Today's guest blogger is Amanda Gaddam, an adjunct instructor in the First-Year Writing Program and the School for New Learning at DePaul University. She holds a B.A. in English with a concentration in Literary Studies and a M.A. in Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse with a concentration in Teaching Writing and Language from DePaul, and her research interests include first-year composition, adult and non-traditional students, and writing center pedagogies.   Our students are often participants in multiple social media networks—Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, and the like—but one thing they all see, regardless of platform, is a plethora of memes. Memes of all kinds have become a central part of daily reading for our students, so it’s time we start acknowledging them in the classroom.   Wiggins and Bowers (2014) argue for the significance of studying memes as digital artifacts:   Second, memes as artifacts highlight their social and cultural role on the new media landscape. Whereas a cultural artifact offers information about the culture that creates and uses it (Watts, 1981), a social artifact informs us about the social behavior of those individuals or groups which produce it (Wartofsky, 1979). Memes as artifacts possess both cultural and social attributes as they are produced, reproduced, and transformed to reconstitute the social system. In practical terms, the memetic social system is reconstituted when members of participatory digital culture use rules and resources of meme creation in the reproduction of further iterations of a given meme. (p. 6)   If students are to be participants in emerging digital spaces, they must study and learn the “rules and resources” of primary texts within these spaces.   Objective To talk about memes as digital artifacts, to look at memes as objects of study, and to repurpose existing memes or create new memes as a mode of expression and reflection for students talking about their lives as writers.   Readings The St. Martin’s Handbook: Ch. 18, Communicating in Other Media; Ch. 4m, Reflecting on Your Writing The Everyday Writer (also available with exercises😞 Ch. 24, Communicating in Other Media; Ch. 8, Reflecting EasyWriter (also available with exercises😞 Ch. 3, Making Design Decisions; Ch. 5, Sharing and Reflecting on Your Writing   Assignment 1. Ask students to reflect on their past experiences with memes, and use this information to spark a class discussion about what memes are, which memes survive and why, how they become popular, and how they’re used in multiple rhetorical situations, including social media, text messages, and advertisements.   It may be helpful to do a “close read” of a few popular memes that have withstood the test of time and the internet. These examples might include:   Kermit-to-Kermit   This meme typically highlights personal reflections that are relatable to a wide audience. Later iterations of the meme are self-referential, showing how quickly these texts evolve and their trajectory.     Condescending Wonka   This meme and its countless iterations are useful for discussing how memes often become political and appropriated for argumentation purposes.     Salt Bae   Variations on this popular meme demonstrate how interpretations of the visual and its tone change based on the various authors/editors captions. 2. Partner students up to interview each other about their writing processes: what they do, what has worked for them, what they struggle with. The goal is to have an honest conversation, but prompt questions can be helpful. The following questions have been useful for my classes in the past when reflecting on the ways in which they write: What kinds of tools do you use when writing?  Do you handwrite, use a computer, or use other media to compose or brainstorm? Why?  What place does revision have in your writing process?  Do you tend to write several drafts or just one?  Have you always written this way?  Why or why not? Do you consider writing to be a solo act?  Why or why not?  If you don’t, who do you generally ask to get involved?  Why?  At what stage of the process?  How much time, if any, do you spend thinking or prewriting?  Does this vary with different assignments?  Why or why not?  How do you react emotionally when writing an essay?  Why do you think you react this way?  What challenges do you face as a writer?  Do you think that you can overcome these challenges?  Why or why not?  If so, how do you think these challenges can be resolved?    Students take notes and prompt with questions to elicit detail and keep their partners talking.   3. Partners look over the notes that were taken and identify a meme-able emotion or challenge during their writing process. Based on the previous class discussion about what makes an effective meme, students should prioritize ideas that may be relatable to the class, to first-year composition students, or writers in general. You might describe the goal as creating a meme to make their classmates respond, “literally me rn.”   Multiple meme-generators available online for free, including https://memegenerator.net/. Students can also easily use PowerPoint create their own memes using their own images and text options.   4. Share memes with the class, have some laughs, and talk about how the memes capture relatable reflections, stereotypes, and revelations about writing. Students might also talk about how the image and text interact with each other to communicate meaning beyond the words themselves.    Reflection This assignment helps students think and talk about digital literacy as they see it every day of their online lives. In studying memes as digital artifacts, students can see how visual and textual elements of memes work in conjunction to respond and adapt to current events, different discourse communities, and multiple rhetorical situations. Reflecting on their own experiences with writing, as well as learning about other writers’ experiences, helps to create a writers’ community in the classroom and to dispel the “lonely writer” stereotype.   References: Wiggings, B. E., & Bowers, G. B. (2014). Memes as genre: A structurational analysis of the memescape. New Media & Society, 1-21. doi:10.1177/1461444814535194 ... View more

We are surrounded by light, yet we live in darkness.   With internet access, we all have the opportunity to wander in a global library that dwarfs the collections at any of the schools or universities where we happen to teach. We can pursue our own versions of independent research; listen to lectures by the world’s greatest thinkers; wander the Louvre and the Uffizi; visit Jane Goodall’s research lab in Tanzania; study the devastation in Syria from a drone’s eye view; read reports on the melting in Antarctica; learn more about the history of relations between North Korea, South Korea, China, Russia, and Japan. We can drill down to information at the sub-atomic level and dolly all the way back to take in the view of our troubled, little planet as it appears from the space station.   We can do this, but as we kick off another school year, our students find themselves swimming to class through a pestilent sea of misinformation, foolishness, and principled idiocy. Houston is underwater in a brew of toxic waste, but how much do our students know about the consequences of this disaster? Is any part of their education preparing them to think about multi-variant problems that have no solutions? North Korea has just detonated a hydrogen bomb more powerful than the ones we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What do our students know about nuclear warfare’s past? Is any part of their required curriculum preparing them to think about history as unsettled? In some places, as our students move across the quad, driverless cars pass in the distance. Will any of the classes our students take explore the possibility of a jobless future?   In our writing classrooms, we have the means at our disposal to bridge the gap between what education has traditionally offered students and what kind of thinking it will take to address the most pressing problems of our time. We live in a sloganeering time under a broken political system that is defined by an antagonism towards expertise. We can work against the zeitgeist’s idealization of the simpleton by cultivating the engagement with complexity in our classrooms. We can eschew assignments that require students to argue first and think later. We can slow things down so that our students can practice attentiveness, so that they can begin to see details that are invisible to the distracted, so that they have time to reflect, to rethink, to reimagine.   “I don’t know enough to say.” “I’d need to do some more research before I could hazard an opinion.” When my students start making statements of this kind in class and in their writing, I know that we’re making progress. Real learning begins with the recognition of one’s own ignorance. We help our students most when we help them practice responding to this recognition with curiosity, when we help them to see that “I don’t know” is the beginning of an exploration into what can be known for certain and what can only ever be known in a qualified way.   Next: On the Re-enlightenment. ... View more

Creepy clowns are back, and Hollywood is counting on them to deliver big box office after what appears to have been a slow summer for the movie industry—at least according to the L. A. Times.  I've visited this territory before in this blog, but between the recent release of It, the cinematic version of the Stephen King novel by the same name, and all the recent hoopla over Insane Clown Posse and their "Juggalo" followers, I thought it would merit a second look.   If you've never heard of Insane Clown Posse, and think that Juggalos must be some sort of children's breakfast cereal, you're forgiven.  This is one of those many corners of popular culture that, somehow, young folks always seem to be in on, but which tends to be under the radar for the rest of us.  Not that Insane Clown Posse is anything new: they're a rap act that has been around since 1989, specializing in a genre called "horror core"—think Marilyn Manson meets Twisty the Clown.  And Juggalos are horror-core fans that follow performers like Insane Clown Posse around and hold mass participation events of their own—think Gothicised Deadheads in creepy clown suits at a Trekkie convention. So what is it with It, and all this clown stuff?  What is the significance of this fad that appears to be edging into a trend?  Well, to begin with, it's less than sixty shopping days till Halloween, so that's part of the explanation—according to the First Law of Popular Culture (which I have just invented): viz., A fad that has made money will continue to be milked for more money until it is obliterated by a new fad that makes it look hopelessly outdated while retaining its essential appeal.  Applied to the present instance, we might say that just as zombies flocked in where vampires began to fear to tread a few years ago, creepy clown stock appears to be rising now that zombies are beginning to look rather old hat.  But is there anything more to it all?   In attempting to widen the semiotic system in which we can situate the creepy clown phenomenon in order to interpret it, I've found myself considering the peculiar similarities between the Juggalos of today and the Skinheads of yore.  Interestingly, both have working-class origins, along with highly stylized fashion codes and preferences for certain kinds of music (of course, this is true for just about any popular cultural youth movement).  More significantly, both have divided into what might be called malignant and benign camps.  That is to say, one set of Juggalos is at least accused of having the characteristics of a street gang, while the other appears to be as harmless as run-of-the-mill cosplayers.  Similarly, while the classic Skinhead liked to toy around with neo-Nazi and other fascist displays, an offshoot of the movement—sometimes referred to as "anti-racist" Skinheads—has adopted the fashion-and-music tastes (more or less) of fascistical Skinheads while embracing an anti-fascist ideology.    All this gets me thinking, because if we expand the system we can find two other popular cultural trends that the creepy clown phenomenon—along with its Juggalo cohorts—shares with the Skinheads: an obsession with costumed role playing mixed with a fascination with violence (even if only in play), whether in the form of horror (Juggalos) or of hob-nailed mayhem (Skinheads).  In this respect (costume drama-cum-cruelty), we may as well include Game Of Thrones in the system, for here too we find elaborate costuming wound round a mind-numbing level of violence.  It's as if Harry Potter grew up to become a warlord.   Well, so what?  If popular culture appears to be filled with elaborate expressions of violent cosplay, it's just play-pretend isn't it, a distraction from the horrors, or boredom, of everyday life—what Freud called "civilization and its discontents?" And Stephen King is hardly alone in making a fortune off the perennial appeal of Grand Guignol.   But then I start thinking about the violence-obsessed costume drama that took place on the campus of the University of Virginia, where khaki-clad and polo shirt sporting crowds of young men marched torches in hand in a studied recreation of Hitler's brown-shirt demonstrations.  Was this some sort of political cosplay, a "let's play at Nazis" display for those in the crowd who weren't "official" members of the Klan and the American Nazi Party?  I really don't know.  I'm not sure that anyone knows just how many genuine Nazis there are in the country, as compared with the play actors who are getting a kick out of trolling their classmates.  But playing at horror has a way of familiarizing it, of moving it from the fringe to the center, and I can only hope that we haven't gotten to the point where the line between play-pretend and deadly-earnest has become so blurred that the true horrors may descend upon us. ... View more

The following message was written by Professor Jenn Fishman from Marquette, who was my research partner in the Stanford Study of Writing. Jenn expresses so beautifully the aims of that study, which began shortly after 9/11/2001, and of our deep belief in the power of writing to connect us to others.    Jenn has given me permission to post her message here and I do so with gratitude.     In early September, 2001, I was a graduate student and a member of the Stanford Study of Writing research team. At that time, we were preparing to recruit a cohort of entering students for a 5-year longitudinal study of college writing. Members of the Stanford Class of 2005, including the 189 first-year students who joined us, were among the first travelers after the attacks. Since Stanford is on the quarter system, many needed to fly or drive significant distances to reach campus on time for orientation. While all study participants completed surveys and contributed examples of their writing over the next 5 years, a small group also agreed to be interviewed by us annually. Sandy, the student whose reflection is attached to this message, was among that group.  For me, remembering the confluence of events 16 years ago underscores the importance of writing in the face of tragedy, both in the moment and in reflection years later. As Hurricane Irma wreaks destruction on Florida and Hurricane Jose gathers force; as everyone affected by Hurricane Harvey, the recent earthquake in Mexico, and unprecedented flooding across South Asia works to rebuild their lives; as changing US immigration policies threaten thousands of DREAMers including Marquette's own, I hope we can help students find both refuge and agency in their own and others' writing.  I share Sandy's words with her permission. A reflection on starting college immediately after 9/11 Written by Sandy*, a participant in the Stanford Study of Writing and a member of the Stanford Class of 2005. Shared by Jenn Fishman with permission. September 11th was a Tuesday. I was wrapping up my summer job at my dad's office, making plans to drive from SoCal to Stanford for freshman orientation on September 21st. I was scared - everybody was. That day, I didn't know if all of America was going to blow up; I didn't know if Stanford would start on schedule. But Stanford did, and my dad and I drove north the next week. We stopped in Sacramento to spend a day rafting on the American River, before heading to Stanford. On September 20th, driving from Sacramento to Palo Alto, we stopped at a small seafood restaurant in Berkeley, CA. The TV was on in the bar, and everybody stopped eating when President Bush addressed Congress. The President pointed his finger to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda that night, as well as to the Taliban in Afghanistan. He announced the new Department of Homeland Security. He said, "Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done." He said we would fight the "War on Terror," and that it would have "decisive liberation of territory and a swift conclusion." I realized this meant we would go to war; I was scared. Freshman orientation was a whirlwind. I remember sitting on the quad hearing a university official speak about the attacks and what this meant for Stanford. I remember this person talking about Stanford's commitment to diversity and against racism. In less than two weeks, mass racial profiling of young Muslim men had already begun. School started and the days whizzed by. There was so much to take in that it was hard to think about the world beyond Stanford. I wanted to get involved in journalism, so I found Stanford's radio station, KZSU. At the News Department's first meeting, I invented my own assignment. I decided to attend a Muslim prayer vigil in the courtyard of Old Union. I was proud that the station loaned me brand-new recording equipment. I sat at Old Union during the vigil, wondering about the nature of Muslim American communities and what terrorist organizations actually were, and fearing for my fellow students about the racism that they would encounter. Four years later, I sat in the Quad again, but this time, I was graduating. The student spoke of entering as a freshman right after September 11th. I knew this had colored my college experience, but it was hard for me to imagine what college would have been like if September 11th hadn't happened. Now, two and a half years out of college and almost done with law school, I'm beginning to get more perspective. Attending college in the shadow of September 11th made me deeply aware of cultural differences and inspired me to search for ways to bridge them. However, now I also realize how much government propaganda I bought into at the time, for instance, thinking that there was at least some sense to a war in Iraq. It's taken me over two years of studying law to begin to get a sense of how much the government has used September 11th as an excuse to violate our civil liberties in ways that have no bearing on the "War Against Terror." Now that more time has passed, I've awoken, and I want to be an immigration lawyer and immigrants' rights activist, so that our country treats its newcomers decently. *  Sandy (a pseudonym) was a member of the cohort we interviewed between 2001 and 2006 for the Stanford Study of Writing. Her experiences as a college writer are also referenced in "Performing Writing, Performing Literacy" (CCC 57.2). Sandy's reflection exemplifies using writing to process significant events and connect with others. How have you encouraged your students to use writing to connect? Credit: Pixaby Image 2142402 by joergwunderlich, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

This post first appeared on LitBits on Nov 2, 2016 Essayist Dinty Moore says “the hand is connected to the arm which is connected to the heart” in an attempt to explain why writing by hand is instrumental in sewing the seedlings of great ideas that form and grow under the act of further writing and revision. When I first bring up hand-writing to my students, they often look skeptical, or wary to say the least. Some of them groan. Some of them say they will definitely handwrite at home. Most of them, though, do ask: “Why should we write by hand if we can type on a laptop?” And I have a few answers for them.   For one, writing by hand slows the writer down. While this may sound like a counter-intuitive hindrance to the writing process, it’s actually an element that makes for better writing, and a higher quality first draft. By sitting at the laptop or desktop computer, typing 40 words per minute allows you to write too quickly, moving forward and backward linearly, erasing any sign or record of your process, any change that you would be able to look over when writing with a pen on the page. By being forced to slow down, your brain has slightly more time to think about what it decides to pen. This allows for more real decision making compared to the writer at the computer whose hands type too quickly, perhaps glossing over a better idea that may have needed a few seconds more to percolate.   Another reason why hand-writing is paramount is that this approach creates room for risk and play, for less constraint. This is to say that there is something about a sprawling page and a pre-writing mindset that alleviates pressure for the writer, allowing them the space to try things on, to “just get the ideas down,” and worry about the meticulous details later. In Phillip Lopate’s To Show and To Tell, he emphasizes the importance of a writer’s journal, another arena where hand-writing takes place, arguing that it allows for the “freedom to try out things, to write clumsy sentences when no one is looking, to be prejudiced, even stupid. No one can expect to write well who will not first take the risk of writing badly. The writer’s notebook is a safe place for such experiments.” Cartoonist Lynda Barry also supports hand-writing, explaining that students should write from their centers instead of their heads. Author and writing instructor Heather Sellers agrees that writing is a physical act, just like football, and so should be practiced physically with the same dedication and reverence that players hold for their sport.   As a writer who hand-writes herself, I can attest to a feeling that comes from the practice. It’s a feeling that comes after I’ve warmed up, after I’ve gotten a few paragraph down, and it comes when I’m hitting a stride, when I can feel my heart rate quickening, my writing becoming somewhat faster, when I know I’m on to something important. Though what I pen by hand is always a start and far from a finished, final draft, the ideas that come forward in the hand-writing stage I’ve come to realize are my better ones—the seedlings of greater things to come, planted by the pen in my hand. ... View more

I am teaching a section of first-semester composition with a 2-credit corequisite, designed specifically for students from non-English speaking backgrounds. I approached the development of my syllabus and assignments in a Writing about Writing (WAW) framework, but this semester I am including a stronger focus on information literacy and source synthesis, based in part on my college’s current Quality Enhancement Plan focus (QEP).   I am presenting source-based writing to my students this term following Joseph Bizup’s 2008 article, “BEAM: A Rhetorical Vocabulary for Teaching Research-Based Writing.”  The premise of Bizup’s framework is that students need to consider source-based composition rhetorically, with a vocabulary that characterizes how sources function in texts. As Bizup puts it, “We should adopt terms that allow us to name, describe, and analyze the different ways writers use their materials on the page, or equivalently, the various postures towards their materials that writers adopt” (75). Bizup uses the acronym BEAM to illustrate four ways of handling source material in a text. Sources can serve as background material (B), exhibits for analysis or interpretation (E), arguments for evaluation, rebuttal, or extension (A), or methods that frame research or provide a particular vocabulary for it (M). In my course, students will be researching and analyzing a discourse community as a course-long project. Their research will lead them to background sources, exhibits, and arguments. I will be providing sources that give them a method and vocabulary for their research. Our first major reading assignment also serves as the students’ initial exposure to the first of these method sources: James Gee’s 1989 article, “Literacy, Linguistics, and Discourse: Introduction.”  This essay is challenging in terms of vocabulary, but in our corequisite structure, students have additional time to work through these lexical difficulties. I have found that they engage quickly with the concept of secondary Discourses and dominant Discourses—noting their own struggles not only to learn English but to understand various English Discourses (in Gee’s sense) from which they are excluded or in which they aspire to participate. The first significant writing assignment is a framed literacy narrative: students discuss their own reading or writing development through the conceptual lens of Discourse, as defined by Gee. Many of these students have never been required to reflect on their own experiences through such a conceptual framework, nor have they been shown how to introduce a method source and apply it effectively in their own writing. Preparation for this assignment, therefore, has included practice in summary, paraphrase, quotation, and consideration of rhetorical context. I have just finished reading students’ first drafts, and I am astounded at their stories and their efforts to frame them in Gee’s terms, however clumsy those first attempts might be. And to my surprise, many of my students selected a second method source from our textbook, Roxane Gay’s “Peculiar Benefits”: they interpreted their literacy stories not only in terms of Discourse (Gee) but in terms of privilege, as defined by Gay. In previous courses, I have asked students to write literacy narratives and compare their experiences to those of other writers whose literacy stories we have read. But this is the first time I’ve asked them to frame their narratives using a method source, and I am pleased with the outcome. We have a basis now for talking about method sources as we move to the next phase of the project, which will require different types of source use. I wish I could share their stories, and especially their understanding of Discourse and privilege, with lawmakers who will now determine the fate of many of my students—those who currently have DACA protections but may lose them, given the President’s recent rescission of that executive order. My students do not see themselves as victims, as those without privilege, even though they have been excluded in many cases from participation in dominant Discourses and positions of power. They see themselves as privileged, simply because they are in the classroom with the opportunity to learn. I am honored to be teaching—and learning—with them. 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

As I write, pictures of the flooded streets of Houston are leading news broadcasts throughout the twenty-four-hour news cycle, and more rain is predicted. The power of visual rhetoric is clear as certain photos go viral on social media: a fireman carrying two small children to safety through waist-high water, another catching a few minutes of sleep with his boots still on, water covering portions of the first floor of the world-famous M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, people carrying their pets as they wade through the flooded streets of their neighborhoods. There is scene after scene of people helping people—first responders of all sorts, the National Guard, the “Cajun Navy.” One photo shows private vehicles towing boats lined up to go to work helping rescue the stranded. A television station loses power, and a lone reporter keeps broadcasting from the street outside, taking time to direct first responders to a man trapped in his truck nearby.   At this point, the flooding is catastrophic, but we seem to have learned some things from Katrina because the rescue efforts seem to be more organized. An iconic picture from that disaster showed seventy-four-year-old Edgar Hollingsworth, a black man, being carried from his home fourteen days after the hurricane, aided by rescuers male and female, white and Hispanic. An iconic pair of pictures that appeared in an earlier edition of Elements of Argument showed a young black man carrying food through the flood after “looting a grocery store,” while another showed a young white couple doing the same after “finding bread and soda from a local grocery store.” Yahoo!News had to issue an apology for the suggested racial bias.  Today I saw on Facebook the first photo of looters taking advantage of the opportunity offered by Harvey. I am reminded of Guy-Uriel Charles’s essay “Stop Calling Quake Victims Looters,” written in response to a recent earthquake in Haiti. A Haitian American, Charles questions our right to define as looters those who following a natural disaster take needed food from a store when there is no one there to pay even if the banks were open to get money. Contrast the man whose picture I use to illustrate that essay, who is carrying a large carton of infant formula, with those in the picture I saw today taking armloads of clothes still on hangers. (Crudely painted signs following Katrina read, “U Loot, We Shoot.”)   I’m sure that the stress that comes with days of no electricity and the loss of homes and property will bring out more of the negative side of human nature, but as Texas cities and towns—and maybe some in Louisiana—begin coping with the catastrophe that is Hurricane Harvey, images of people of all ages and races and vocations helping each other has been an encouraging contrast to all of the recent ones of Americans facing off in anger and violence across political barriers. Credit to Lt. Zachary West of the Texas Military Department posted on Flickr 8/27/17 via Creative Commons ... View more

During the next few weeks, I will continue my series on racism in the classroom by sharing 10 scenarios that confront racism through discussions of ethics. The teaching strategy for these class discussions is simple:   Students are presented with a scenario. They decide on their ethical stance on the issue in the scenario. They examine a summary of responses from their class. They discuss the various stances and work toward deeper exploration of the issue and, if possible, consensus on how to deal with the situation.   In step two, students choose their ethical stance using a strategy that I outlined two years ago for Discussing Ethics Scenarios in Professional Writing, though the strategy would work for any course. Using this strategy, decisions are chosen on a digital compass. As explained in the Learning & Leading with Technology article “Developing Ethical Direction” by Mike S. Ribble and Gerald D. Bailey, students choose among these 8 options:   Right I am not sure it’s wrong Depends on the situation As long as I don’t get caught Wrong What’s the big deal? It’s an individual choice I don’t know   To simplify the process of tallying responses for the course, have students respond to the scenarios with a Google Form, or use one of the online polling tools, such as Poll Everywhere, SurveyMonkey, or Top Hat. Before beginning class discussion of the scenarios, prepare students for the issues that you will introduce. You can use the ideas I shared in my post last month, Preparing to Explore Racism and Racist Events in the Classroom.   The Scenarios You are in a meeting with the marketing team. Your manager (a black woman), her manager (a white man), and four other people (2 women and 2 men) are present. During the meeting, whenever your manager makes an assertion about the best direction for the team to take, her manager interrupts her or talks over her. Several times, he stops her and asks one of the other men in the room to clarify or explain the ideas. Your manager is frustrated, but remains silent to avoid confrontation with her own manager. Is your manager making the right choice? After making your decision, consider what actions you might take in the meeting.   You are joining colleagues from the team of developers (4 men and 3 women) you manage for a barbecue on Friday to celebrate the launch of the program you have been working on for the past year. You arrive about 30 minutes late, because of a meeting with Accounting, and notice that everyone seems to already be in the backyard, laughing and having fun. You walk out the back door and scan the yard. You immediately notice that Haruka, a Japanese-American woman on the team, is not present. You approach Jeff, who owns the house and has taken command of the grill. You ask him, “Hey, looks like nearly everyone is here. When will Haruka get here? I want to share some feedback from Accounting with everyone.” Jeff looks a bit puzzled, but explains, “Oh, we never invite her. She’s so quiet. Makes everyone uncomfortable. She probably wouldn’t come anyway.” Is Jeff’s decision right or wrong? As the manager, how should you handle the situation?   You are in an all-employee meeting of the food production company you work for. Every division provides an update on current projects and forecasts future projects and issues to consider. The Warehouse division, led by Sherry, has been working on a service project to provide food for those at the local family shelter. To share their work with everyone, they have developed a two-minute video that shows employees from the division unloading contributions along with testimonials from the shelter staff and people temporarily living there. About half-way through the video, a male person in the meeting room audibly makes a derogatory comment about the people living in the shelter. The comment includes racial stereotypes and a specific ethnic slur. Sherry looks unsure what to do and fidgets a bit as the video plays out. Once it finishes, she asks everyone to congratulate her team on their hard work and then sits down while employees applaud. Asked about her decision not to address the derogatory comment, Sherry explains that she had no way of knowing who made the comment, so it was best to just ignore it. Did Sherry make the right decision? If you were in Sherry’s position, what would you do? If you were sitting in the meeting, would you do anything? Why or why not?   Customizing the Scenarios I’ve written the scenarios for use in a Business Writing or Technical Writing course. By changing the basics of the scenarios, you can convert them for use in another class, like first year composition.   For #1, change the scenario to a meeting of a small group working on a group presentation. Drop the references to managers, and talk about group members instead. To make the scenario easier to talk about, add specific first names. Obviously choose names that aren’t members of the course.   For #2, again, change from colleagues from the development team to members of a small group that is celebrating submission of a major project.   For #3, rather than an all-employee meeting, change the situation to a class meeting. Rather than divisions, have small groups, which are presenting their projects to the class. Sherry becomes a student from one of the groups.   Final Thoughts Ethical scenarios like those above and those I’ll share in the next weeks can yield strong class conversations. While students may have strong convictions about the situations, there are rarely easy answers. Students must weigh alternatives and negotiate with one another to arrive at consensus.   Next week, I’ll be back with more scenarios. In the meantime, if you have any questions or want to share a scenario of your own, please leave me a comment below.       Credit: Business Meeting by thetaxhaven on Flickr, used under a CC-BY 2.0 license ... View more

When the Beach Boys released their version of “California Dreaming” in 1986, singing “All the leaves are brown, and the skies are grey. . . .” they weren’t thinking of California today. It’s not winter, for one thing, but late summer-about-to-be-fall. But many of the leaves on our still drought-troubled trees are already brown, and the sky is grey from haze and smoke from forest fires throughout California.   Of course, 1986 wasn’t such a great year for California either: Ronald Reagan, who as governor had presided over the decimation of the State’s vaunted university system, was president; the Challenger disaster occurred in January, and the Russian nuclear reactor at Chernobyl exploded in April—just for starters. So harking back to 1986 shouldn’t take us on a trip down nostalgia lane (though I should note that The Oprah Winfrey Show debuted that year and Miyazaki made the first Studio Ghibli film, Laputa: Castle in the Sky, both great events in my book).   Still, it’s sobering to look back over three decades and see that in that year the Congress passed the 1986 Immigration and Reform Act. In summarizing the bill, Kurtis Mees writes that it   [G]ave unauthorized aliens the opportunity to apply and gain legal status if they met mandated requirements. The fate or status of all those who applied fell into the hands of “Designated Entities” and finally the U.S. Attorney General. Applicants had to prove that they lived and maintained a continuous physical presence in the U.S. since January 1st, 1982, possess a clean criminal record, and provide proof of registration within the Selective Service. Moreover, applicants had to meet minimal knowledge requirements in U.S. history, government and the English language or be pursuing a course of study approved by the Attorney General.   Sounds like a gain for immigrants, at first glance. The law did lead to green cards for two and a half million immigrants, many of them farm workers. But millions more were deemed ineligible—and so the “problem” continued to grow, as voices on the right called, incessantly, for stronger and stronger anti-immigration legislation.   Today we are caught in the same controversy, with an attorney general who is determined to roll back immigration and deport, deport, deport. While I had hoped that those in power today would exempt the “dreamers”—young people who signed up with the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program—on Tuesday, August 5, 2017, Jeff Sessions, arch foe of immigrants and immigration, announced that the program would be phased out, leaving some 800,000 young people—who have no criminal records but who have worked hard, gone to school, paid taxes, served in the military—completely vulnerable. We are in a time with more anti-immigrant sentiment in our government than perhaps any time since the 1920s, with little hope in sight that Congress will pass any sensible legislation to protect these dreamers as well as to establish rational, reasonable immigration reform.   We here in California, with the largest number of DACA recipients, are still trying to dream, however: the governor, many mayors, and most university presidents have said they will do everything in their power to protect those who signed up for DACA, and people up and down this long, long state are in the streets protesting this latest insult to our democracy.   If you have not yet read former President Obama’s message regarding this issue, please do so on the Los Angeles Times website. It is a reasoned, responsible argument, understated in its eloquence, which offers an opportunity for a class discussion or assignment. Have students read President Obama’s statement and then compare it to Jeff Sessions’s announcement of the rescinding of DACA on the Washington Examiner, or look at the current president’s potentially self-contradictory tweets about the issue.   Ask students to look at the claims made and proof offered in support of each. Ask them to tease out the enthymemes and see if the assumptions on which they are based stand up to scrutiny. Ask them to do some research on possible legislation being proposed by congressional leaders and look carefully at who gains and who loses from it. Ask them to think about what it means to be an American.   In addition to our indigenous fellow citizens, we are a country of immigrants; many of our most important scientific findings, technological developments, and artistic achievements have been accomplished by immigrants—and I am certain there are many more advancements that will come our way from the 800,000 DACA youth.   So I refuse to give up this particular dream, even if the leaves are brown and the skies are grey.   Credit: Pixaby Image 2590766 by StockSnap, used under a CC0 Creative Commons License ... View more

by Heather Sellers‌ This post first appeared on the blog on Jan 29, 2016. How do we meet our writing goals and help our students meet writing goals in the midst of other demands?   My favorite recent book on this topic is Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals: How Artists Work. It’s a portable encyclopedia of the daily schedules of artists, psychologists, theologians, and authors.   Toni Morrison (single mother of two with a full time job as an editor at Random House) explains that “it does seem hectic,” but she doesn’t do “anything else.” She avoids cocktail parties and evening events because that is when she works. And, “When I sit down to write I never brood….. I can’t afford it.”  She makes it clear that there’s really not likely going to be, for most of us, a regular time to write. She grabbed weekends, evenings, predawn time.   Haruki Murakami wakes at 4 am and writes until 9 am or 10 am. He also turns down invitations.   What I notice, reading Currey’s charming, delicious compendium, is that creating a writing life is actually less about a cushy life filled with luxurious writing hours and more about saying no to almost everything else.   And, reading the lives of artists while thinking about students as our semesters get underway, I see that it’s more than a bit challenging to be 20 years old and newly free in in the world, and then, if one would like to become a writer, tasked with saying no to all of your friends, parties, weekend getaways, football games, laying out in the sun.   I asked three of my colleagues, graduate students in the MFA program at the University of South Florida, to address the question: how do you get your writing done while teaching? Annalise Mabe said she writes best when she has a deadline for class. Carmella Guiol recently got rid of the internet at home, and for her, hours and hours of writing time opened up.  Chelsea Dingman, prolific writer and mother of two boys, gets up monstrously early, and writes in any spare hour during the day.   These three writers get their creative work done by saying no to a lot and they can do that because they love the work and they have been rewarded by long hours of practice with visible, measurable proof of improvement.    Can we help our students experience more deeply how rewarding practice is? (The recent film Seymour provides a terrific discussion of the delicious rewards of pure practice.) I’m not sure. I know when they are required to spend more time on a piece (writing a sonnet, for example), they learn more as writers, produce better work, and they are often surprised at the correlation between time spent on writing and the success of the piece.   This semester, I’m working on creating assignment sequences that are meaningful and challenging. I’m trying to do a better job of explaining to my students why we’re doing this work, and what they’ll be able to do at the end of the semester, and showing them, along the way, exactly what is happening in terms of skill development and knowledge acquisition.    I’m modeling a working writing life for them by sharing my triumphs and failures I’ve met my new year’s writing goals four days out of 24 so far this year, but at least I’m aware of what I want and where I am. Heather Sellers (PhD, Florida State University) is professor of English at the University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate creative writing in children's literature, poetry, and non-fiction. She won the student-chosen professor of the year award at Hope College, where she gave the commencement address. Her textbook for the multi-genre course is The Practice of Creative Writing, which will appear next year in its third edition. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Fiction, she's published two books on creating an inspiring and happy writing life, Page after Page and Chapter after Chapter, as well as a children's book, two books of poetry and three chapbooks, along with Georgia Under Water, a collection of short stories. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The London Daily Telegraph, Reader’s Digest, Good Housekeeping, O,the Oprah Magazine, and The Sun, as well as Prairie Schooner and Alaska Quarterly Review. She's currently at work on a new manuscript of poems and a novel for younger readers, set in Florida, her home state. She’s an avid cyclist and kayaker. ... View more

I came across Barbara Fister's post "Beyond Ignorance" last week. Fister, an academic librarian*, crime novelist, and frequent blogger, writes provocatively about the mission of the college library in times of cultural stress and in the wake of events such as those that happened in Charlottesville last month. She argues that a college or university library should, of course, foster certain values in student researchers and writers: that knowledge making is based on reasoned debate and open mindedness and curiosity, for example, and that critical inquiry can be taught and modeled. But Fister blew my mind a little with her idea that reason isn't enough of a response to hate. We in the academy have to teach caring--the idea "that caring for one another matters, too." And as I'm in planning mode for the upcoming semester--assembling activities, writing syllabi and assignments, grouping readings, and designing classroom scenarios that will make writing groups successful--I'm wondering how best to teach students to care. I do spend a good deal of time early in the semester building community. I make sure everyone in the class knows every other classmate's first name by the end of week 3. I absolutely insist, and it drives my students crazy. I emphasize collaboration. I ask students to respond to one another's ideas with respect, both in writing and in speaking, with language that I model (I can see why you would think that way. What about this idea...?). I assign students to present their final projects, but I also assign several responders for each presenter so that each presenter can count on a few people who listen well enough to ask thoughtful questions at the end of the presentation. It's a little artificial, I get it. But it's something. How much attention to you pay to this element of the social curriculum? How do you teach students to care for one another? Is anyone familiar with Harvard's Making Caring Common Project? At any rate, this is something I'll be working on and thinking about throughout the semester. And I have Barbara Fister to thank for the reminder. *Barbara Fister is co-author of Research and Documentation in the Digital Age, Sixth Edition (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2016). ... View more

If you teach writing, you have certainly heard scores of misconceptions about writing, like these: America is Facing a Literacy Crisis  Official American English is Best  African American Language is not Good English  Teaching Grammar Improves Writing Formal Outlines are Always Useful The Five-Paragraph Essay Transmits Knowledge Machines can Evaluate Writing Well Texting Ruins Students’ Grammar Skills Anyone Can Teach Writing   Sometimes they’re uttered by administrators or repeated by politicians. You may hear them from colleagues in other departments who ask you for help. Occasionally you hear them from other writing teachers. Students parrot them, repeating what they have heard from family, parents, and their high school teachers. It’s possible that you may have even thought them yourself at some point.   The next time that you hear one of those misconceptions, head directly to Bad Ideas About Writing, edited by Cheryl E. Ball (co-author of Bedford/St. Martin’s Writer/Designer) and Drew M. Loewe, for a myth-busting counter-argument, ready to share with that misled colleague, administrator, or student. The collection includes over sixty essays, divided into eight categories ranging from “Bad Ideas About What Good Writing Is” to “Bad Ideas About Writing Teachers.” The text includes essays from a number of Bedford/St. Martin’s authors, including Elizabeth Wardle (Writing about Writing), Susan Naomi Bernstein (Teaching Developmental Writing), and Beth L. Hewett (The Online Writing Conference, and Reading to Learn and Writing to Teach).   Elizabeth Losh, co-author of Bedford/St. Martin’s Understanding Rhetoric, praises Bad Ideas About Writing, explaining that it “offers its readers a wealth of good ideas for countering the dangerous myths, harmful stereotypes, unfounded folklore, romantic delusions, and fanciful thinking that too often surround questions about how best to improve written expression.”   Bad Ideas About Writing provokes discussion and debate as it meets each misconception with constructive criticism and related research on writers, writing, and how writing is taught. As Ball and Loewe, the editors, explain in the book’s introduction, “We hope that the collection is a conversation-starter, not a conversation-stopper, and we hope that it provides a catalog of support for productive conversations about how and why to stop the bad ideas about writing and start the good”—and that’s why I think it’s a good idea to download this book!   Bad Ideas About Writing is published in whole by the Digital Publishing Institute at WVU Libraries and is free to download. ... View more

Last Spring I left off in this blog with an exploration of what I called “The Uses of Objectivity.” That essay probed the inadvertent relationships between poststructural theory and the current climate of “alternative facts” and “post-truth” claims.  Since then I’ve run across an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education that could have been written in response to mine, and while it actually wasn't, I'd like to continue the discussion a bit here.   The Chronicle essay I’m referring to here is Andrew J. Perrin’s “Stop Blaming Postmodernism for Post-Truth Politics.” That's an easy request to honor: certainly the supporters 0f such alt-fact politicians as Donald Trump can hardly be expected to have been influenced by —much less, have read—the texts of contemporary postmodern theory.  So by all means let's take postmodernism off the hook in this regard.  The question is not how postmodernism has affected what is often referred to as the "populist" politics of Trumpism; the question is how educators can best contest, in the classroom, the contentions of the post-truth world.  My position on this question is that educators who wish to do so would do well not to deconstruct, in a postmodern fashion, the fundamental grounds for things like scientific consensus, while Perrin, for his part, feels that we need more postmodernism in the face of the post-truth era because of the way that it exposes the ways in which "all claims, beliefs, and symbols are tied up with the structures of power and representation that give rise to them."    Now, the originator of this postmodern approach to power/knowledge was, of course, Michel Foucault.  It is central to his entire notion of "discourse," which itself descended from his essentially poststructural (poststructuralism is an academic species of the larger cultural genus postmodernism) adaptation of the structuralist position that reality (and the knowledge thereof) is constructed by systems of signs.  That is to say, the signified, in the structuralist view, is not something detected outside the sign system: it is constituted by the sign system.  From here it is not a very large step to the poststructural position that whoever controls the sign system controls what counts as "reality," as "truth" itself.    There is certainly no shortage of historical instances in which this vision of power/knowledge has indeed been played out.  The Third Reich, for example, rejected relativity theory as "Jewish physics," and that was that as far as Germany was concerned.  George Orwell, for his part, gave dramatic expression to this sort of thing in 1984: 2+2=5 if Big Brother says so.   Thus, it comes down to a simple question.   What is a more effective response to the post-truth claim, for example, that climate science is hoax: the position that all scientific claims are expressions of power/knowledge, or the position that concrete empirical evidence gets us closer to the truth of climate change than do the claims of power?  This is not a rhetorical question, because I do not suppose that everyone will agree with my own answer to it, which happens to be as simple as the question itself:  I prefer to oppose power/knowledge with objectively measurable data.  For me, reality is not subject to a referendum.   Interestingly, the late Edward Said—who helped put Foucault on the American literary-critical map in his book Beginnings—came to identify another problem that arises with respect to postmodern power theory when he criticized Foucault for effectively denying the element of human responsibility in power relations by treating power as a nebulous "formation" that is expressed socially and historically rather than being wielded by empowered individuals (which happens to be a poststructural view on power that parallels the structuralist position on the relationship between langue and parole).  Such a view could provide support for the many voters who did not vote in the 2016 presidential election due to their belief that both major parties expressed the same neoliberal and capitalist power formations.  I think that the aftermath of that election makes it pretty plain that individuals do wield power and in different ways, no matter what the current larger power/knowledge formation may be.   And just as interestingly, as I was putting the finishing touches on this blog, an essay by Mark Lilla appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education saying substantially the same thing: i.e., if students accept "the mystical idea that anonymous forces of power shape everything in life," they "will be perfectly justified in withdrawing from democratic politics and casting an ironic eye on it."  Now, two Humanities professors in agreement doth not a movement make, but it's heartening to see that my thoughts are shared by someone else. ... View more

For the first time since starting this blog five years ago, I took a bit of a break for part of July. I’ve had a very busy writing summer, and, like many other teachers, I also like to spend some time trying to get caught up on reading books and journals. So I’m writing today to say I hope all of you have had a good summer, thus far, and I hope that the coming school year will bring some joy amid the anxiety we are all feeling about health care, education, and the state of our country. I also come with a recommendation: a review essay in the March 2017 issue of College English. “Literacy Hope and the Violence of Literacy: A Bind that Ties Us,” by Kirk Branch, is definitely worth a read.   Branch’s provocative and thoughtful review addresses four books: Paul Feigenbaum’s Collaborative Imagination: Earing Activism through Literacy Education; Michael Harker’s The Lure of Literacy: A Critical Reception of the Compulsory Composition Debate, Todd Ruecker’s Transiciones: Pathways of Latinas and Latinos Writing in High School and College, and Amy Wan’s Producing Good Citizens: Literacy Training in Anxious Times. While Branch ends up discussing each book in some detail, he sets the entire discussion in the context of the bind all literacy teachers and scholars face—between what Harvey Graff calls the “literacy myth,” of hope and faith in the power of literacy to liberate and to solve many ills, including social inequality; and what Elspeth Stuckey calls “the violence of literacy,” its power to oppress, punish, and subjugate.   I read Stuckey’s book when it came out twenty-five years ago, and I still remember literally reeling from my encounter with her rage against a system that has not only withheld literacy but also used literacy to punish people. I still remember, in this same vein, hearing an African American textile worker from South Carolina tell of being beaten in middle school when she misspelled names of bones in the body: when she told her mother what had happened, her mother said “I can’t go complain to those white people, but you don’t ever have to go to that school again.” I’m here using deliberately stark terms to illustrate the “bind,” as Branch describes, to make the point that all teachers of writing will inevitably encounter the poles of this divide. But of course, such binaries are never simple, never easy, and this one is no different. Issues surrounding literacy and our relationship to literacy are deeply complex; they are also intertwined with ideology and with the stories we tell about education in the United States. Beyond complex, really. But recognizing this complexity and resisting either pole long enough to look closely at our own goals, and to see how they are implicated in institutional systems that almost certainly work against those goals, is a necessary step in coming to grips with both “literacy hope” and “the violence of literacy.”   Branch finds admirable things in each of these books, but in the end Feigenbaum’s seems most fascinating to him:   In the end, what I find so compelling about Feigenbaum’s book is that he wholly engages the contradictions at the heart of literacy education, that he understands the ways his own teaching is implicated in the sort of violence at the heart of Stuckey’s analysis, that the necessary impossibility of achieving the goals he attaches to progressive literacy education does not mean that it will fail. (420) As we begin a new school year (and with a Secretary of Education who is no friend to public education or to progressive literacy education), it seems especially important to reflect on the “binds” that tie us—sometimes into knots (!), sometimes into productive and useful and meaningful work with young writers. As Branch puts it, we can at least hope that these binds “tie us together, that they allow us to work with others within and outside our disciplines to understand and continually to reimagine the potential of literacy education in anxious times.” Credit: Pixaby Image 2482275 by cocoparisienne, used under a CC0 Public Domain License ... View more

by Michael Kardos   This post first appeared on the blog on September 12, 2011.   My favorite part of that first class session, during which my introductory creative writing students watch me with equal parts eagerness and trepidation, is when I tell them, “Regardless of your major or why you signed up for this course, for the next fifteen weeks, please consider yourself a writer.”   I tell them this because for the next fifteen weeks they will be writers, in that they’ll be doing what writers do: writing, trying stuff out, getting stuck, staying stuck, getting hit with inspiration, revising, revising some more, hating what they’ve written, loving what they’ve written, being completely unsure what to think about what they’ve written.   Many of them will also be doing something else that all writers do at least some of the time: coming up with reasons to put off writing.   One key difference between less experienced writers and more experienced writers is that the latter know full well the sin they’re committing. Newer writers, however, often harbor the comforting belief that their writing comes out better if put off and done last-minute. Even advanced undergraduates will sometimes enter class claiming that their best work gets done the night before an assignment is due. Adrenaline, etc.   A goal for me each semester, particularly in introductory classes, is to get across the notion that writing takes time. And while time alone won’t necessarily yield good writing, time is nonetheless a prerequisite. In practice, this means giving out assignments early and often that get pen to paper (or fingers to keys). It’s actually a hard lesson to communicate, this possibility that starting early and writing every day might just result in more successful stories and poems. I’ve tried everything from “confession sessions” to handing out snapshots of Richard Simmons—the ultimate motivator—to hang up in their workspaces. I’ve been developing a new idea involving dinosaurs, flashlights, and the Harlem Globetrotters, but I don’t want to give away too much.   Truthfully, my most successful approach has been the most straightforward: I try to keep the discussion alive throughout the term. And every semester, at least a few “last-minute” writers will make a breakthrough in their work simply because they gave it more time—though I would love to hear other instructors’ strategies.   Best wishes for the new semester! ... View more