This post originally appeared on the blog on 2/10/12       I read Lorraine Berry’s Salon article, “Dear Female Students: Stop Writing about Men,” with great interest.  She gives good advice that all college students ought to hear: You’re not defined by your relationships; you are more than who you choose to date; a breakup is not the most significant or interesting thing that has ever happened to you.  But I was surprised to see her focus her essay on female students, and to learn that, in her experience, “The females in the class tend to write about a romantic relationship, and the males do not.”  I have had almost the exact opposite experience.  I can only recall one female student ever writing about her own romantic troubles, but I’ve read—as either a student or a teacher—the “guy’s break-up narrative” easily a dozen times. To be sure, I don’t think I’m talking about the male equivalent of the type of essay Berry is talking about.  She writes that “only once or twice in the nine years I’ve been teaching these courses has a guy expressed his need to understand why a relationship has fallen apart.”  I haven’t really read that essay either.  The type of relationship essay I’ve read from male writers tends—more often than not—to be more angry than reflective. I first encountered this type of narrative during my senior year of college, in a workshop where a fellow student ended his own end-of-the-affair narrative with the triumphant line, “I was sick of playing that bitch’s games.”  Even typing that line now, fifteen years later, I cringe both for her and for him—she was, after all, a fellow student on a campus of just over two thousand, and he certainly had no idea how committing such a line to the page and handing out photocopies to the class made him seem… well, less than gentlemanly.  This trend continued in grad school.   There was the guy from my M.A. program who gave a paragraph to each girlfriend in a five page essay, each paragraph devoted to chronicling the woman’s flaws. And I’ll never forget the guy from my Ph.D. years who described—in pornographic detail—the sex with his ex-girlfriend while Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer” played on his stereo.  The above examples come from former classmates, but I’ve occasionally received these types of essays from my own students, too, and it always seems to me that the men who write these narratives of the break-ups—with their unflattering descriptions and their potentially embarrassing sexual revelations—are writing not to reflect on “why a relationship has fallen apart,” the way some of the women Berry has taught do, but are instead writing as a form of revenge, an attempt to “get back” at those who either broke their hearts or somehow became a romantic disappointment. I was talking about this phenomenon with my own nonfiction students last week—before I even read Berry’s article— as we were discussing Dinty W. Moore’s observation in his anthology/textbook The Truth of the Matter that “A helpful way to approach the question of memory in creative nonfiction is to occasionally investigate your own motives.  Are you remembering something a certain way in order to make yourself look more like the hero of the situation, or in order to cast your lazy brother-in-law in an even more unpleasant light?  If so, you are being dishonest.”   I would say the same thing is true when writing about relationships—in fact, I think it’s even more true.  It seems to me that a failed romance provides fertile ground for self-deception and self-serving excuses, which will inevitably lead to a dishonest essay or memoir. I don’t want to tell my students not to write about things that make them angry, or that they have strong feelings about—such subjects might lead to brilliant insight, either in their writing or in their lives.  But I do caution them to ask themselves, honestly, if they’re ready to write about these subjects.  Can they reflect without being overwhelmed by their emotions?  Because if the answer is no, and the piece of writing lacks that critical, honest interrogation of the self, then the essay or memoir will ultimately be unsuccessful.  And above all else, I try to discuss with my students why we write what we write.  If a student is genuinely trying to come to an understanding of an experience, trying to figure out something about himself or an event or relationship he lived through, awesome.  That’s the point.  But, I caution my students, if the whole point is to vilify, degrade, or humiliate another person in front of a classroom full of people, then perhaps this is an essay that ought not be written.  Once it’s written down and submitted for workshop, it’s out there, and can’t be taken back.  And I doubt too many of us would want to be judged by the things we say—or write—in the heat of an angry or heartbroken moment.  ... View more

Like many of Nikole Hannah-Jones’ longtime admirers, I was thrilled to hear the New York Times investigative reporter won a 2017 MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” for her culture-shifting analytical reporting on segregated schooling and racial injustice.  The award confirmed for my co-author, Stuart Greene, and me all the reasons we chose to anchor our chapter on Education in the 4th edition of our book, From Inquiry to Academic Argument with Hannah-Jones’ essay, “School Segregation, the Continuing Tragedy of Ferguson.” Just as Hannah-Jones explains in this short MacArthur Foundation video, she models in her essay the method of inquiry that moves readers beyond simply reacting to a tragedy like the police shooting of Michael Brown. Hannah-Jones teaches us to ask why the neighborhood where Brown attended school was so segregated. She shows why it's important to ask about the specific policies that dismantled the very desegregation laws that benefited Michael Brown’s mother in the same school district just a generation earlier. She invites readers to examine the data comparing the vast disparities in academic proficiencies of students in the lowest-performing school district in Missouri, the Normandy district where Michael Brown attended school, with the top-performing predominately white district, Clayton, just five miles away.  Finally, she demonstrates the power of asking the question we train all our students to ask: “So what?” Her response -- after weaving connections between personal, political, and historical examples -- is devastating: “Students who spend their careers in segregated schools can look forward to a life on the margins …. They are more likely to be poor. They are more likely to go to jail. They are less likely to graduate from high school, to go to college, and to finish if they go. They are more likely to live in segregated neighborhoods as adults” (This citation appears on page 451 of the forthcoming edition of From Inquiry to Academic Writing). In other words, moving from only gut-wrenching sorrow about police violence to inquiry and analysis can allow us to see systematic patterns that maintain inequality. And, seeing them, we can begin to recognize their characteristics, and act to disrupt them.  While Hannah-Jones is a journalist, she models the academic habits of mind we strive to instill in our students — asking questions that reveal patterns, and analyzing those patterns to understand their significance in the lives of real people. Further, she models how to examine the implications for a nation whose pledge proclaims “justice for all," while policies deliberately work against this aspiration. What texts have been particularly helpful for you in modeling habits of mind that engage your students in meaningful inquiry? Please considering sharing in the comments, below. Click here to see more articles by Nikole Hannah-Jones. ... View more

This fall has brought a series of disasters, from Hurricane Harvey in Texas to Irma in Florida to the wildfires that have recently raged in northern California. The effects of these disasters are still all around us, particularly in Puerto Rico, which was hit by not one but two huge storms, the last one named Maria. In the month that has passed since Hurricane Maria hit, many have spoken and sung out in support: Lin Manuel Miranda’s “Almost Like Praying” is just one example. And all across the country, students are writing about their own experiences with these disasters. As always, writing provides an opportunity to express thoughts, feelings, and emotions; it also offers catharsis and connection—and can lead to action.  In this regard, meet Amaryllis Lopez, whom I’ve known through a Bread Loaf Teachers’ Network’s project called Next Generation Leadership Network (I wrote about this exciting initiative in a previous blog post). Amaryllis is one of this group of leaders, who are already making a difference in a number of different sites around the country.  Currently a student at Bridgewater State (class of 2020), Amaryllis is majoring in English and minoring in Latin American and Caribbean Studies; she is also president of La Sociedad Latinix and a Social Action Writing Leader in the Andover Bread Loaf program in Lawrence. As you’ll see, she is also using writing as a major means of self-expression, as testimony, and as a vibrant call for action. Here is one of her recent blog posts, “Maria, Maria,” which she hopes will get others writing and acting positively in the face of total disaster. Amaryllis’s post originally appeared on the Next Generation Leadership Network blog and the poem is inspired by Carlos Santana’s “Maria Maria.”   Maria Maria October 5, 2017  Amaryllis Lopez Lawrence, MA   Hey, everyone! Long time no post. As many of you know Hurrican Maria recently hit Puerto Rico devastatingly hard. A lot of my family still live in Puerto Rico and I’m still waiting on responses of safety from a couple of members. As usual, 45 “response” is unprofessional, inhumane, and ignorant….. the only way I can make sense of the world is through poetry. This is a poem I’ve been working on since the day the hurricane hit. I’m still as angry, hurt, and lonely as that day. Poetry is the only medium I know that can effectively educate and on hard topics and conversations in an inclusive way. With poetry, everyone is involved-- whether you are listening or performing, everyone in the room brings the poem to life for the words cannot be ignored and you can never say you weren’t aware. It’s in its infancy, but this is the latest version.  I finished it today. ♪ Se mira Maria on the corner thinking of ways to make it better ♪ but the US aint never helped us get any better only took our ports to make them richer la isla will be headlining news for a couple days then your president will drown it out the Red Cross with proclaim themselves saviors and wipe away our blood with Benjamins turn our pain into currency make a meal for themselves out of our hunger ♪ Maria Maria ♪ she cries for help ♪ stop the looting, stop the shooting Uncle Sam pick pocking on the corner ♪ ahora vengo mama cause her daughters have been uprooted and planted in a different son every year every year the sun gets a little hotter and now there’s plenty of water to put out the fire it’s been a week since I’ve written this poem and nothing has been done ♪ Ni gota de esperanza ♪ F*** Elaine, this shit ain’t a good news story your satisfaction ain’t shit when my people are dying when laws are in place to benefit you first before us this shit is a genocide people are dying, I don’t know how to say that poetically like y’all just gonna claim a whole territory and then forget it’s yours debt be our housewarming present and the only time we be American is when we’re on the front line you’re not on our front lines it’s clear that we are not on your minds cause getting angry about people taking knees for police brutality is more offense than ignoring millions of Americans in need ♪ Maria Maria she reminds me of a west side story ♪ Of a modern day colonizer Something like a punishment A slow pulse A muted drum line like the heart of the Caribbean ain’t screaming in an empty all-inclusive resort storage room, smiling for tips 24/7 while you sip on your drinks 24/7 for the next 6 months there will be no power 24/7 is there any light left in your hearts? ♪ Borikén, you know you’re my lover When the wind blows I can feel you through the weather And even when we’re apart It feels like we’re together ♪  Credit: Pixaby Image 1292634 by Lenaeriksson, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

Today’s guest blogger is Tanya Rodrigue, an assistant professor in English and coordinator of the Writing Intensive Curriculum Program at Salem State University in Massachusetts. I often take my three-year old son to a maker’s lounge at a nearby museum. He transforms popsicle sticks, pipe cleaners, legos, paper cups, scraps of paper and whatever other materials available that day into his own creations. In his play, he makes things like spaceships and communication contraptions, which may or may not resemble a material object in the world.  My son learns through play: play in public places like the museum; play at his school, which operates from a play-based curriculum; and play at home with toys, cardboard boxes, costumes, and even flashlights.   Scholars have positioned play as optimal for learning: play fosters and invites problem-solving abilities, curiosity, exploration, discovery, inquiry, creativity, persistence, oral language, collaboration, intrinsic motivation, and strong engagement. While we know that play is a highly effective learning tool, it is often relegated to spaces where children learn. Positioned at the opposite end of the spectrum from “academic,” play is not often encouraged or integrated into classrooms in higher education. Yet, according to scholar Henry Jenkins, play—“the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving”—is one of the skills needed to be literate in the 21 st century (Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture). Thus, as college instructors, teaching students how to “play” is now arguably part of our jobs.   In my pedagogy, I have recognized the value of play—both structured and unstructured, and material and intellectual play —as a means to learn about writing, rhetoric, and genre. One semi-structured material play activity I facilitate in my digital writing courses is the transformation of my class into a maker’s lounge. The purpose is four-fold: to motivate and nurture the 3-year old inside of my college students, evoking an excitement for learning and doing; to encourage creativity and innovation; and to position the writing process as a process of play, and writing itself as a play-based activity. I ultimately want my students to adopt the same mindset and approach they have and use in making something during this activity as they will when they compose a digital project.   Activity Step #1: Bring in a plethora of materials students can use to build something such as legos, play-doh, string, tape, pens, paper.  Below is a picture of material I use. Spread the material out on a table.   Step #2: Tell students that they’ll be working with the material in three different ways. Then, one at a time, explain the steps. Set a five-minute timer for each step. Take some materials from the table and create something. Take two more pieces of material from the table and add it to your creation. Now, take the material you have and create something completely different.   Step #3: After students finish their creations, give them 10 minutes to respond to the following questions: How would you describe this experience? What did you create in each iteration of the activity, and in what ways did you work with the material to make these creations? How did it feel, both intellectually and emotionally, to add material to the creation in step 2 or to transform the material into something completely different in step 3? Why would I ask you to do this in a writing class?   Step #4: Ask students to share their responses with the class, and facilitate a large class discussion about the relationship between play and writing.   Reflection This activity yields a fun time, imaginative creations, and thoughtful reflections and realizations about writing and the writing process. Students’ creations have ranged from the simple—a bunny rabbit made with two pens and a paper plate later turned into a cat face—to the complex—a carousel with toy soldiers transformed into an elaborate military scene with a detailed storyline, complete with roles for each soldier. Students described the experience as “fun,” “creative,” “relaxing,” “engaging,” “silly,” “no-pressure,” and “simple.” Some students surprised themselves with what they made, either because they didn’t think they were creative and then recognized they were, or because an idea suddenly emerged, they claimed, out of “nowhere.” Other students talked about feeling uneasy about creating something or not knowing what they were doing while they were doing it, but eventually feeling excited about the finished product.   From this activity, my students exceeded my expectations, learning much about writing and the writing process. Some lessons they took away from the activity are: the value of experimentation, play, revision, editing, and thinking “outside the box” the realization that there are different ways to approach writing, and that constraints can yield creativity the possibilities inherent in adding and transforming material, combining material (which some likened to modalities), and working within and against genre conventions and constraints the recognition that there is no one “right way” to work with material when writing, and that it is possible to make “something” out of “nothing” This activity can prepare students for a more structured activity in play with alphabetic or digital writing, and/or provide them with a frame of mind for approaching a composing task. Photo by the author. ... View more

This semester my class is partnering with organizations in Syracuse, NY, as well as with schools in the Middle East/North Africa. Our goal is to foster a discussion on the meaning of human rights, religious freedom, and democracy. Much of this work is taking place in the context of our Middle Eastern student partners being confronted by ISIS on a daily basis. To prepare for these dialogues, my students have been reading, discussing, and considering the history of the region and its political contours. Indeed, this past week, we were just on the cusp of beginning our conversations.   Then one of our Middle Eastern partners vanished.     A scheduled Skype call with my class never materialized. We still have not heard from him. My students feared the worse might have occurred. My sense was less ominous. For the moment, I am thinking that the absence is one of the typical partner issues any project faces. “Time will tell” if I’m being naïve. Still, in the immediate moment, I had to figure out how to move the class forward. It was at this moment that I realized the value of having multiple partners in any community project.   Often, when forming community partnership projects, teachers are advised to keep it simple – work with only one partner. When that partner is unable to keep their commitments, however, the project will often falter, if not actually fail. By itself, this possibility is an argument for creating projects with multiple partners.   Yet the more important reason against the strategy of the “single partner” is that it misrepresents the ways change occurs in a community.  Change is a collaborative coalitional project. To create change within a community is to work within a space where a network of committed organizations share resources toward a common goal, constantly amending plans as organizations encounter difficulties fulfilling their promises. Change is an alliance in constant flux.  If our goal is to show how change occurs then our community-based classroom projects need to demonstrate this fact for our students.   Here are some guiding principles:         1. Your Classroom Should Exist Within a Coalition When designing a community-based project for my students, I try to think of all the different actors who have a stake in a particular issue. Out of that set of organizations and individuals, I then consider with whom I have an existing partnership and an ongoing effort on a particular issue. Once I have a set of partners willing to join their existing efforts to the possibilities of my class, we develop a plan to distribute required work. (For advice on how to develop “work plans,” see Writing Communities, p. 233.)         2. Each Coalition Member Should Have Unique but Integrated Tasks The purpose of having multiple partners is to create a set of projects and tasks that are interrelated in that they support a common goal, but are not necessarily dependent on each other. For instance, community projects often find it useful to develop informational sheets on an issue to distribute in a neighborhood; community forums are also considered important, yet one is not dependent on the other. If one partner is unable to follow through on the forum, the other partner’s information sheets can still be produced in alliance with my class. This allows the project (and the class) to keep momentum going despite setbacks.         3. Student Work Should Be Distributed Among Partners Multiple partners create the possibility of different types of work for students. Rather than just tutoring, for instance, the students might also run workshops with parents about the goals of education; create short videos featuring students reading their work for a local community access station; produce policy papers for use by community organizations focused on school reform. That is, a partnership network allows students to not only experience ways in which collaboration can produce actual change, it also allows them to bring their particular strengths to this collaboration.         4. When One Partner “Vanishes,” Redistribute Work Among Other Partners If a project exists among many different organizations, when a partner has to drop out (or can’t fulfill its tasks), you can move students to other ongoing projects. This both demonstrates the value of coalitional work when creating change and insures that students have continuous work to do in the class. Such moves are not possible when a class is premised on a single project.   In arguing for our classrooms to be distributed among a network of community partners, I can imagine an argument that this creates more work for the teacher. My experience is that this is just the opposite. Each person’s individual workload shrinks and becomes more focused as collective resources are brought into alliance, and each person can witness greater impact for their efforts when placed within a collective movement. This is a powerful lesson for our students to learn.   As I conclude this post, I continue to hope that soon I will hear from my partner and friend in the Middle East. Yes, partners vanish, but we are all always wishing for their safe return. ... View more

Truth be told, we really did make a movie about a handbook this year. But the way I see it, it's more a movie about a community--a community of writing teachers who believe in a particular handbook and the power it's given them to transform their program, unify their classroom vocabulary, and instill in their students habits of mind and habits of practice that make academic writers. If you have 6 minutes, I invite you to view A Writer's Reference: The Movie. I'll buy the popcorn. "Most of my better students do come back to me and say A Writer's Reference is the book they've hung on to and turned to over the course of the last few years. They see it not as a text for a course but a text for their college education."    --Andrea McCrary, Queens University of Charlotte "My students become better writers, they become more comfortable writers. They see models of good sentence style and structure, and they apply that to their own writing. And a lot of that is owed to the handbook."  --Timothy Regetz, Blinn College "I'm very excited about the ninth edition."   --Anna Hall-Zieger, Blinn College A very big and grateful shout out to University of Alabama, Blinn College, UC San Diego, Norwich University, Queens University of Charlotte, SUNY Buffalo State, and Eastern Oregon University. ... View more

 Today's guest blogger is Kim Haimes-Korn, a Professor in the English Department at Kennesaw State University. Kim’s teaching philosophy encourages dynamic learning, critical digital literacies and focuses on students’ powers to create their own knowledge through language and various “acts of composition.” She likes to have fun every day, return to nature when things get too crazy and think deeply about way too many things. She loves teaching. It has helped her understand the value of amazing relationships and boundless creativity. You can reach Kim at khaimesk@kennesaw.edu or visit her website Acts of Composition.   As students create multimodal projects they learn the roles and skills of content creators. With our students composing through text and image, it is important that we also focus on composing for visual rhetoric. This series of related assignments introduces students to the practices of digital composers through the creation and sharing of digital galleries.   Background Reading Resources on composing for digital images (see list under “Compose” below) The St. Martin’s Handbook 8e - Ch. 3e, Organizing Verbal and Visual Information; Ch. 16, Making Design Decisions; Ch. 18, Communicating in Other Media The Everyday Writer 6e (also available with exercises) - Ch. 22, Making Design Decisions EasyWriter 6e (also available with exercises) - Ch. 3c, Visuals and Media   Assignment Steps Curate: The practices of curation and repurposing are valuable skills for multimodal composers. Most work in my classes is housed on blogs in which students create a collection of academic works and digital projects. As part of this digital space, I have them dedicate an area/section to curate an image gallery. Each week I give them image assignments (10-20 images per week) that are either content driven and clustered by ideas or focused on visual composing techniques as a heuristic lens. From these assignments they curate an ongoing image gallery with captions. They organize the gallery into a visual layout that allows their audience to easily view them in organized sub-sections to showcase each week’s assignment. Although students will use them to create content over the term, the curated galleries should also be engaging online spaces when viewed on their own. Through purposeful captioning, students learn the importance of connecting text and image for intentional, rhetorical communication. Captions go beyond naming and speak to meaning, composition, and design.   Compose: Next, we make students aware that visual composition is more than happenstance. We teach them to thoughtfully compose images through visual rhetoric and design aesthetic. They can compose in naturally occurring environments and capture cultural moments or stage scenes that intentionally communicate specific ideas to others. The images each week can stand on their own or can reveal a sequence when viewed together. I send students out to research and analyze compelling images and supply them with some resources about the practices of visual composers. You can easily find these with a quick internet search but I include a few here—interestingly all in lists of ten. Ten Rules of Photo Composition and Why they Work Top Ten Composing Tips: Take Your Digital Photography to the Next Level Ten Ways to Take Better Pictures with your Smartphone   Collaborate: Like traditional assignments, image work benefits from peer response and the sharing of rhetorical decisions. For this part of the series I have students create a grab-and-go gallery in which they choose an image and explain their rhetorical choices. I open up a blank presentation in Google Slides where they can collaboratively compose a full class presentation of their strongest images. Students first gather in groups and show their images. Group members help choose the strongest of the weekly images. Each student then takes their strongest image and places it on an individual slide along with the rhetorical and visual choices they made. We then display the whole slideshow.  Students take turns presenting as their slide comes up while students in the audience provide feedback and discuss composing techniques and strategies. Here is an example of one of these grab-and-go galleries designed to emphasize visual composing practices:   Reflection This activity gives us an opportunity to see and celebrate the work of others and reinforces the idea that there are rhetorical decisions involved in visual composition. This grab-and-go collaborative presentation is created on-the-spot and is completed within a single class period. It is a quick and easy way to share curated images (and other multimodal projects) and reinforces classroom practices such as digital collaboration and peer response while also teaching valuable visual composing practices. ... View more

As a writing teacher, my number one goal is to see students succeed. I live for those moments when students write something that brings them pride, when they connect with a community or idea that resonates with them, or when they realize they can do something they thought was impossible. These are the moments when I see the rewards of teaching reflected through my students. College and university administrators also place a high premium on “student success,” even naming entire offices or divisions after that goal. Yet, administrators are often looking at specific data when they talk about student success—things like grades, retention, and graduation rates, to name a few. While some of these metrics might seem like impersonal numbers when viewed from a distance, my instructional evidence of individual student success and university measures of student success aren’t really that far apart. In some ways, they are two sides of the same coin. When I encourage students to find solutions to writing problems on their own and they succeed, they develop skills of persistence that will help them later in college. And if students begin to develop a set of tools in my class that will help them tackle tough writing projects later in other classes, they will have a better chance of success. I have become increasingly convinced that a focus on Writing in the Disciplines (WID) in writing courses can be a powerful tool to partner with other efforts on campus to build student success. WID helps students think about the transition from their prior writing experiences to college and beyond, and it asks them to think about their future college and career aspirations. In other words, WID can help them transition to college and begin to explore and identify with a future major and career.  The transition to college can be a challenging one. Vincent Tinto, a researcher interested in what helps students succeed as they make that transition, has written extensively about three stages that he identified that students go through as they adapt to college: separation, transition, and incorporation (Tinto, 1988). At the separation stage, students might feel disconnected to prior communities and commitments, and successful students move through a transition stage and then find a way to connect themselves with new communities in college (incorporation). Our goals as educators is to help shepherd them through that process. Think about the kinds of assignments that are common in a WID approach and how they might help students work through these stages: A Literacy Narrative: When students write literacy narratives, we can give them the space to think about the process of separation and the transition they are making to writing in college A Literacy Profile: A literacy profile of a professional or a scholar in the student’s field of study can help them make a connection to someone who can mentor them in the kinds of writing they might be expected to do in their field An Annotated Bibliography: Compiling a list of sources that document what others have written and said about an issue can help a student figure out how to enter the conversation. By helping students build connections between the content in their writing classes and their future majors and careers, WID helps students with the process of transition and incorporation. As writing teachers, we can be partners in a campus-wide effort to give students the tools they need to succeed.   These are just a few sample assignments. What other assignments can you think of that would help students move through the three stages of separation, transition, and incorporation? What are the biggest questions and concerns that you have about trying a WID approach? If you’ve tried it already, what are some of the strategies you have found to be most effective? 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

It's beginning to feel like every time I sit down to write this bi-weekly blog of mine that America has just endured another calamity of such mind-numbing atrociousness that I can't simply ignore it, while at the same time knowing that there is nothing I can say that can possibly make anyone—students and colleagues alike—feel any better about it. And the massacre at the Route 91 Harvest music festival in Las Vegas has placed me in that position once again.   So I'm going to go ahead and address the matter analytically, but there are some things I will not do. First, I will not waste my time, or yours, demanding that America finally do something to control the spread of weapons of mass destruction to everyone who wants them, because I know perfectly well that America is not going to do anything of the kind. Second, I'm not going to try to explain why nothing is going to happen because it would be entirely futile to do so. Suffice to say that we all know the script: the political rituals that follow upon every one of these atrocities, and the way that those rituals invariably play out as they do. Third, I'm not going to blame "the media" for the carnage; that, too, is a common, though by no means illegitimate, part of the post-massacre script, as this essay in Inside Higher Education demonstrates once again. And finally, I'm not going to blame the high level of violence in popular culture for the high level of violence in everyday life—though that, too, is a not-unworthy subject for careful, data-driven analysis. Rather, I am going to look at the difference between the typical (and conventional) narrative to be found in violent entertainment, and the formless anomie to be found in the seemingly endless string of massacres in schools, movie theaters, night clubs, music festivals, and heaven knows what other sites, that plague our days and nights today.   Consider, then, the typical narrative of violent entertainment. Reduced to its most basic structure, it involves a victim (or victims), a villain (or villains), and a savior (or saviors). The story—whether told in the generic form of horror, or murder mystery, or thriller, or war epic, or superhero saga, or sword and sorcerer fantasy, or whatever—tells the tale of how the villain is, in some way or another, opposed by the savior, and, usually, stopped (even when the story is open-ended, which is not infrequent in contemporary entertainment, there is usually some heroic figure, or figures, to identify with, who at least provides a model of sanity amidst the mayhem). This is what stories conventionally do: they give shape to the horrors of existence and give them a kind of meaning that Aristotle called "catharsis." When the detective catches the killer, the vampire slayer drives the stake through the monster's heart, the evil empire is defeated, the wicked witch is dissolved or the evil sorcerer vaporized, the bad king is dethroned (or de-headed: Macbeth is part of this system as well), and so on and so forth, the audience overcomes its pity and terror, and, to put it as plainly as possible, feels better.   But this is exactly what does not happen when someone, who has been living among us—and who, having shown no signs of madness or murderousness, has plotted his massacre completely under the radar of law enforcement—suddenly cuts loose. More often than not, now, he also kills himself. And we are left with nothing but the carnage: there is no wily detective, no heroic hobbit, no boy wizard, no man/woman in spandex, no warrior, no secret agent, no martial arts expert, nor any kind of savior at all: just the sorry spectacle of missed opportunities on the part of those we rely on to protect us—from the police to the politicians—and an almost total lack of understanding of why the carnage occurred at all. I realize that the heroic acts of victims and first-responders on the ground in such cases can help mitigate the horror, but it is all too after-the-fact for any real comfort when we know that it is all going to happen again. This is the reality of real-life horror, and there is no redemptive narrative in sight. ... View more

Over the course of my career, I’ve served on a number of strategic planning initiatives, and inevitably, the issue of “branding” or “rebranding” comes up: usually the university, college, department, or program wants to establish a public image of itself that will be instantly recognizable and that will convey a particular idea or “feel.” Sometimes the work of branding is invigorating and fun—when we launched the Stanford Writing Center (now the Hume Center for Writing and Speaking), we took out a full-page ad in the campus newsletter announcing “a new Stanford tradition” and used words and images designed to get as far away from any idea of remediation as humanly possible. We pursued this theme, knowing that Stanford students would not identify as “remedial” no matter what, and it worked. The Center is now used by students across the campus and across the years, with usage by graduate students (sometimes professors, too) growing every year.   In this case, we were looking for a very positive brand for our Center. But branding can be negative—and often highly destructive—as well. No one knows this better than our current President, Donald Trump, whom the New York Times refers to as the “master brander.” In a recent article, Emily Badger and Kevin Quealy reported on their analysis of two years of Trumpian tweets (beginning in June 2015 and continuing six months into his presidency), finding that Trump “is much better at branding enemies than policies. And he expends far more effort mocking targets than promoting items on his agenda.”   Badger and Quealy’s analysis reveals the strategies Trump uses in this negative branding. Repetition, simplicity, consistency, and essentializing all work together to brand Trump’s enemies with words and phrases that stick in our minds. In his hundreds of tweets about Hillary Clinton, for example, he used “crooked” and “crooked Hillary” like a drum beat. Tthe simple, memorable, insistent phrase became associated with Clinton in many, many voters’ minds, as did the phrase “Lyin’ Ted Cruz,” “goofy Pocahontas” (aka Elizabeth Warren), “little” Marco Rubio.   The use of essentialism—the notion that one characteristic or trait is inherent to a person rather than the result of circumstances or a complex combination of factors—is particularly effective. Ted Cruz is not just a liar but rather he is essentially a liar: in Trump’s orbit, lying is a deep-seated, central and identifying characteristic that trumps all others.   Trump brands himself positively, of course, as a “winner” and “deal maker,” though he has not been particularly successful at branding policies, partially because he changes his mind so frequently about them (and perhaps because he isn’t as interested in policy as he is in personality).   It seems important to me that we share analyses like the one done by Badger and Quealy with students, that we alert them to the power of simple, consistent repetition and of essentializing to mark both people and policies in particularly negative, or positive, ways. Research in psychology shows that these strategies are very effective and that we are often unaware of their power over our thoughts and ideas. Being a critical reader and writer today means understanding how branding works and being able to interrogate it thoroughly.   I suggest reading “Trump Seems Much Better at Branding Opponents than Marketing Policies” on The New York Times July 18, 2017 edition and discussing it with your students. There, you can see excerpts from Trump’s tweets with the repeated word or phrase highlighted: it’s an eye-popping experience!   Credit: Pixaby Image 292994 by LoboStudioHamburg, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

As I mentioned in September, I am a member of a year-long cohort that focuses on inclusive pedagogical practices. Each week, we have discussion questions to consider, and I thought I would share one of the recent questions and my response with everyone this week. The Questions How do you prepare for religious diversity in your class? How does religious diversity intersect with the particular nature of your course or discipline? My Response Since I teach professional writing courses, the content matter of my classes has little to do with religious matters. There are ways that we can focus on religious diversity (more on that below), but you can easily teach a writing class without discussing religion with students in any depth or detail. Nonetheless, religion does come into the class because students often have religious practices that can impact the activities that we complete. I’ve broken my discussion into three sections: at the beginning of the term, as holidays occur, and religion in writing assignments. At the Beginning of the Term I try to model openness about religious matters by addressing religious holidays specifically in my class policies at the beginning of the term. I use the following statement on my syllabus: Religious Holidays: Please take advantage of the grace period explained in the Late Policy section above if the due date for any work in this class coincides with a religious holiday that you celebrate. Please let me know before the holiday if the grace period will not be adequate, and we will come up with an alternative plan. The grace period I mention is part of my late policy. To explain briefly, I announce a due date for each activity, but I also allow a grace period during which students can still turn in their work with no penalty. The policy is explained in more detail in a Bits post from 2013, Due Dates, Deadlines, and My Late Policy. I have varied the length of the grace period from three days to a week. Even the shorter three-day grace period takes care of most holidays and religious events. As Holidays Occur in the Calendar When a holiday draws near, I address it directly by reminding students to let me know if they need more time than the grace period allows. Occasionally, I also extend the grace period, when it seems likely that students may need more time. I use class announcements to update students on holidays and class work. I see these announcements as serving a dual purpose: reminding students to think about time management, and educating the class on holidays that they may not know about. For instance, for Yom Kippur, I posted the following information: I have extended the grace period for the Labor Log due on Friday, September 29, by one day. The grace period now ends at 11:59PM on Tuesday, October 3. Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) begins at sundown on Friday and lasts until nightfall on Saturday. I know that some of you may be traveling home to mark the holiday with family or participating in special events here in town. As a result, I wanted to give anyone who needs it extra time so that the assignment does not interfere with your religious holiday. If you need more than one day, please email me to arrange what you need. It would usually be off-topic for me to talk about religious holidays at length, so I like this compromise that lets me provide a bit of information in contexts that fit with the course. Additionally, these reminder announcements take care of any extensions students may need. I’ve found that being up front and accepting of students’ needs allows me to avoid any complications. Religion in Writing Assignments Religion can come up naturally during class discussions of audience analysis. Just as students consider demographic categories like race, class, and gender, they can explore how an audience’s religious affiliation and practices influence a writing situation. In many business writing and technical writing situations, the reader’s religion isn’t relevant. A technical description of a chemical process, for example, won’t change because of the religion the reader follows. There are rhetorical situations and writing assignments where religion of the audience does influence the work students do. Likewise, there are situations where religious practices directly effect the writing topic itself, not just the audience. Here are some examples: Compose an internal memo, to be distributed on December 1, that explains the company’s policy on holiday decorations in the workplace. The student writing such a memo has to consider how coworkers’s religious beliefs and practices will influence their acceptance of the policy. Write a leave policy for your company’s employee manual. Your company has paid holidays for all major U.S. holidays. Generally speaking, if the post office closes for the holiday, so does your company. Your policy needs to outline the holidays that the company observes, sick leave, family leave, bereavement, and any other situations specific to your industry. The company’s owner strongly believes in supporting employees’s religious beliefs, so she has asked you to draft a policy that proposes how employees can observe the holidays of their faith if they are not covered in the list of U.S. holidays when the company is closed. You work for a regional collective of farms that wants to expand into food processing and sales. Up to this point, the collective has only sold their produce to manufacturers. Because of the regional popularity of your fruits and vegetables, many of the farm owners are interested in testing the production of simple food products that can be made with local ingredients. For instance, the collective includes a number of apple orchards, and there has been interest in manufacturing locally-sourced applesauce, apple butter, and apple cider. The collective wants to maximize sales opportunities by creating a product that meets the needs of a wide customer base. You have been asked to conduct a research project that investigates how religious requirements affect food processing and packaging. Once your research is complete, write a report that explains your findings and makes recommendations for practices the collective can adopt to ensure that their products meet the needs of customers from a variety of faiths. Your company has always focused exclusively (and quite successfully) on domestic business. Because of the recent popularity of a new product, to which your company owns all patents, the board of directors has called for research on expansion into international markets. Choose a country and investigate the possibility of manufacturing and marketing products there. You can decide what your product it. Using your research on your country, write a recommendation report to the board of directors that explains the requirements for manufacturing and marketing your product in that location. Your report should include information on financing in the country, any specific regulations, taxes, or fees that would apply to your product, how the country’s population would respond to the introduction of your product, including consideration of how race, class, gender, cultural norms, and religious practices in the country would be likely to impact manufacturing and sales. Conclude your report with a recommendation on whether the board should consider the country further as a potential market. Final Thoughts Working through these ideas, I still believe that religious considerations need not be a large part of a professional writing course; however, there are certainly options for including religious diversity. It’s imperative for my class policies to support students’s religious practices. Students should also be asked to consider the religion of their audiences when they complete audience analysis of rhetorical situations. Including specific assignments that incorporate a religious dimension seems less of a requirement however. It’s doable, as the example assignments above demonstrate; yet it would need to fit the overarching goals of the course and fit into the progression of assignments. I would not add an otherwise unrelated or unnecessary assignment simply to add religious content to these writing courses. That’s my take on the topic. How do you prepare for religious diversity in your class? How does religious diversity intersect with the particular nature of your course or discipline? Can you suggest writing assignments or class activities that incorporate religious diversity? Please leave me a comment below to share your ideas.   Credit: Coexist by Patrick Byrne on Flickr, used under a CC-BY-SA 2.0 license. ... View more

Today's guest blogger is Jeanne Bohannon‌ (see end of post for bio). As I travel back from a trip to Northeast Normal University (NENU) in Changchun, China, I am thinking about Andrea’s Top 20 Student Grammar Mistakes, which I explored with first-year students at NENU. I have employed the indomitable Top 20 in my digital grammar courses each semester but was a bit pensive taking it “on the road” to a class of students who major in English in a School of Foreign Languages. Before my arrival at NENU, my colleague, Professor Fuhui Zhang, took a poll of her fifty students, asking them to rank their own grammar challenges out of the Top 20. Here’s what they came up with: NENU Class Supper and Grammar Practice Among student-reported mistakes, faulty sentence structure (especially complex ones with two or three or more subordinate sentences) and wrong word are number 1 and number 2, respectively.   Anecdotal Results of Grammar Attitudes The results showed a few commonalities with their American counterparts. The Top Ten below represents elements of grammar reported by all students, in order of descending occurrence. Faulty Sentence Structure Wrong Word Problems with Quotations/documentation Vague Pronouns Unnecessary/Missing Punctuation Unnecessary Shift in Verb Tense Unnecessary Comma Sentence Fragment Pronoun/Antecedent Agreement Fused (run-on) Sentence   Interestingly, #4 (pronouns) was close on the list with my American students in 2017 (#4), when I posted about my students’ Grammar Diagnostics when I last measured these grammar elements for this blog. Comma usage showed up #1 for American students, but for Chinese students ranked at #7. Both sets of students still report issues with verbs, semicolons, and specific uses of punctuation.   Professor Zhang further confirmed that she has noted the same issues in students’ writing. Together, she and I determined to employ a learning strategy that, while completely new to students, might increase their application of grammar and help them to not only recognize mistakes, but avoid them. We landed on a flipped class model.   Context Learning grammar in a flipped class model is a low-stakes opportunity that uses traditional grammar tools to create dialogic growth between students in a class and helps students take ownership of their grammar challenges by teaching others. Students at NENU reviewed a PowerPoint presentation adapted from Stanford’s Hume Center for Writing and Speaking that detailed The Top 20 list prior to my arrival, which they used to rank the list based on their own writing experiences and grammar challenges. They narrowed their choices down to a Top 10 to fit within our class time parameters.   Measurable Learning Objectives Examine results of the Top 20 for areas of improvement Compare attitudinal results to others’ in an open discussion forum Synthesize content-meaning through a flipped class model   Background Reading for Students and Instructors Acts of reading and viewing visual texts are ongoing processes for attaining learning goals in dialogic, digital writing assignments.  Writer's Help 2.0 for Lunsford Handbooks: “Diagnostics” The St. Martin’s Handbook: “The Top Twenty” The Everyday Writer: Ch. 1, “The Top Twenty: A Quick Guide to Troubleshooting Your Writing” Writing in Action: Ch. 1, “The Top Twenty: A Quick Guide to Troubleshooting Your Writing” EasyWriter: “The Top Twenty”    What We Did in Class Students began by posting and discussing their perceived Top 10 grammar issues in their course LMS, called “QQ.” They then participated in the interactive PowerPoint, guessing answers to prescribed mistakes, sometimes reciting correct answers and at other times writing them on the chalkboard. Students also chose to participate on Weibo and WeChat, two Chinese social media platforms where they hashtagged #ProfessorJeanne to post their reflections and view others’ thoughts on the grammar lesson.  After working with students to vocalize their Top 10 grammar challenges in Mandarin first and then English, I encouraged them to step behind the instructor podium and teach content, demonstrating a deep understanding of each grammar element. Did Students Appreciate Our Flipped Class? Out of twenty-five students, twenty-one reported that they learned more about their own specific grammar pitfalls and how to avoid them by participating in the interactive lecture, social media posts, and flipped class. Accordingly, all of them thought their syntax-level American English grammar improved because they knew their specific concerns up-front. Students flipping the class Students further narrated their thoughts on postcards: Learning the Snow App   My Reflection  For me, strategies such as flipped classes engage students in participatory learning, without fear of grading or making mistakes. This assignment is multimodal because students use real-time ed-tech to see a snapshot of their grammar issues and then participate in face-to-face interactions with other students with similar concerns, supplemented by social media. “Flipped Grammar” counts for me, in terms of multimodal composition, because it encourages students to reflect on their own grammar challenges and become active participants in community-driven, digital conversations about writing. Try the “flip” and let me know what you think!   Do you have an idea for a Multimodal Mondays activity or post? Contact Leah Rang for a chance to be featured on Andrea's blog.   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 ... View more

In 2005, Bedford/St. Martin's partnered with the Two Year College Association to sponsor the Diana Hacker TYCA Awards for Outstanding Programs in English as a way to honor a brilliant teacher and provide recognition for superior programs that enhance language learning and student success. We are privileged to continue to sponsor these awards and to recognize excellence in teaching and learning at two-year colleges. Past winners have enjoyed the opportunity to create a higher profile for their program within their college and the TYCA community. Please consider nominating your program or a colleague's program by November 10, 2017. The nomination process is easy, and winners are granted travel stipends to the 2018 CCCC annual convention in Kansas City. The awards will be given at the annual TYCA breakfast on March 17, 2018. I hope to see you there! ... View more

For William Bradley   I’m not the sports fan I used to be. The combination of getting older and busier and moving away from the New York of my Knicks has turned me into the kind of fan who opens the sports pages and wonders what happened to all the players he used to know and who the hell these guys are. Outside of watching English soccer on weekend morning TV and traveling on the endless circuit of my sons’ soccer games (and writing some poems about youth soccer that accidentally got published), my interest in sports is not a rooting interest. What it has become is a cultural interest—an interest in what sports means to people and to the communities they live in.   So naturally I’m planning a new course for spring semester called “Sports/Writing.” It will be about sports in American culture and all kinds of writing about sports—fiction, poetry, essays, reporting. I’m also revising my literature textbook, Literature: The Human Experience, and am trying to put together a couple of clusters of selections on sports as, well, part of the human experience. This seems like a happy synergetic moment from which all sorts of reading selections should flow, and I’m gathering a giant pile of good ones, but it turns out I’m developing a case of syllabus/table of contents block.   I want to muster the usual suspects that I use as excuses for writer’s block, but I think there’s something more interesting going on. Next to the growing stack of possible selections, important sports-related events keep happening. Just this past week saw the explosion of Colin Kaepernick’s protest of racial inequality in policing and in American life into a multiple sideline, multiple player protest. This already knotty situation was then complicated by team owners responding to Donald Trump’s angry social media comments saying team owners should fire kneeling players by joining in a linked-arm gesture alleged to be about unity, a unity cynics might characterize as the response of rich white men to another rich white man telling them what to do with their property. A scandal involving sneaker companies, coaches, recruiters, and agent erupted in college basketball. Further evidence emerged of the seriousness of brain injury in football.   It seems like there’s no talking about sports these days without talking about money and race and politics. This should be a good thing—an embarrassment of riches for me, really—but it’s making it hard for me to put together a selection of works that I can imagine teaching.   I’m not a teacher who shies away from political and social issues in the classroom, and I’m not a teacher who pretends not to have opinions about these things; what I am is a teacher who makes it very clear that all I ever want from my students is that they think hard and that they form conclusions from evidence and solid arguments, and I have never had reason to believe that students felt seriously pressured to agree with me about anything.   But I do live in a Midwestern state (as some point out, a Southern Midwestern state) that was targeted by David Horowitz on his “intellectual diversity” tour of state houses a few years ago, a tour that resulted in the presence of a form on my university’s web site that students can use to report their professors for having opinions about these things. And I do teach at the university where in 2015 the football team threatened to sit out a game as part of a protest of the university’s handling of racial issues, a development that has cost the school funding from state legislators who cynics might characterize as white men telling other white men what to do with their property. These legislators also got a friend and colleague fired for her small involvement in this protest. So I’m always aware of how reports of my teaching would play on social media.   Similarly, I don’t shy away from including political works in LHE and 50 Essays, but I am aware of the reality that there are textbooks that don’t sell in Texas because of the kinds of things I select and, much more importantly, I’m aware that the instructors who use these books will have to deal with teaching selections that touch on issues that some readers will be sensitive about.   It turns out, knowing who I am as a teacher and what I want for my students and students who use my textbooks doesn’t make this any easier. The more I think about it this week, as I stare at my screens and watch America twist itself into knots over the posture of athletes whose games haven’t started yet, the more I’m coming to realize that what’s getting in my way is the same obstacle we all come up against when teaching literary works about any of the things that people love: when people are devoted to things, they don’t want to hear them criticized.   The word fan, of course, comes from the word fanatic, which means a person with excessive zeal—a zealot. A turn of phrase people use when they say they love someone or something: I’m crazy about it. This fanaticism, this craziness, is part of what makes sports so important in culture (in addition to economics, institutions, identity); it’s also what makes it hard to examine sports critically—that is, to not simply negatively but with an eye toward understanding that requires not unthinkingly accepting the common wisdom, the things people who work in and around sports says about sports. When we look at what people are worked up about this week in American sports, we see the intersection of two institutions that people love—sports and nation—and the inextricable presence of race and money. It’s hard, beyond the most innocuous of pieces of literature—“Casey at the Bat?”—to think of selections for teaching that don’t quickly become about more than the thrill of pure athletic competition.   The same is true when you teach works that brush up against ideas of America, of romantic love, of heroism. We are all attached to these things, and have strongly held and largely unexamined beliefs about them. When we ask our students to read works that reflect critically about them—asking them to think about darker moments in our national history, about how ideas about gender sexuality shape the way people are allowed to love each other, about what acts by which kinds of people get called heroic—we are encouraging them to do something that they don’t necessarily want to do. But the things we unquestionably love and hold dear might be the things—the institutions, the beliefs, the ideas—we most need to look at if we are to develop ourselves as thinking, contributing members of our communities. Which in one model of higher education is the goal of all of this.   In the end, if you value making your students think about the things they read and the world they live in more than you value protecting them from discomfort and the things they believe in from scrutiny, you assign reading that questions the things they love and believe in. You don’t force answers on them; you lead them to questions. And yes, I’m talking to myself.   ... View more

Off and on (mostly on) since 1990, I have spent a good part of my summers at the Bread Loaf Graduate School of English, near Middlebury in Vermont’s Green Mountains. You are probably already aware of this MA program, certainly so if you have read my posts over the last six years, and know that I am a big fan of Bread Loaf—especially of the teachers who arrive each summer to pursue the study of language, literature, writing, rhetoric, and performance.   This summer I am not teaching (I’m now supposed to be retired!), but I spent a week on the mountain reading, writing, and talking with teachers about their students, about student writing and reading, and about their plans for this next school year. As always, I came away deeply inspired by what I learned. While I could talk glowingly about the Ken Macrorie writing centers, which I helped to start a few years ago and which are thriving under the leadership of Beverly Moss, or about the fabulous courses Brenda Brueggemann is teaching about disabilities and literature and about writing pedagogy, or about the brilliant production of Othello that the theater group mounted from scratch, I came away most excited about the Next Generation Leadership Network, an initiative of the Bread Loaf Teacher Network (led by Beverly and Dixie Goswami), Middlebury College, and Georgia Tech’s Westside Community Alliance (spearheaded by the incomparable Jackie Royster).   Funded by the Ford Foundation, the NGLN will engage young people, ages fifteen to twenty-one, in underserved communities across the nation. The program will help in developing robust knowledge and leadership, as well as organizing networked social, civic, and academic activities aimed at strengthening public and community-based education. The leaders of this project draw on grass roots initiatives in Lawrence, MA; Atlanta, GA; rural South Carolina; Appalachian Kentucky; the Navajo Nation; and rural Vermont to form social action teams aiming to change the national narrative about the capabilities, passions, and dreams of youth often viewed as deficient—or simply ignored. Through youth-centered think tanks, where young people and their mentors will gather physically and electronically, the teams will develop strategic plans for individual and collective social action. NGLN is founded on a deep and abiding belief in the strengths of young people to create and share knowledge, to build from experience, and to engage in strategic problem solving that can deeply enrich our understanding of 21 st century literacies as multimodal and action centered performances.   Thanks to the determination and very hard work of people like Dixie Goswami, Jackie Royster, Beverly Moss, Lou Bernieri, Ceci Lewis, Brent Peters, Rex Lee Jim, and a host of others, the Next Generation Leadership Network is gearing up for a year of organizing and meeting—and, most of all, listening to young people across the country as they discuss how they hope to realize their potential as national leaders in literacy education. I am expecting big things from all of them!   Credit: Pixaby Image 2286442 by rawpixel, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more