to the needs of students, with more energy and less frazzle. The two examples I’ve spoken about both relate to the boundary between home life and teaching life, but I have put others in place as well. Instead of making sure my office door is always open to be welcoming to students, there is now a “please knock” sign on the door. The knock gives me a second to transition from whatever I’m doing in the office to what I need to do in relation to my students. It’s not about shutting people out, it’s about helping myself be in the most ideal state when welcoming them in. For some, small boundary gestures feel obvious, so much so that they may not even be understood as boundaries. However, boundaries often make me feel guilty; I’m in a field where always being available is considered excellent and blurred boundaries are sometimes read as a sign of commitment. Exerting energy is seen as a much better way to reach and connect with students than preserving energy. If you have a few moments, it might be helpful to reflect about a several questions on this topic. What boundaries have you built in your teaching life? Are there any boundaries that are not serving you or your students? Are there any more you can create? What can your institution do to support you in constructing the space you need? Taking an assessment of the small boundaries that can be built into our pedagogical practice can help us to become more focused professors and more joyful humans.  ... View more

Kim Haimes-Korn is a Professor of English and Digital Writing at Kennesaw State University. She also trains graduate student teachers in composition theory and pedagogy. Kim’s teaching philosophy encourages dynamic learning and critical digital literacies and focuses on students’ powers to create their own knowledge through language and various “acts of composition.” She is a regular contributor to this Multimodal Monday academic blog since 2014. 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 When the ordinary is extraordinaryAs digital and multimodal composers, we live in two worlds: the virtual and the real.  We go back and forth between these two worlds to create content and represent experiences.  Our attempts to represent online give us opportunities to show our lives, our thoughts, and our experiences. The best digital writing happens when we communicate something meaningful and create a world for audiences who are not there in person. A simple example of this is when we go on vacation, and we share images and visual narratives of our journeys,  meals, and even events. In these examples, we are trying to recreate a sensory and emotional experience for our audiences – one where they can feel the impact of the experience without actually being there.  In the book, Experience Design: A Participatory Manifesto (2023), authors Abraham Burickson, Ellen Lupton, Erica Holeman discuss what it means to design experiences: Traditional design practices invite us to design things, and to use those things to solve problems. But experience is not a problem; it is life. Experience designers engage with unpredictability and the unknown, partnering with their audiences to generate possibility and relationality. Experience designers create worlds, craft narratives that leave the page and enter people's lives, and structure transformation. Broadly interdisciplinary and deeply human, experience design is a practice that at once embraces new technologies and offers a balm for our disconnected lives. These authors invite us to consider that “Personal connections are what makes experiences memorable” and that “empathy is a key component of meaningful experiences” (xi). We typically think about empathy as the ability to feel the emotions of others.  However, early definitions of the term also involve aesthetic empathy which as Susan Lazoni describes in Empathy’s Evolution in the Human Imagination:  Returning to empathy’s roots—to once again think about the potential for “in-feeling” with a work of art, a mountain, or a tree—invites us to re-imagine our connection to nature and the world around us. In a world where students often feel disconnected and isolated, we can offer opportunities for them to experience, connect, and share to promote a sense of aesthetic empathy.   The term immersion is often used for virtual technologies such as VR, interactive art installations, and worldbuilding through video games. Although these technologies might be a bit advanced for our classes, we can still engage our students in participatory acts of experiential design where they immerse themselves in multi-sensory environments that transform audiences to other times, places, and realities. Through multimodal and digital writing, we can activate senses, evoke emotions, and create connections or, as Burikson, et.al suggest, “stop making things and, instead, to craft the minutes and hours of human life.”  To do this kind of work, I send students out of the classroom and on what I call Immersive Journeys as visual storytellers.  With phones or cameras in hand, they step out, curate images along the way and create immersive content that engages audiences in authentic virtual experiences.  Just another day in the coop I have been thinking about experience as a subject for many years and have incorporated it into my teaching and writing in many ways. As writers, we continually move back and forth between participant and spectator perspectives. We can train students to understand the shifts between observation and inferences along with image rhetorics and composing techniques. Using the foundational concept of the immersive journey, we can expand this idea and encourage students to shift their lenses through a multitude of immersive prompts.  This is more a concept than an assignment and can be modified for different contexts and types of deliverables. Students can create multimedia and mixed media projects (blogs, research papers, digital stories, etc.).    The main goal is that they engage their senses and curate visuals (images and video) and eventually attempt to represent those experiences to others through connected visual content. Some prompts for visual journeys:  Reveal an idea through cultural examples Sense of place where students choose a place to visit A flow journey where they allow their path to emerge without a goal in mind Visit and review a restaurant, event, attraction, or museum Take a nature walk Look for ironic juxtapositions Street art tour Contrast the old and the new Focus on a concept such as fun, love, chaos Look for examples of human interaction Engage an interdisciplinary lens (geography, psychology, sociology, etc.) Take a historical walk Focus on patterns or connections What do you see? The possibilities are endless!  Students can participate as individuals or in collaborative pairs or groups.  We can send them out on their own or explore places together as a class.  Students respond positively to these kinds of immersive experiences and are seeking opportunities to connect in a world that feels increasingly more disconnected.  Furthermore, they embrace the challenge of representing reality for their audiences to potentially transform experience and create a sense of aesthetic empathy through multimodal composition. ... View more

Confusing and Messy: A Brief Return to Zoom Teaching and What Happened Next Neurodivergent Teaching Before pivoting back to a "snow day" spent teaching on Zoom, I took a brief morning walk.  Photo by Susan Bernstein 13 February 2024   Recently, weather forecasters predicted that my city was about to receive a nor’easter with high winds and 5-8 inches of snow. The afternoon before the storm, public schools announced that they were pivoting to remote learning, and the university system that I teach for made the same announcement shortly thereafter. Back to Zoom, we were told.  I told myself that it’s only for one day, not the rest of the semester. Our previously scheduled in-class Discovery Draft would readily adapt to Zoom. For the lab hour, students would write reflections, which grew out of field notes I wrote as students were composing their Discovery Drafts (see the end of this post for reflection questions).    My field notes reflected previous Bits posts about teaching in social isolation and  my earlier frustrations with Zoom, the space of muted mics, blank screens, and occasional chat questions. After my return to in-person learning a year ago, Zoom seemed even more jarringly inadequate. I missed the instantaneous feedback of the classroom, the facial expressions, body language, sighs and groans perceptible in person, but not on Zoom.  When I read the students’ remote classroom writing this time around, the frustration really hit home. I had miscalculated the amount of writing that students would be able to complete on Zoom, even as I had remained on camera, offered guidance, and encouraged the use of chat for questions and concerns.  The discovery draft submissions were shorter than I had expected, and the reflections suggested that students needed more time to complete the prompt. So I planned a second day of in-class writing, in the hope that students would have an opportunity to complete their drafts in person. This way, I would have more writing to assess and students would have more opportunity to practice critical thinking to complete the discovery draft assignment. What followed was messiness and confusion that I should have anticipated. Where, students asked, was the instructor's feedback? Why didn’t the class offer a peer review session? I replied that these processes would take place after the discovery drafts were completed. But how, the students asked, could they possibly complete the drafts on their own without further guidance from someone else?    An important part of the writing process, I offered, is struggling with the writing process. Besides, you should have an opportunity to see what you can do on your own before comments or assessment from anyone else. Perhaps it’s an unfamiliar strategy, but it’s an important aim of the course–to learn new practices to grow your own writing for a variety of situations, not only for English writing assignments. All the same, class ended–at least for me–with messiness and confusion. Moreover, much of the city received little more than 3 inches of snow.  I remembered in-person classes on days much worse than this, and, yes, even a day in elementary school when I walked home a mile in a blizzard because the buses couldn’t navigate the roads home from school.  But that long-ago blizzard was not this brief February snowfall. “It Was a Mess,” the New York Times suggested, recounting later that same day how  the public school system’s remote learning system (different from Zoom) proved inaccessible. Due to a technical glitch, many students and teachers were unable to login, and some parents who were privileged to have a day off took their children sledding. The unplanned switch back to remote learning felt more like an unnecessary throwback to the traumatic days of pandemic lockdown. Yet, in remembering the seemingly endless trauma of lockdown, I gained a new perspective on my struggles with anxiety. Those struggles felt deeply rooted in my inability to adapt to the new conditions of online teaching. But after a one-day pivot backward, I felt something shift in my brain. The real problem, I thought, is Zoom. Or rather, the problem is an assumption about accessibility: if a large system is in fact inaccessible, the burden of creating accommodations is left with individuals who are struggling. In the midst of the pandemic’s social isolation, I wrote often about the struggles with online learning that are left unspoken and documented years before the Covid-19 pandemic by Beth Hewlett, including insufficient privacy for staying on camera, inadequate access to Wifi, and inaccessible platforms for neurodivergent and other disabled learners. Zoom exacerbated these problems, as well as the stigma and embarrassment of  not conforming to the current status quo in the wake of the pandemic. In other words: Education, at best, remains messy and complicated. There is no one-size-fits-all method or methodology for any teaching and learning, in or out of the classroom.  Nevertheless, that insight also applied to how I planned the lesson the day after we returned to the classroom. I had assumed everyone would adapt to drafting on their own for two class periods. That clearly wasn’t the case. In the midst of the pandemic, I made a video slideshow to explain grading criteria, and to offer suggestions to alleviate frustration with the writing process: Don’t worry if the process is messy and confusing, and don’t be afraid to make mistakes. I would need to revisit that lesson now, and to work on adapting it for new perspectives and ever-shifting circumstances–inside and outside the classroom.    In a grading criteria video I made for remote learning,  a masked dinosaur shares suggestions on the writing process. Screenshot by Susan Bernstein, February 16, 2024; video circa 2021.  In a grading criteria video I made for remote learning,  a masked dinosaur shares suggestions on the writing process. Screenshot by Susan Bernstein, February 16, 2024; video circa 2021.   3 Questions for Reflection (class assignment): In reviewing your in-class draft, what gives you the most joy? What do you think your audience will like about your draft? Why? Take a look at the University of Toronto document The Transition to University Writing. What questions do you have about this document? Based on this document and what you already know about writing, what would be your most important focus for revision? What do you want to learn about revision to better grow your writing? What feedback, questions, or support do you need from me for revising your draft by the due date? Where should I concentrate my attention? ... View more

Sensitive Witnesses is the thought-provoking name of a new book by Kristin M. Girten—with the subtitle Feminist Materialism in the British Enlightenment. The title caught my attention because I wondered who these “sensitive” witnesses might be and because I have been writing in this blog space recently about feminist rhetorical practices, which include—now that I think of it—sensitive witnessing as well as being sensitive to witnesses of all kinds.  Girten, who has co-edited an earlier book, British Literature and Technology, 1600-1830, is Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska, and while I love 18th century literature, this is not a book I would have ordinarily run across since I do not regularly read scholarship on that area. So: serendipity! In this book, Girten is at pains to insist that there were writers in the 18th century who did not follow the “scientific method” of Francis Bacon and fellow philosophers who espoused distanced and “objective” observation and eschewed any embodied connection to what they were observing. And who were these writers who resisted such distanced, and disembodied, observations? All women (philosophers), including Aphra Behn, Margaret Cavendish, Eliza Haywood, Lucy Hutchison, and Charlotte Smith.    Portrait of Aphra Behn, by Mary Beale (17th c.)   These women, according to Girten, were purposefully “intimately entangled” with whatever they were observing; their observations were “profoundly embodied.” Girten dubs this form of feminist materialist practice, of intimate and embodied observing “sensitive witnessing” and thus implicitly argued for a broader, more inclusive version of science and of scientific endeavors.  Girten sees these women as foremothers of today’s feminist materialists, and it seems to me that she makes a very persuasive case. But I could also see these 18th century sisters as foremothers of today’s feminist rhetorical critics such as Jacqueline Jones Royster, who argue strenuously for the embodied nature of the research that they do and who also seem “intimately entangled” with their subjects, and very purposefully so. I feel even more encouraged, then, in recommending that we teach the feminist rhetorical practices I wrote about a few weeks ago to all our students, thus making the research we do more inclusive and more able to report accurately and fully the full nature of what we are studying.  ... View more

This week, I was reminded in two different classes that what I say (or what I think I say) and what students hear may be quite different.   Sometimes, such “mis-hearings” can give us a laugh—like the time I had a multilingual student in an ESL course begin a paragraph with the expression, “firstable.”  I noted that we would say, “first,” but the student repeated the expression in a later composition.  When I pointed out that “firstable” is not a recognized word, he was puzzled. “But Professor Moore, you say it all the time.”  “I most certainly do not.” “Yes, you do.  You said it today in class: ‘Firstable, we need to understand why Alexie wrote this.’” It was quite clear.  I was saying “First of all,” and he was hearing “firstable.”  We laughed, and he adjusted his notes. Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com via Unsplash This past week, in my corequisite writing class, another student was struggling to proofread and edit a draft of her literacy narrative.  I had asked the students to annotate some of their editorial choices; I wanted to understand more about their decision-making processes.  The student, who had several issues with end punctuation and run-on sentences, added several capital letters mid-sentence, but no periods.  In the annotation, she noted that she was starting a new idea, so capital letters were required.  I thought back to an editing session I had led earlier:  she had not processed the discussion of periods, semicolons, clauses, or conjunctions, but she had heard that new ideas required would be signaled by a capital letter.   I could focus on all the things she did not hear—or I could focus on the fact that she was diligently applying what she did hear to her current assignment.   I applauded her work, and after a few quick examples in conference, she returned to her editing with a stronger conceptual base. And in an introductory linguistics class, I was working through the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) inventory of English consonants and vowels, including the sound called a velar nasal (written as a [ŋ])—this is the sound you hear in words with an “ng.”  I assigned some common words for students to transcribe for homework, including several with the velar nasal sound: penguin, linguistics, and finger.  Some students submitted rather odd transcriptions—their versions lacked an initial vowel and did not include a [g], which is clearly present in all of these words: they wrote [lŋwɪstɪks] instead of [lɪŋɡwɪstɪks].  I asked them what was going on. “Where’s the vowel and the [g]?  Don’t you hear those sounds when you say the word?” They were clearly perplexed.  “Dr. Moore, you said the velar nasal was the same as an I-N-G.  So every time we have a word with an I-N-G, we replace that whole part of the word with the [ŋ], right?” Again, my first thought was to wonder why they were so confused:  we were working through isolated consonants sounds one by one, so how could they have heard that one symbol would represent a vowel and two consonants?   “Did I say that?”  They nodded.  I hesitated, and then I laughed.  “Well, that was not very clear, was it?  Let me try again.” I have no doubts this group—who diligently take and share notes—will master phonetic analysis. How have you been mis-heard by students?  I would love to hear your stories. ... View more

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the longitudinal study I conducted at the turn of this century, one in which I followed a cohort of Stanford students from their incoming year through one year past their graduation. In particular, I’ve been thinking about what I learned about their connection to what they wrote. At the beginning of the study, students didn’t seem to feel any strong connection at all: they were writing to get a grade, to get a job, or for other practical reasons. In short, they didn’t see the writing they were doing as connected to their identities, to who they were as people. As the years went on, however, student participants began to feel more connected to their writing, began to take ownership of it and see writing as a way to make their marks on the world. In fact, they started to define writing as something that gets up off the page and makes something good happen in the world. And as a reflection of themselves, of their thoughts and character and purposes.  I’m thinking about this shift in their relationship to writing because I am wondering what we would find now: especially with the rise of misinformation and deep fakes, along with the rise of AI generated text, I wonder how students’ perception of their relationship to writing is shifting and changing now. Do they feel that the writing they do at least has the potential to embody their hopes and dreams, to represent their authentic selves? Do they feel identified with their writing? And if so, to what degree, and why?     These seem like pressing questions to me, ones that can best be pursued in longitudinal studies like the one I began over two decades ago now. I know that Jessica Enoch and her colleagues at the University of Maryland are considering such a study, and I hope that they will do so—and that others will follow their lead. We are clearly living in a great watershed moment in terms of writing: how to define it, how to understand who and/or what can deploy it, whether it can in the future be “owned” in the traditional sense of copyright, and perhaps most important, how it can reflect and create our best selves rather than our worst. Can writing still be the means of “making something good happen in the world”?  Food for thought, especially for those of us who are privileged to teach writing today.   Image created with Microsoft Designer   ... View more

Over the next four months, I will offer five tips to students writing in each of the four genres covered in my textbook, Creative Writing: Four Genres in Brief. The suggestions will highlight advice that, over my decades of teaching, I have found to be the most useful for writers just beginning their journeys into the creation of literature. I’ll begin with poetry, the first genre covered in the text, and also the one that I turn to first when I have something to say. Many students approach the writing of poetry with the sense that anything goes, that whatever leaps from the writer’s brain to their fingertips is, almost by definition, a poem. I don’t believe that’s the case, which may make me sound overly fussy, but if each utterance is the equal of every other utterance, there’s no real point in holding a class on creative writing. Everyone who composes a poem is already writing as well as they ever will. So, granting for the moment that student writing may be made stronger in a classroom setting through mentoring by instructors and peers, here are my Top 5 Tips for Beginning Poetry Writing Students: Use the concrete and specific to evoke the universal. One of the most common assumptions new creative writers make is that the more general and abstract their work, the more likely readers will insert themselves into the piece. The idea is that specific details about specific experiences shut out those who have not experienced the exact same events. In fact, the opposite occurs in creative writing. The vaguer the presentation, the more likely the reader is to drift away from it, whereas vivid details help us to imagine seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, and touching what the poet hopes to convey, thereby triggering similarly rich visual and sensual memories of our own. Compose in terms of lines rather than sentences. The prose poem aside, free verse and metered poetry consists primarily of lines rather than the sentences that run through them. This is one of poetry’s great, and underappreciated, freedoms—the right to stop and start a poetic line wherever that break can open up meaning and insight and generate excitement. The least interesting poems tend to be those whose lines consist solely of complete sentences. Simply running one sentence into the next line (enjambment) can suddenly open up a range of new ways to envision the poem. Read your work aloud before presenting it to others. Unless you’re a musical marvel, you wouldn’t impose a song you’d never rehearsed before on friends and family, much less on an audience of strangers. Make sure that at the end of every draft, you let your poem be heard—even if you’re the only one listening. How a poem sounds aloud is often quite different from the way you imagine it in your head. Revise. It’s the rare poem that cannot be made better through serious reconsideration and rewriting. Especially when you’re starting out, you’re likely to use language you’ve heard before, phrases that make strike the ears of more experienced readers as cliché. As you rework your images and lines, try to create a poem that’s both strange and clear. That might sound like an odd combination, but we can only view new worlds and ideas when we can plainly see them. Read, read, read. It’s been said many times, but it bears repeating: good writers are good readers, and great writers are great readers. Being familiar with renowned work from the past and present, if only because it will help you decide what you don’t want to do yourself, is essential. In fact, many writers believe that the best cure for writer’s block is reading the work of other writers. Poets, in particular, benefit from encountering as many short poems as possible. A topic, specific form, or even an image or a phrase encountered in another poem can be just what you need to get started on your own. ... View more

Red banner embroidered with NO CUTS PSC CUNY placed on a classroom window ledge. The window overlooks the boulevard in front of campus.     The First Day of Class: Lab Hour Neurodivergent Teaching    Excerpt from my first-day teaching journal (revised for clarity) We are in a room in a building that faces the Boulevard. In front of the building my colleagues are protesting university budget cuts. We can hear them chanting through the window.  I admit–it’s distracting. I said to the students that half my heart is out there but my whole self is here in this room with them, and that this campus is an incredible place with an incredible history. While I wish I was at the rally, it’s good to be in class too–this teaching and learning–is deeply connected to what’s going on outside.    This semester my section of College Writing includes an additional lab hour once a week and is required for all students. For the lab hour, the class is divided into two smaller sections and each section meets with me one hour a week for extra writing practice.    On the first day of lab class, immediately following College Writing, after a long hike one floor down from our classroom and through several labyrinthian hallways with confusing signage, we arrived in the room and settled into our new seats. I invited students to take out paper and pen (to write in a different modality off the screen) and offered them the following writing prompt: Introduce yourself to me as a learner. How do you learn best? What engaged you most in English 110 today? What was not interesting? What else do you want me to know about you as a student in College Writing? Then, ask me a question—about the class, about me, about anything you’d like to know. I will read the questions ANONYMOUSLY and respond as best I can.  As writing began, we opened the window for ventilation. That’s when we heard the chanting outside: REVERSE THE CUTS The room faced the main entrance to campus, and this classroom building also housed the college's administrative offices. We were listening to my colleagues at a union rally in front of the building. The cuts mentioned in the chant referred to the 24 full-time temporary faculty who were fired two weeks before the beginning of the semester to save money for the college. The students were interested, and I briefly explained the purpose of the union rally. As the chants continued, the students wrote down their writing experiences and their questions. The questions generally focused on the syllabus, and students had other questions too. Which writers and books did I recommend (besides James Baldwin who we’re reading in class, Martin Luther King’’s speeches and essays other than “I Have a Dream,” and bell hooks’ “All About Love”)? What is my favorite activity in NYC? (Long walks in Manhattan and Queens, and visiting the New York Public Library at 5th Ave. and 42nd St.) I wrote with the students as well, and took advantage of the opportunity afforded by writing to process the usual and unusual challenges of this first day of Spring Semester 2024. Ceiling at the New York Public Library with a painting of clouds and sky surrounded by an ornate frame.   ... View more

In 2010, writer and longtime NPR commentator on All Things Considered and Washington Post columnist Michele Norris ordered 200 postcards that read: “Race. Your thoughts. 6 words. Please send.” She started leaving them in bookstores, at coffee shops, in the seat pockets on airplanes, without much hope of a big response. She shouldn’t have worried: people started filling them out, stamping them, and sending them, eventually adding up to over 500,000 messages. Norris includes many of them, along—each a little gem of a story—in her Our Hidden Conversations, along with interviews with numerous correspondents and essays by Norris in what the New York Times describes as an “open-mic town hall gone right.” Here are just a few of the six-sentence responses she received: “I wish he was a girl”; “I’m only Asian when it’s convenient”; “No, really, where are you from?”; “With kids, I’m dad—alone, thug”; “Underneath, we all taste like chicken”; “My beautiful Black boys deserve HOPE.” Morris reports being surprised that she heard from so many white people, though postcards came from dozens of racial and ethnic groups, as well as from over 100 countries. And while she started the project out of a sense that people at the time were very uncomfortable talking about race, these handwritten postcards proved that they had profound thoughts on race that they wanted to share. Michele Norris accepts the Peabody Award for "The Race Card Project."   In addition to the Peabody-winning narrative archive The Race Card Project and Our Hidden Conversations, Norris is the author of The Grace of Silence and host of the podcast Your Mama’s Kitchen. Her work is accessible and challenging at the same time, and I think students could spend some time doing a little research on her and her publications; they can also listen to her reporting during the dozen years she was a host for All Things Considered, hearing the rhythms and timbre of her voice, which carries so much personality. But in these times when students may feel uncomfortable engaging any number of highly contentious, emotion-laden topics in class, perhaps we could take a tip from Norris, asking students to write six words, and six words only, on a controversial or difficult topic you are dealing with in class. They might also bring in six-word responses from five or six other people. Then as a class, you could choose two or three responses to focus on, first in small groups and then in a whole-class discussion. Perhaps some of these six-word stories would yield new insights for the whole class to ponder, and lead to some open, honest, and respectful conversation. Image via WikiCommons   ... View more

  Elizabeth Catanese is an Associate Professor of English and Humanities at Community College of Philadelphia. Trained in mindfulness-based stress reduction, Elizabeth has enjoyed incorporating mindfulness activities into her college classroom for over ten years. Elizabeth works to deepen her mindful awareness through writing children's books, cartooning and parenting her energetic twin toddlers, Dylan and Escher.   Recently at Community College of Philadelphia, there has been a lot of talk about the 80/20 rule, which states that 80% of outcomes come from 20% of the causes. It’s the principle that has been reflected on in many places, such as the powerful book by Keller and Papasan called The One Thing. The basic principle is that often we are driven to do more to get better results, but more success and meaning can come when we don’t divide our focus—when we do less of what matters less. In other words, the idea behind the 80/20 rule is to identify the 20% that really matters and put our focus there. This is hard for professors in the classroom; we’re in a field where we are taught that everything matters. I have felt burdened by trying to help students’ lives outside of school, their emotional lives inside of it, trying to undo some of the challenges of a broken-in-some-places Philadelphia high school educational system while providing a rich education for a diverse audience of students ranging from age 16-60 (often in one class). There are, of course, institutional pressures as well—things we all “must do” that we would not do if not being forced to do them. Though the circumstances for all of us are different, I think it is safe to say that we have all been told, explicitly or implicitly, that doing more is the way to achieve better outcomes. At Community College of Philadelphia last semester, instructors were challenged to explore the less is more approach and add just one thing that might improve student learning. We could pick it, and there was no pressure for the “one thing” to succeed. We were just asked to do it and then to report back about how it went. I brought in career counseling to talk to my English class and tried to facilitate connections between the work we were doing in reading and writing and student career aspirations; it was pretty successful, but what I found most effective was a debrief conversation afterwards where people told stories about struggling to find and keep employment. It didn’t exactly relate to our course content as I’d hoped, but it helped me connect with students as I, too, have had struggles finding jobs at moments in my life and career, and I was happy to share my stories right along with students. By the end of the conversation, a few students had very specific goals—to reach out to career counseling to get help on a resume, to apply to two more jobs, and to get some new interview clothing. At the end of the conversation, they felt connected to each other and to me as well as empowered to take next steps that they had chosen. I didn’t seamlessly fold the activity into my curriculum, but it was still what I would consider a success. But exactly what about it made it successful? When I attended the debrief about the CCP “one thing” projects, something began to strike me. It didn’t really matter what the “one thing” was (or even the subject where the “one thing” project occurred). Of course, the content always related in some way to course goals, but what mattered after that fundamental link was established was something else entirely. What mattered was whether the interventions did one of two things: They either fostered student empowerment, fostered connection (to self, others or professor) or, in some cases, they fostered both empowerment and connection. This semester, I’m going to ask myself some questions about my lessons, assignments and practices. Does this assignment, lesson or practice foster connection and/or does it empower students? If not, I’ll consider letting it go. Though there is, for me, always grief in letting go, I’m hoping that the questions will lead me to put more of my energy into what matters most this semester for the greater good of myself and my students. ... View more