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

April is National Poetry Month! We've asked some of our LitBits bloggers to discuss how they approach poetry with their literature and creative writing students. Before the first workshop of the semester in any class I teach, I pass out a stack of papers, face down, and instruct my students to take one each. When everyone has a paper, we flip them over. I’ve given them a poem: "Kindness" by Naomi Shihab Nye.  Without introduction, I read the poem. I pause when I reach the ending. Some students’ heads are bowed, gazing at their copies. Some have their eyes closed. Some are watching me. “Why do think I wanted to share this poem with you today?” I ask. The responses from my students vary depending on the course I’m teaching. But often, one of the early answers is a question: “Because you like poetry?” “I do like poetry.” I smile. “But what is it about this particular poem?” Soon, someone points to the lesson plan on the whiteboard. “We’re going to talk about workshopping.” Another adds, “And you want us to be kind to each other.” “Great observations. So what can we learn about kindness from this poem?” The room is quiet. My students frown at the poem, or at each other, or at me. It’s time for a short writing exercise. I ask my students to write their answers to two questions: what can you learn about kindness from the poem? How does the poem make you feel? Most of my students are used to analyzing writing. They are used to looking for meaning. They are not accustomed to looking inward, at their own feelings, at how the work is affecting them. Poetry, in this instance, helps them identify their feelings and prepare them for the vulnerable process of workshopping. An honest conversation about something other than workshopping encourages them to trust their ideas and each other before diving into their own work. After a few minutes of writing I ask my students to share their responses with a partner next to them, if they are comfortable. I walk around the room, eavesdropping. “This is a sad poem,” several students say. “But it’s hopeful,” others point out. “I don’t understand all of it,” some students say, and their peers offer, “I think that’s OK.” I bring the class back together and encourage my students to share their responses. They are animated, responding to each other, almost as if I’m not present.   “I don’t like poetry much, but this is deep,” one says. “It’s like reminding you to walk in someone else’s shoes, you know?” “Everyone has sadness. I’ve got sadness, you’ve got sadness.” A student points to herself and then to her peers. “So we have to respect each other,” says another student. “Even if we disagree.” “Especially if we disagree.” I step into the conversation after a few minutes. I encourage my students to point out their favorite lines. “I like the opening: 'Before you know what kindness is you must lose things.'” “You must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.” “It follows you like a shadow or a friend.” All or almost all of my students participate in the conversation about the poem, even my quieter students. The poem animates them. They connect with each other over favorite lines and ideas. They connect over confusion and questions. It’s these connections that are vital to successful, thoughtful, and trusting workshops. I read the poem one more time after our discussion, so students can listen to phrases they haven’t noticed before, memorize lines they hold dear, and remember how kindness will take them far both in workshop and outside the classroom. ... View more

I had the privilege of presenting as part of a CCCC panel on “Writing about Writing at the Community College” a couple of weeks ago in Kansas City (along with Elizabeth Johnston and Angelique Johnston of Monroe Community College in Rochester, NY). One theme reiterated throughout the panel is that implementation of writing about writing pedagogy needs to be rooted in the “community” of the community college – the local context and culture. In my case, the context is teaching writing about writing in a sheltered ESL first-year composition course with an IRW co-requisite. I use six “anchor” texts that introduce my students to writing about writing (WAW) during the term, and students write about these (multiple times) in connection with other essays drawn from our departmentally selected reader. The first assignment for students is a literacy narrative; they connect their own experiences to those of other writers and to the concept of Discourse (from the work of James Gee, our first anchor text). The literacy narrative has revealed a lot about the language, reading, and writing experiences of my students. This semester I decided I wanted more information about my students’ reading habits and strategies, beyond the stories they had chosen to tell in their first assignment. Mid-term, I gave students an anonymous survey to gauge how they were working through our anchor texts, by far the most challenging of the reading assignments in the course. I queried them about the amount of time spent on these, the number of times each text was read, and the strategies they used—as well as the areas that caused the most trouble and the suggestions they had for me to facilitate their reading efforts. Some of the findings were expected: students were reading the challenging selections less than 3 times, on average, and spending an average of 3-4 hours (total) with each one, despite my recommendations to revisit them multiple times. Students also reported that the vocabulary was the primary impediment to reading, and they requested reading and vocabulary guides in advance of the readings. Given the experiences they have described in previous English language instruction, these findings were not surprising. Fifty percent of my current students also asked for more time to discuss the readings in class, and many commented that they don’t feel comfortable with the readings until after class discussion. Again, given their accounts of previous education experiences (in which there was no need to do assigned reading in advance because instructors would “go over it” in the next class) these comments were expected. But when I asked students what strategies they were using when reading outside of class, I noticed something I had not seen before: while almost all students reported annotating texts (as we have taught them to do) and using dictionaries or translators, only one student reported talking to another student about the text, and none reported talking to an instructor about the text outside of class. Also, students said they did not use graphs, charts, or pictures to organize their thinking about the readings, even though we frequently create such charts, graphs, outlines, and pictures (as well as paraphrases and responses) in class.   These results led to an epiphany about my students’ reading process: this particular group views “text-talking” and making visual representations of assigned texts as teacher-directed, in-class processes. Their literacy narratives suggest that they engage in text-talk easily enough when it comes to self-selected reading, but that practice has not transferred as a strategy for approaching academic texts. So this is my next IRW challenge: how can I foster text-talk and visual representations of texts outside of the classroom as reading strategies? Of course, I could assign an out-of-class discussion, require students to stop by my office and chat, or work with a team to build a graphic presentation before class. But will these activities transfer beyond my class as effective strategies for reading complicated texts? I can’t answer that yet. I will need to keep experimenting. What are you doing to get your students engaged in “text-talk,” especially for challenging academic readings? 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

While there appears to be some significant doubt over whether Cambridge Analytica really had much effect on the outcome of 2016 presidential election (Evan Halper at the L.A. Times makes a good case that it didn't), the overall story of the way that millions of Facebook profiles were mined for partisan purposes is still something that is of profound significance in this time when digital technology seems to be on the verge of undermining the entire democratic process itself. As such, the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica controversy is a worthy topic for a class that makes use of popular culture in teaching writing and critical thinking.   If you happen to be using the 9th edition of Signs of Life in the U.S.A., you could well begin with John Herrman's "Inside Facebook's (Totally Insane, Unintentionally Gigantic, Hyperpartisan) Political Media Machine." In this extensive survey of the many ways in which Facebook has fostered an ecosystem of political activists who invade your news feed with ideologically targeted content, Herrman shows how the marketing of online behavior has been transformed into a "(Totally Insane, Unintentionally Gigantic, Hyperpartisan) Political Media Machine." That our Internet activity is being tracked and our data mined is no secret anymore, and many people don't seem to mind—so long as it only results in specially curated advertising pitches and coupon offers. But what Herrman describes goes well beyond product merchandizing into information manipulation, the building of highly politicized news silos where the news you get is the news that someone has calculated that you want to get, and nothing else, as more and more Americans transition away from such traditional news sources as newspapers and television to Facebook, Twitter, and a myriad of other social media.   Brooke Gladstone's "Influencing Machines: The Echo Chambers of the Internet" (also in the 9th edition of Signs of Life), succinctly explains the effect of this shift. With no pretense of presenting a balanced palette of news and information, the new media are exacerbating and deepening the social divisions in America, creating ideological echo chambers that effectively constitute alternate realities for those that inhabit them. The result is a kind of political and cultural echolalia.   It's little wonder, then, that the contending parties in America cannot find a way to communicate effectively with each other. Already divided by a history of cultural conflict and contradiction (chapter 7 of Signs of Life explores this division in depth), Americans have vanishingly less in common with those whose lives lie on the other side of the great divide.   There is something profoundly ironic about all this. For many years it has been assumed that the effect of modern mass media has been to chip away at America's regional differences, flattening them out into a kind of unaccented (literally and figuratively) sameness: a mass culture watching the same TV shows, eating the same food, and talking in the same way. But now something is changing. Rather than tending towards a common culture, America, sliced and diced by digital algorithms, is dividing into mutually hostile camps.   William Butler Yeats said it best long ago at a time when his own country was divided in two: "Things fall apart," he lamented, "the centre cannot hold." Now there's something to hashtag. Image Source: "Facebook security chief rants about misguided “algorithm” backlash" by  Marco Verch on Flickr 10/08/17 via Creative Commons 2.0 license. ... View more

Like many in our field, I had second, and third, thoughts about attending CCCC this year, given the NAACP’s travel warning for people of color. I followed the debate on several listservs and read all of the statements sent out by CCCC leaders explaining their decision to keep the conference in Missouri and the steps they were taking to work with the NAACP and other groups to support civil rights in Missouri. In the end, while I believe that our organization should have pulled out of Missouri (we have taken such action in the past, so there is precedent) and while I supported the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition’s decision not to meet at this year’s CCCC, in the end I decided to attend for one day (Thursday) in order to be part of a panel on “Feminist Rhetorics in the Age of Trump.”   That panel was inspirational to me, as I knew it would be, but I also got a surprise treat when I attended another panel, called “DBLAC: Challenging Narratives of Deviance and Disruption in Writing Spaces.” This panel was a surprise because I had not known about DBLAC, and it was a treat because the talks were all outstanding! As its website defines it, Digital Black Lit (Literatures & Literacies) and Composition or DBLAC is a digital network of Black graduate students in the United States, formed in May 2016 at the Digital Media and Composition Institute (DMAC) at The Ohio State University. We are comprised of graduate students who self-identify as Black in the fields of Literacy Studies, Literature, Writing Studies, Rhetoric, English Studies, Creative Writing, Digital Humanities, and other related fields. This network provides safe spaces for members to testify to, discuss with, and share support for each other in response to the continued marginalization of Black bodies in academia. DBLAC also acts as a learning community for professional development, networking, and resource-pooling aimed at the academic retention and success of its members.      The panelists introduced us to this fairly new organization, and told us a bit about its history and their involvement in it. As I listened to them talk about establishing safe spaces for graduate students of color and about how to establish a supportive community, I finally noticed what they were wearing: each member of the panel had on a black t-shirt with a series of names printed in large, white block letters. When these finally came into focus for me, I realized they were the names of these panelists’ mentors, scholars of color who had provided safe spaces for them. BANKS, ROYSTER, GILYARD, MOSS, NUNLEY. . . and others. In short, the panelists were embodying their message, delivering it not only through their words but through their actions and clothing.   Khirsten Echols, Brittany Hull, Louis Maraj, and Sherita Roundtree each shared experiences of being in UNsafe, hostile, and disrespectful spaces in the academy, stories that are all too familiar to all who have had the privilege of working closely with graduate students of color. They didn’t stop there, however, going on to share their research and scholarship on recognizing, respecting, and valuing the knowledge and insights of young scholars of color.   Sherita Roundtree, in “Black Women’s Noise and Institutionalized Spaces,” argues that Black women are often “scripted out” of spaces of belonging and that addressing this long-standing act of exclusion calls for literally making space and recognizing the right of Black women to occupy it, in their scholarship, teaching, and professional development. They have been kept from occupying such spaces by what Roundtree identifies as “noise,” a term used by Jacqueline Jones Royster in her award-winning essay, “When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own”: At the extreme, the African American community, as my personal example, has seen and continues to see its contributions and achievements called into question in grossly negative ways, as in the case of The Bell Curve. . . . Such interpretations of human potential create a type of discourse that serves as a distraction, as noise that drains off energy and sabotages the work of identifying substantive problems within and across cultural boundaries and the work also of finding solutions that have import, not simply for a ‘race’ but for human beings whose living conditions, values, and preferences vary.   In her presentation, Roundtree took this concept of “noise”—the chatter/clatter that distracts attention from African American women’s achievements and contributions, that literally drowns them out-—and then expanded it. In Roundtree’s work, “noise” affects the perceptions of African American women in such negative ways, yes, but the term also signals something else: the “noisiness” of Black women is not negative but can instead be thoroughly grounded in Black culture and ways of knowing and being. Roundtree’s goal goes beyond reducing the negative noise that affects Black women so profoundly; in addition, she aims to explore “the perceived and known noisiness of Black women GTA’s in the academy and their teaching of writing,” thus seeking to “develop a more nuanced understanding of Black women as teachers, learners, and mentors.”   As I listened to this group of very smart and very talented researchers, I wished that everyone at CCCC could have heard their presentations. In the meantime, I urge everyone who works with graduate students of color to make sure they know about DBLAC!   Credit: Pixabay Image 2488359 by gtjoflot, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

  Today's featured guest blogger is Lisa DuRose, Professor at Inver Hills Community College “These characters and what they represent are things that I normally don’t read about, but these stories compel me to look at the reality that some women face.”   My student, quoted above, echoes what many others tell me about the works we read in my Introduction to Literature course: these selections are not their usual reading material and these characters have little in common with the protagonists they’ve encountered in some of their favorite works. At this point in the semester, students have been unsettled by characters who face poverty, mental illness, and death. This week, however, we venture into a terrain that is even more emotionally challenging. We are reading a collection of short stories by contemporary author Bonnie Jo Campbell entitled Mothers, Tell Your Daughters. Campbell’s stories often feature strong working class women who mitigate dangerous terrain—troubled relationships, economic hardships, and addiction. Campbell’s first person narrators, however, often present the greatest opportunity for critical analysis. In some instances, these narrators are processing through sexual assault and molestation, and readers are drawn into each woman’s effort to sort out the traumatic details of these violations.  Although we know that posts about sexual assault and harassment swarm students'Twitter feeds, we may be reluctant to engage students in substantial discussions about these highly charged topics for fear that we are ill-prepared to deal with the emotional impact they may have. However, those of us who teach literature understand that the tools of our discipline provide a framework for such discussions. Through the lens of literary devices and critical approaches, we can create a space that allows for both analytical understanding and social empathy, even as we venture through the most emotionally vulnerable themes.  In the case of Campbell’s stories, I ask students to consider how the author’s choice of narration allows readers to glimpse the thoughts of protagonists who have suffered through sexual assault. To aid in their analysis, I provide students with ample background information: my video interview Interview with Bonnie Jo Campbell: Difficult Topics in Literature, a critical essay I’ve written about Bonnie Jo Campbell's Sources of Inspiration, and several reviews of the short story collection. These resources coupled with Campbell’s writing style—which is both lyrical and plain spoken—move my students toward a critical space that invites exploration rather than judgment. Applying literary techniques to Campbell’s story “Playhouse” has led to complex discussions about the roots of sexual violence and the often complicit social responses they prompt, especially among family members. In this piece, Janie, the narrator, gradually discovers that she was gang raped three weeks earlier during a party at her brother’s house. She “feels sick and weird” (15) and her brother hasn’t returned her phone calls. The story opens with Janie returning to her brother’s house and learning that her brother, who recalls more about that night than Janie, is inclined to chastise his sister’s behavior and excuse the actions of his friends, one of whom he calls “a decent guy” (31). As Janie struggles to piece together her memories of that evening, the reader glimpses the emotional nuances of her discovery—experiencing first confusion, doubt, guilt, and then a sort of sickening knowledge. However, even as the events of that night become more lucid, she still struggles to identify the violation. After she tells her brother that she thinks she’s been raped, she second guesses herself: “The word raped feels all wrong, and my heart pounds in a sickening way” (31). When she says the word again, “it feels even more off-kilter, like I really am a drama queen, creating from thin air a victim and perpetrators and accessories” (31). Students are quick to comment about how upsetting this story is, but I’ve noticed that when they are asked to frame their responses around questions of literary techniques, they are able to articulate a deeper understanding of the stories and the theme. When students are asked to apply a range of critical responses—including feminist, Marxist, and reader-response—their interpretations are even more enhanced. Since many of Campbell’s protagonists live in poverty, students learn about the connection between sexual assault and poverty through Callie Marie Rennison’s New York Times article “Who Suffers the Most From Rape and Sexual Assault in America,” which explores how “women in the lowest income bracket are sexually victimized at about six times the rate of women in the highest income bracket (households earning $75,000 or more annually).”  For some students, these topics are highly personal; a few will identify themselves as victims of sexual violence, often commenting about the realistic depictions in these stories. In every case, these revelations have enhanced the level of respect and community in the classroom. These are difficult topics to discuss, but such conversations are already happening outside of the classroom. When we include them in a literature classroom, we can provide a framework that not only enriches our students’ knowledge but stretches their capacity for empathy. ... 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Today's guest blogger is Kim Haimes-Korn‌, a Professor in the English Department at Kennesaw State University. Kim’s teaching philosophy encourages dynamic learning, critical digital literacies and focuses on students’ powers to create their own knowledge through language and various “acts of composition.” She likes to have fun every day, return to nature when things get too crazy and think deeply about way too many things. She loves teaching. It has helped her understand the value of amazing relationships and boundless creativity. You can reach Kim at khaimesk@kennesaw.edu or visit her website Acts of Composition. Multimodal composition relies heavily on the relationship between text and image. As teachers in this context we can emphasize to students that composing images takes the same kind of thought and energy as composing written texts. We consider our audience, purpose, subject matter, and context and make rhetorical choices that communicate meaning. Of course, students can just snap pictures and capture strong images by happenstance, but I try to get them to understand that composing images involves rhetorical strategies and an understanding of visual rhetoric. Kenneth Louis Smith in the Handbook of Visual Communications (Routledge, 2005), helps make that distinction.  Not every visual object is visual rhetoric. What turns a visual object into a communicative artifact--a symbol that communicates and can be studied as rhetoric--is the presence of three characteristics. . . . The image must be symbolic, involve human intervention, and be presented to an audience for the purpose of communicating with that audience. This definition is a good place to start our conversation. How do we symbolize? What is the difference between literal and representative images? How can we use visuals to move beyond pretty pictures and create persuasive communication? I use this and other sources to introduce students to the idea of image rhetorics and discuss particular rhetorical strategies to consider while composing visuals. I find it useful for students to think about metaphors and their relationship to designing visual content. Thoughtco.com and other online sources offer glossaries and definitions for rhetorical devices and visual metaphors. I also use Sean Morey’s discussion of Image Rhetorics (The Digital Writer) to investigate terms and to help initiate students into learning the language of visual composition. He discusses the following rhetorical lenses and image categories: Analogy, Metaphor, Metonomy, Synecdoche, Enthymeme and provides detailed visual examples of each. Morey also talks about the importance of text and image relationships and suggests terms like Anchorage and Relay, Juxtaposition and the distinction between Denotation and Connotation. Students learn the language of visual composition and start to see ways to change and enhance their visual composing practices through this assignment.  Background Resources: The St. Martin’s Handbook: Ch. 16, Design for Print and Digital Writing; Ch. 17, Presentations The Everyday Writer (also available with exercises😞 Ch.22, Making Design Decisions; Ch. 23, Presentations  EasyWriter (also available with exercises😞 Ch.3, Making Design Decisions; Ch. 11, Creating Presentations Steps of the assignment: Have students study and learn image rhetoric terms and strategies. Look online for examples that demonstrate the principles of visual rhetoric. Gather students into teams and have each team compose a collaborative Image Rhetoric Slide show through Google Slides. Each student is responsible for a single slide that features a different rhetorical term in which they 1) Define the term, 2) Compose an original visual example, and 3) Provide an explanation of the meaning they are trying to communicate (and what makes it effective). Students present the slide shows in class and discuss examples. Reflection: It is one thing to understand a definition and repeat its characteristics on a test. It is another to apply that knowledge through this kind of exercise. Students found interesting connections and creative ways of presenting persuasive visual communication. Students come to see larger connections between cultural concepts and learn how images can bring complicated ideas together in impactful ways. For example, Aiden’s slide provides an analysis of metaphors, creatively combines two concepts, and draws a “comparison between unhealthy fried foods known to be carcinogenic like fries and tobacco products.” This assignment helps students understand that many of the messages around them are composed through these lenses and that they can actively compose persuasive visual images of their own.  I have included two of the team presentations below: Team 1 – Image Rhetorics Presentation Team 2 – Image Rhetorics Presentation Let me know what you think in the comments. ... View more

We’re almost to the mid-point of Nelson’s The Argonauts. Eighty pages in, I’ve had the students spend time in the computer lab drafting and then publishing “interpretive footnotes” in order to explore one of Nelson’s many references and see where the exploration leads. As with the interpretive definition assignment, I publish an example for them to read before they get started.  There are no images in Nelson’s text; but she returns often to the work of Catherine Opie. We’ve discussed the images in class and I’ve had the students write about the experience of looking at Opie’s self-portraits. But, like all discussions, there’s been a lot left unsaid and there have been paths left to pursue. And that’s what I want to happen in the interpretive footnote—for the pursuit to continue, for the connections to keep sparking. Here’s what I published prior to having the students enter the computer lab:  Each time I passed the sign stuck into the blameless mountain, I thought about Catherine Opie's Self-Portrait/Cutting from 1993, in which Opie photographed her back with a drawing of a house and two stick-figure women holding hands (two triangled skirts!) carved into it, along with a sun, a cloud and two birds. She took the photo while the drawing was still dripping with blood. The pacing of Nelson's description here is timed for maximum shock. If you don't know the image ahead of time, what you experience over these two sentences is a crescendo that starts with the word "blameless" and then moves from "cutting" to "carved" to "dripping with blood." The mountains that Nelson passes are blameless because they can't control what other people stick into them; they are the passive recipients of the pro-Prop 8 signs calling for the end to gay marriage. Like the blameless mountains, has Opie's blameless back, too, been defaced? vandalized? made into a site for a political struggle? It's hard to quite know what verb to use here. The one most ready-to-hand is the one Opie provides herself--cut. But, how? Cutting, as a form of ritualistic self-harm, tends to be done on the arms or the legs. How does one cut a childlike picture of friendship or love into one's own back? So, from cutting to carving to drawing, the latter two verbs allowing the knife to turn, to shape, to compose, to redesign the act of mortification. Did Opie do this to herself? That would require fixing the knife and moving her back to create the shapes. It's more likely she had someone carve the picture for her. And then, she took the picture herself, with the blood still dripping. The written description slows the experience of Opie's work down and it asks the reader to construct the image herself. The actual image, though, arrives immediately. Harry and Nelson disagree about what the image means. Or rather, Nelson argues that the image means something troubling and Harry, without commenting on the image, isn't troubled by the possibility that Opie might be grieving the fact that she can't have a "homonormative" family. In this instance, Nelson settles for engaging with the art object via hermeneutics; she interprets it and extracts a stable meaning from it. And then she further locks the meaning down by citing personal information about Opie that confirms that the image is one of grieving. * This stabilizing is only temporary, however. Having introduced Opie's work on page 11, Nelson returns to it on page 64, immediately after recounting all the negative reactions her friends had to Community Action Center, a film that gave Nelson a glimpse of freedom. Ugh, one of Nelson's friends says, why did we have to stare at so many hairy pussies? As if in answer to that question, Nelson returns to Opie and observes that Self-Portrait/Cutting is "in conversation" with another of Opie's self-portraits, Pervert. The childlike picture on Opie's back is "in conversation" with "the ornate script of the word Pervert, which Opie had carved into the front of her chest and photographed a year later." And this image is in conversation with Opie's Self-Portrait/Nursing, taken a decade later, where the scars from the chest-carving remain, leaving a "ghosted" trace of the word "pervert" above the nursing child Opie cradles in her arms. Here, it's clearer that Opie has had the word "pervert" and the ornamentation beneath it carved into her chest by another person. There are other details about the portrait that Nelson elects not to mention, details the unsuspecting viewer may well find difficult to behold: Opie is seated in this image; her head is encased in a dark black leather mask, with a brass ring at the neck; both of her arms have matching rows of flesh piercing needles running up them; she is topless; she is wearing leather pants with a leather belt; the fingers of her hands are interlaced; the posed figure seems relaxed and calm; the figure faces the camera head-on, but can see nothing. This description also slows down the experience of beholding the image. What is this image saying to the Cutting image? It's the same body in both images. The self in both portraits has a face that can't be seen; it is a self that presents her body for others to see. One facet of that self entertains or entertained childlike visions of coupledom. Another facet takes pleasure in receiving pain, in submission, in being at the mercy of another. It's the same body, but visually, the desire for a partner and the desire for pleasure can't be united in a single image. * Which bring us to the third self-portrait: Nursing. Here, in the definitively maternal act of nursing, Opie reveals her face. She looks into her child's eyes; her child looks at her. The child is too young to know what scars are, let alone how to understand their meaning. The child's sex is not revealed. The ghosted scar offers a rebus of sodomitical maternity: the pervert need not die or even go into hiding per se, but nor is adult sexuality foisted upon the child, made its burden. Is this image the place where Opie's identity is secured and stabilized? The one that brings her safely back within the perceived societal norms? I think it would be a mistake to force such a reading on the image either in isolation or in context of the series. The "sodomitical mother" encrypted in this image is a many-faceted self: Opie can show her face in this image because it is the image of Woman that all women are expected to fulfill. And, if the image is looked at quickly or carelessly, the scratches on Opie's chest might be missed altogether or misinterpreted as a skin condition, signs of aging, unfortunate lighting. The three images together allow the viewer to see some facets of Opie's self, facets that sink beneath the surface when she removes the leather mask, picks up her hungry child, and turns her face to the camera. She's had non-reproductive sex and she's reproduced; she grieves, has a fantasy life, has sexual desires, has maternal desires. Doesn't that make her, in the end, a "normal" human being? That's not the conclusion Nelson wants us to reach or that Opie thinks is true. When Nelson returns to Opie on page 74, she quotes Opie, laughing, as she says, "becoming homogenized and part of mainstream domesticity is transgressive for somebody like me." While Nelson isn't laughing along with Opie, she emphasizes the insight at the heart of the laughter: "it's the binary of normative/transgressive that's unsustainable, along with the demand that anyone live a life that's all one thing." Opie moves between the poles of that binary; engaging with her work requires that the viewer resist the pull to sap the images of their power via norm-driven acts of interpretation. Here, again, we find the call to an erotics of art, rather than a hermeneutics, as a practice for self-definition. ... View more

Dr. Lockett is an Assistant Professor of English at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia. She deeply enjoys serving the oldest historically Black college for women, and is committed to teaching and learning about the relationship between composition, new media, sustainability, and collective intelligence. At Spelman, Dr. Lockett actively contributes to the English Department’s writing minor in the areas of professional and multimedia composition. She also provides leadership to the Comprehensive Writing Program in major curricular initiatives like First-Year Composition and Writing Across the Curriculum/Writing in the Disciplines (WAC/WID). In 2015, she was awarded a $10,500 grant from the Associated Colleges of the South (ACS) Grant to organize and lead a faculty development symposium on Integrating Wikipedia into Writing-Intensive Courses at ACS Colleges. She continued her work with Wikipedia in 2017, organizing Spelman’s first-ever Art+Feminism–Black Women’s Herstory Wikipedia Edit-a-thon. Currently, Dr. Lockett is the proud recipient of the UNCF/Mellon Faculty Residence Fellowship (2017-2018) where she is a fellow at Emory University’s James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference. While in residence, she is working on her book project Overflow: Rhetorical Perspectives on Leaks.    Diversity and inclusion.  Equality.  Social justice.    These terms and concepts comfortably blanket educators asserting their desired vision of the world in a distant, cold, and bitter wasteland. Part of the mystery of such words lies in the major assumption that historically white institutions (HWCUs) need to be more integrated, or at least appear mildly interested in some kind of commitment to this effort. However, what exactly do these words mean to faculty and administrators at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and single-sex colleges?     In my own personal experience teaching writing and unofficially administering the Writing Intensive initiative at Spelman College—a historically black college for women in Atlanta, Georgia—I feel alienated from the framing of diversity discourses. Before I discuss certain aspects of my experience, I want to clarify those conversations may be very applicable to predominantly white contexts that are more or less typical for the majority of instructors and researchers participating in our discipline. However, black women faculty face major challenges in work environments where they are a highly represented demographic. Arguably, this educational space comes with significant risks that are sometimes muted by the nature of the college.    I didn’t start to notice the systemic silence surrounding faculty and student demographics at Spelman until I started developing and leading faculty development workshops about the teaching of writing at the college across and within disciplines. Faculty often did not explicitly discuss what it meant to teach black women, or what it was like for black women of various ranks to exchange teaching and learning. There was a kind of assumption that since we were mostly black women gathered in a space, we would know what to do.    And I thought I would know.   The allure of being part of the demographic majority when you are used to being represented as a minority is intoxicating. After living in some of the whitest towns in America from 2001-2013—Kirksville, Missouri; Norman, Oklahoma; and State College, Pennsylvania—the first week of working at Spelman felt unreal. Black women of every size, shape, color, hair type, hair style, and age moved through the space with smiling faces that lent sparkle to the sun and shine on skin that blinded me with the power. We saw each other, feeling that shared electricity of novelty and glimpsing hope. Potential filled me up like fresh fruit. Alive. Fleshy. Ripe. I moved more slowly than at Penn State where I needed to be small, dart fast, and move out the way. And those other places where I regretted being seen or taking up space, where I communed with the trees during breaks to avoid the concrete jungle of young white bodies shuffling about swiftly and completely enough to swallow me whole. In that small private college in Atlanta, I felt an indignant right to be there. Not to color the place, and not to sit on a margin, but to be at the center of its life.    But we weren’t *all* black women faculty, and the black women faculty there most likely had been teaching in predominantly white American college classroom spaces before coming to Spelman. Did we understand that we needed to talk about the meaning of teaching black woman somewhere? To talk about what it means to work with other black women? That we needed to know more about our assumptions about the meaning of our bodies to the students in those classrooms? In faculty meetings? How were students receiving our instruction and what did they expect?   After participating in first-year writing portfolio assessment with an interdisciplinary jury for the past few years, as well as several writing-intensive faculty development workshops on topics like “Integrating Wikipedia into Writing-Intensive Courses” and “Teaching Black Women Writers,” I strongly believe that we need to do even more research on several major issues facing HBCU faculty—including but not limited to:   Their attitudes and expectations towards their training and work environments. Their deliberate or unconscious reproduction of the field’s dominant discourses in writing instruction at HBCUs Their students' responses to an instructor’s demographic embodiment and social relationship to (and within) the black community Their scholarly knowledge of and/or production of research projects centered on Rhetoric and Writing programs at HBCUs—historically or present Their sociopolitical relationship to the HBCU and how it influences access of and distributions of resources both within and outside the college   Next week, March 28-31, I am thrilled to attend my first-ever HBCU Symposium at Howard University, sponsored by Bedford/St. Martin’s and the Howard University Writing Program. This event will be the second time that I have been to a professional development opportunity that organizes HBCU writing faculty representing various institutions in a single space. Two years ago, July 25-28, 2016, I attended a UNCF/Mellon Teaching and Learning Institute on Critical Hip-Hop Rhetoric and Composition led by Shawanda Stewart and Brian Stone at Huston-Tillotson University. This event enabled me to network with a number of passionate writing teachers operating under financial and pedagogical constraints. Although much of the institute’s focus was on teaching students, especially those in first-year composition courses, this event brought up some glaring issues about how the field does diversity in terms of faculty development. For example, Asao Inoue—2018 Program Chair of the CCCC and one of our featured speakers—offered a dynamic, memorable workshop on assessment. Inoue’s discussion about how we may be unknowingly institutionalizing whiteness through our grading practices at the expense of marginalized students resonated with many of us. The fact that HBCUs could be subject to white supremacy by its own instructors was hardly surprising, given some of our colonial histories. Moreover, some of the institute’s attendees were white, and seeking to leverage the most value from diversity and inclusion strategies.   But when we started talking about our institutional context, as scene and agency, the conversation uncomfortably shifted to unknown terrain. To prepare for Inoue’s visit, we were required to read his book, Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future. Feeling as if Inoue was not writing to underrepresented instructors, I asked him to explain how his theory of antiracist assessment applied to HBCUs after we were well over halfway through his planned workshop. Other instructors also wanted to discuss this problem. Moreover, I wanted him to help me understand how to get linguistically conservative instructors to manage “gradeless” classrooms. I recognized quickly that if we were going to have that conversation, it would deviate too sharply from the workshop he planned. I stopped pushing it, and Inoue gracefully and thoughtfully acknowledged the validity of my concerns. Nevertheless, the disconnect between Inoue’s antiracist aims and their relevance to HBCUs seemed jarring, given that he knew he was communicating with an audience of HBCU writing instructors.   Even at a workshop at an HBCU with HBCU faculty, I was compelled to engage “diversity” pedagogical hypotheticals about represented students we don’t teach and instructors whose bodies are not black like me. (For more info about this audience issue, see the endnote.)   At the upcoming HBCU symposium, I am looking forward to discussing some of the unique challenges of teaching writing in the HBCU space. Engagement with contemporary sociopolitical issues may be encouraged even as student deficiency is focused on more than the task at hand. The teaching of grammar is often believed to be the primary and exclusive duty of English departments and Writing Centers, which positions us as easy targets to blame for student failure during faculty meetings. We often lack examples of how to structure and administer our programs because our history and traditions have yet to be fully incorporated in our field’s dominant disciplinary historiographies, our most widely circulated First-Year Composition readers and Rhetoric textbooks, or our conference panel offerings at NCTE, CCCC, ATTW, RSA, NCA, Computers and Writing, etc. Certainly this was illustrated by the teaching and learning institute at Huston-Tillotson.   Moreover, I look forward to using the space of the HBCU symposium to collaboratively develop more resources that racially diverse HBCU faculty need to effectively serve our unique demographic. In this historical moment, I’d love to see conversations about the role of HBCUs in contemporary society take the lead on cultivating an empowered faculty. Without a culture of empathic and collaborative collegiality, black and brown women teachers are just as alienated as they are at PWI/HWCUs. How can we be expected to uplift our beautifully diverse students when it seems so socially unacceptable to mention, let alone critique, the environments we labor in?   Endnote   This audience issue is discussed at length in Sarah Banschbach Valles, Rebecca Day Babcock, and Karen Keaton Jackson, who argue that diversity scholarship about Writing Centers tends to assume that directors are “middle-aged White female(s) and the student, or in some cases the tutor, is the Other” (Writing Center Administrators and Diversity: A Survey, 2017). As their article demonstrates, scholarship about the field’s administrative leadership such as Writing Center Directors and WPAs is scarce, raising questions about the racial landscape of the field’s entirety of practitioners and those they serve. While Jill Gladstein’s National Census of Writing Project offers some sense of institutional writing program representation, it does not collect data about the bodies occupying them. One recent exception is "Race, Silence, and Writing Program Administration: A Qualitative Study of US College Writing Programs,” published by Genevieve Garda de Mueller and Iris Ruiz last year (2017).    References   de Mueller, Genevieve Garda, and Iris Ruiz. "Race, Silence, and Writing Program Administration: A Qualitative Study of US College Writing Programs." WPA: Writing Program Administration 40.2 (2017).   Fulford, Collie. "Hit the Ground Listening: An Ethnographic Approach to New WPA Learning." WPA: Writing Program Administration 35.1 (2011): 159-62.   Green Jr., David Frank. "Notes of a Native Son: Considerations when Discussing Race and Privilege in the Teacher's Lounge." The Journal for Understanding and Dismantling Privilege 4.2 (2014): 261-75.   Hocks, M. "Using multimedia to teach communication across the curriculum." WPA: Writing Program Administration 25.1-2 (2001): 25-43.   Howson, Emily, Chris Massenburg, and Cecilia Shelton. "Reflections on Building a Popular Writing Course." Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy 3.1 (2016).   Rose, Shirley K., Lisa S. Mastrangelo, and Barbara L'Eplattenier. "Directing first-year writing: The new limits of authority." College Composition and Communication (2013): 43-66.     Taylor, Hill. "Black spaces: Examining the writing major at an urban HBCU." Composition Studies 35.1 (2007): 99-112.   Valles, Sarah Banschbach, Rebecca Day Babcock, and Karen Keaton Jackson. "Writing Center Administrators and Diversity: A Survey."   ... View more

Today's featured guest blogger is Howard Cox‌, Instructor at Angelina College. My epiphany came one day when I was teaching Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises in a sophomore literature course.  In Chapter VIII of the novel, Jake and his friend Bill are taking a stroll along the river Seine.  Bill, who evidently has decided to avoid hangovers by never sobering up, had previously suggested that they stop almost every ten feet for a drink.  After looking down the river at Notre Dame, the bridges over the river, and the islands covered with trees in the river, Bill remarks, “It’s pretty grand,” and “God, I love to get back.”   A few moments later, Jake, being considerate of his friend asks, “Want to have a drink?”  Bill says, “No, I don’t need it.” The point I make about this exchange is that the beauty of the cathedral at night, the river, and the scenery is intoxicating enough in and of itself.  Alcohol isn’t necessary. My students, many of whom already have extensive experience with alcohol, don’t get this.  My aha moment came when a student asked about part of the description that says, “Down the river was Notre Dame squatting against the night sky.”  “Why does it say squatting?” she asked. “How can a church squat?” I explained that Notre Dame was a Gothic cathedral built in the Middle Ages with flying buttresses.  “Viewed from the right angle,” I said, “it looks like a giant toad squatting on the river bank.”  Blank looks were on every face.  “It’s a kind of awe-inspiring sight,” I offered.  “Have you ever seen something so amazing that you just kept staring at it?”  Crickets chirped in response. I was a getting a little exasperated when inspiration struck, and I happened to be in a classroom with a computer hooked to a projector.  A couple of minutes later I had a southern view of Notre Dame, about four feet tall, up on the screen.  Comprehension began to creep into students’ faces.             “Yeah,” one said, “it does kind of look like a frog.”             “Definitely squatting,” said another.             I had learned an important lesson.  Our students, who have smart phones with more computing power than the spacecraft that went to the moon, often don’t bother to Google images of things they are unfamiliar with, any more than they look up new words on Dictionary.com.  Seeing something, though, is often key to understanding the point an author is making.  Incorporating this into a lecture yields surprisingly positive results.             The following week I was teaching Wordsworth in a British Literature course.  This time I was ready and was able to quickly reference online photos of Tintern Abbey and the River Wye.  It may not have helped any students to understand the themes in the poems we were discussing, but it definitely helped them to understand the inspiration for the poems and the places being described.             In recent semesters I have added props to the online visuals I have been using.  When discussing fiction dealing the American Civil War, I pass around a replica revolver, a Minie ball, and a kepi cap.  There is something about touching and holding an artifact that brings the literature to life for many students.  For a British Literature class on the Medieval Period I recently acquired a broadsword replica.  When I discuss how medieval swords were purposefully made to look like crosses, it is much easier to make the point when you have one to display and for the students to touch.  After a serious intellectual discussion about swords in that class, we took ours outside and sliced a watermelon with it.             My experience with using props and visuals has been overwhelmingly positive, but there are some legitimate concerns that some instructors may have: Cost: You can find anything for sale online these days, but I was surprised to find good quality replicas were available for not much money at all. The most expensive prop I have is a revolver replica that was $80.00.  Time constraints: It does take time to display visuals, and to have students interact with props.  Some advance planning is always involved, but I don’t find this to be any more burdensome than planning, say, a group activity, for example.  I often arrive a little early to pull up online visuals on a classroom computer, and to make sure the projector is working. Safety: Replica firearms are impossible to fire, but some states do have regulations concerning their display and use. Sword replicas are sold without sharpened edges. The only danger from either of these props is dropping one on your foot.  ... View more

This semester, students have been invited to engage with reading a whole nonfiction book from a choice of three twentieth-century texts: Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, and Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge. I chose these three books because excerpts from them are frequently anthologized in first-year essay collections, and each text deals with a still-contemporary issue of relevance to my students: decolonial theory (Anzaldúa); racism (Baldwin); and climate change (Williams). Students could chose to work individually or in groups on a creative project that would merge in-school and out-of-school concerns.   The assignment for the creative projects is copied later in this post. The general invitation asks students to create a multimedia piece that is not necessarily digital, but that can be digitally documented, such as a handmade collage or mural that can be photographed, or spoken word lyrics that can be transcribed to a document and uploaded to our institution’s eportfolio system.   A creative project, according to the assignment, is essentially a rhetorical act that asks students to seize the circumstances of the moment (kairos) to persuade audiences to move toward action, or at the very least to pay attention to issues that have long been ignored and that continue to provoke dire consequences.   One example of a previous creative project that I shared with students (and previously on Bedford Bits: A Single Story (audio file)) was a song based on Chiminanda Ngozi Adiche’s TED Talk “The Danger of a Single Story.” The song riffs on the theme of Adiche’s talk, inviting listeners to consider the complexities of identity that resist stereotypes and that move beyond a “single story.” The three assigned books also address complexities of identity, and work rhetorically to persuade readers to consider everyday life as deeply embodied in its complications.   This semester, the introduction to the creative projects was preceded by a moment of silence for victims of gun violence. Our classes met the day after the walkout efforts initiated by the students in Parkland, Florida, to commemorate the first-month anniversary of gun violence and the murders of seventeen people at their high school. The walkout and activism surrounding the many recent occurrences of gun violence are examples of creative projects, as a student noted by drawing the class’s attention to a recent exhibit of murder victims’ shoes on the lawn of the Capitol in Washington, D.C.   At the end of this project, students will write an analytic essay that asks them to reflect on their processes of making their creative project and the insights gained from reading the book they selected. We are just at the beginning of this work. I hope to report back later in the semester.    Writing Project 2: CREATIVE PROJECT For WP 2, you are asked to make a creative project based on the book you have chosen. The creative project contains two parts:   PART 1: Create a multimedia piece that shows your relationship with the book. For the multimedia piece, you can create (alone or in collaboration with others in class): photography, music, video, artwork, poetry, spoken word, podcast, interview, poster, collage, graphs, charts, experiments, blueprints, demonstration, performance, fiction, memoir, zines, graphic novels, service project, and so on. The piece can relate to your major, to interests outside of your major, or to interests outside of school. Post your piece on our eportfolio system. The original piece need NOT be digital, but make sure that you can make a digital record of your work to post online.   PART 2: Write an analysis that focuses on your relationship with the book, your process work for the multimedia piece, and your final multimedia product. Here are some questions to begin, but remember to go deeper as your work moves forward:   Your RELATIONSHIP with the book What seems most significant? What causes cognitive dissonance? What connections did you find to 21st-century thought and action? What points seemed confusing? Your PROCESS work for the multimedia piece How did you decide what to create? What steps did you take? What successes did you have? What frustrations did you find? Your final multimedia PRODUCT: Does the multimedia piece truly reflect your relationship with the book? If so why? If not, why not? What would you change? ... View more

At this year’s CCCC, I participated in a roundtable on “Feminist Rhetorics in the Age of Trump.” Noting that the narrative spun daily by Trump is filled with lies, mis- and dis-information, and “alternative facts” (a phrase that won Kellyanne Conway the 2017 NCTE Doublespeak Award), and that we must do everything we can to help our students resist this narrative, I offered a series of exercises and assignments aimed at helping students to STOP, LOOK, and LISTEN before they TALK (much less TWEET).   These exercises and assignments all aim at reflection, contemplation, and careful looking and listening. They aim for understanding rather than winning at all cost, for stepping back and analyzing the full context of any statement or situation before rushing to judgment or conclusions.   One “looking” assignment I have used throughout my career is to ask a student, unobtrusively, to serve as “observer of the day.” This student watches interactions intently, noting who speaks before and after whom, for how long, and in what clusters. How much the teacher talks and who responds. How turn-taking works and to what ends. Who never speaks. What body language can suggest about the ethos of the classroom that day. Then the observer reports findings the next day and we discuss just how well our classroom is working. I like this exercise because it engages students in careful reflection and self-reflection, and because I learn so much from it as well: on more than one occasion, I have been surprised to see how much I dominate discussion, how I seem to elicit comments from only certain kinds of students, how I may have silenced someone. This kind of quiet reflection and contemplation can help to counter, I hope, the narrative of “winners” and “losers” the president is so intent on fostering, and can encourage stepping back and taking the long view, so I recommend it.   But as I should have known, now there’s an app for this! Called Equity Maps, it’s an app for tablets, marketed by iPad for iOS devices (at a cost of $2.99), and aimed at helping teachers “Effortlessly trace and assess your students’ interaction, performance, and involvement.” I think I may spring for the $2.99 and take a much closer look to see how Equity Maps and its analytics may help me improve on my old-fashioned “observer of the day” method. But I won’t be too surprised if I decide to stick with my tried and true version rather than its electronic replacement!   You can check Equity Maps out for yourself, or perhaps you already have: if so, I’d love to hear what you think of it!     Credit: Pixabay Image 2557399 by StockSnap, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more