Last week I wrote about the gap between the expectations we have for students and the expectations they have for our classes and their participation in them. Since then, I had an opportunity to join in on a Program in Writing and Rhetoric pre-term staff meeting at Stanford, led by my inimitable colleague Marvin Diogenes. During this session, Marvin asked all of us to turn the dial back to the first day of our first year in college, to our arrival at whatever school we attended. For him, that was fifty years ago this week, his first day as a first-year student at Stanford.  Marvin asked us to make notes about what that day was like: what did we remember about the place and our place in it? What was happening on campus at the time? What was happening in the larger world that week or month? What favorite movie or song or band do we remember from that year? What activities were we signed up for and why? How did we allocate our time between school work and “other” things? He had about twenty of these prompts, all designed to take us back in time to our 17- or 18-year-old selves, to get our heads back into that space, if only briefly. He described leaving his home in Michigan pretty much for the first time, getting ready to head west to California. He remembered packing two suitcases and two boxes, which his brother-in-law helped load into the car—when Marvin, being his ever-cautious self, remembered he had not packed his winter coat. No room in the suitcases now, so he wore it instead, onto the airplane headed to SFO. In those days, current Stanford students turned up at the airport to welcome new frosh and usher them onto waiting buses for the ride south to campus. Marvin found himself on one of those buses, the only person wearing anything even vaguely resembling a winter coat. Feeling awkward and out of it, a “nerd” from small town Michigan, he imagined everyone on the bus looking at him with derision or contempt. Or worse. It was a moment when he felt a complete outsider, ostracized and very much alone. He asked us to look over our notes and to think about when and where we might have experienced such a “winter coat” moment, and just how that had felt. View of Wallenberg Hall on the Stanford University Main Quad Then, more to the point, he asked us to remember such a moment when we looked out at the faces in our first classes this term. The students, he said, might look unengaged. They might look distant and even suspicious. Or just silent. Those appearances, though, don’t reveal the whole student, not by a long shot. We can be sure, Marvin reminded us, that each of them has had or will have a “winter coat” moment that will affect them deeply, though we won’t be able to see that at all. I’ll remember this story for a long time. Especially when I am greeting new students. And I will try very hard not to make snap judgments and to question my own assumptions about the students I see. I had more than one winter coat moments in my first year, from the time I badly mispronounced a word that I had only seen written to . . . well, you get the idea. And the movie of my first year? Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, after which I did not feel comfortable in the shower for almost a decade. What was your first week of college like? And do you recall a winter coat moment?   ... View more

Ever since George Lucas mashed up Gene Roddenberry and J.R.R. Tolkien to create one of the most profitable movie franchises in cinematic history, fantasy has come to dominate the American box office—whether involving sci-fi space operas, sword-and-sorcery medievalism, extraterrestrials, superheroes, vampires, or zombies (just to name some of the most popular examples over the years).  So dominant has fantasy become that the question today isn’t whether any competing genre has emerged to challenge it but, rather, which sorts of fantasy are currently the most popular.  In the 1990s, for example, extraterrestrials seemed to be everywhere (The X-Files, Roswell), but they were eventually overtaken by vampires, who for quite some time looked like they would never be dethroned… until zombies came along, and then it looked like it was going to be all zombies, all the time, for all time.  But now superheroes rule the roost, with such one-time leaders of the cinematic super-pack as Batman and Spider-Man being currently eclipsed by Black Panther, Thor, Loki, Ant-Man, Shazam!, assorted Avengers, and a gang of Guardians that includes a highly precocious raccoon… just to name a few. The semiotic question accordingly becomes: what does the currently unstoppable hegemony of the superhero tell us? As is always the case in a semiotic analysis, we can begin to answer this question with the construction of a system of associations and differences. In the case of superheroes, that system begins with the invention of Superman in the 1930s, and extends forwards to every current star in the superverse (if I may coin a term).  What all these heroes have in common—and which is something that they share with such mythological heroes as Gilgamesh, Hercules, and Beowulf—is that they defend their societies from external threats and dangers.  The superhero, in short, offers the comforting reassurance that a fearsome world can be brought under control—that all, in the end, will be well, thanks to the superhero’s prowess and vigilance. But there is a significant difference between the dangers presented in the early Superman and Batman sagas—threats to American society that were generally posed by such masterminds of organized crime as the Joker and the Penguin—and the fundamentally cosmic threats that haunt the superverse today.  For today the danger is existential: the entire universe is at stake, and without a band of Guardians or Avengers standing between humanity and the super villains who threaten to destroy us all, we would be doomed to extinction. I think that the most likely (or abductive) explanation for the current preeminence of the existential superhero is to be found in the fact that we are not having a very good century.  From the events of 9/11 to the ever-increasing threat of environmental collapse posed by global warming (not to mention the after effects of the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic), things are not going well, and for the first time in their history Americans seem to be losing their traditional, and heretofore unshakable, optimism.  The current crop of superheroes accordingly reflects a growing uneasiness, a sense of implacable doom. But popular culture mediates, as well as reflects, social distress, offering for the price of theater admission a comforting reassurance that all, in the end, will be well.  An Avengers: Infinity War, in which half the universe is destroyed, is followed by a sequel, Avengers: Endgame, in which the dead are brought back to life.  When necessary, the hypothetical existence of multi-verses can be trotted out, along with time travel and other sci-fi expedients, to revive the dead and restore normality.  Thus, in spite of how terrible everything looks in reality, today’s superheroes offer not only entertainment but a kind of existential salvation.  Which, of course, is why such tales are called fantasies.   Photo by Craig McLachlan (2019), used under the Unsplash License. ... View more

In 2018, increasingly alarmed at the polarization and the vitriol characterizing too much of our national discourse, Tim Shriver (Chair of the Special Olympics) and some colleagues founded UNITE “to find ways to help ease divisions in our country.” The group soon began to focus on language as one major means of creating and exacerbating divisions, and by 2021 they were developing what they came to call the Dignity Index, a set of measures for determining the degree of contempt (or its opposite, which they call dignity) in political discourse, especially between or among people who disagree. Convinced that contempt causes division and that dignity eases it, they hypothesized that putting a spotlight on language that conveys contempt or dignity might reduce contempt and help ease the tension and division so evident in public discourse.  UNITE put their Index to work during the 2022 midterm elections in Utah, training scorers to rank political speeches. They found that “voters from opposite ends of the spectrum were able to agree on scores” and came up with three key findings: first, the Index attracted a lot of attention from people who wanted to learn about it and become trained in using it; second, while people tend to come to the Index thinking of it as a way to judge the speech of others, they soon begin applying it to themselves and their own speech; and finally, when people spent time with the Index, they came to recognize contempt as a major problem, and one that they have some agency in helping to solve.   The group went on to launch “Students for Dignity” at the University of Utah and other universities and to develop additional training materials and courses for others who want to learn how to use the Index to bring about change in communication and ultimately to “embrace a dignity culture.” You can read their 2023 report, "The Dignity Index: Utah Pilot Project Technical Summary," here. One passage from the report seems worth quoting in full: During Dignity Index development, UNITE team members reported something unanticipated: as the expression of dignity rises in conversation, so did curiosity, humility, vulnerability, and the ability to see the good in others and the flaws in oneself. Observations such as these underscore the premise that treating others with dignity and easing divisions and solving problems are the same set of skills. This suggests the Dignity Index could be a helpful tool in easing political division and supporting productive public dialogue. I was especially interested in the report’s description of what some students had to say about using the Index. One student said: “We started to apply the guide in our own lives. We were reflecting on it, we understood it, and we trained on it and talked about it." This comment that suggests that we teachers of writing might use the Dignity Index in our classes, preparing students to use it and then working with them as they apply it to discursive exchanges they are studying in class, to political speeches, and to their own language use. As I’ve studied the report and tried to learn more about the development of the Index, I have wondered about the choice of “dignity” as the best term to encompass the kind of open, respectful, care-full language they are advocating. I expect that for many students, “dignity” and “dignified” connote a kind of distanced stuffiness that resists the definition the UNITE team implies. I wonder if they considered and debated other possible terms, such as “respect” (which comes with its own set of connotational problems as well) or “good regard.” I think “respect” might serve as a better antonym for “contempt” for students today. But in the meantime, whatever terms are chosen, an index that has been tested as thoroughly as this one has and that allows us to take a close look at how our own speech and/or writing veers toward contempt or toward dignity warrants our attention. Check out the eight levels on the contempt-dignity continuum here.   ... View more

    The most recent politician to declare their candidacy for president in 2024 is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., one of America’s best-known anti-vaccine activists. Earlier in his career Kennedy established a reputation for himself as a prominent and respected environmentalist. When he shifted his focus in 2005 from toxicity in the environment to the alleged toxicity of childhood vaccines, however, he caught the attention of parents who distrusted vaccinations and believed that they were linked to autism in children or other medical problems. This case is an intriguing example of how Kennedy’s notoriety persuaded parents to accept his claims and refuse the substantial body of research that proved vaccines are safe. Rolling Stone published his article “Deadly Immunity” in 2005 where Kennedy warned that children were being harmed by the preservative thimerosal in childhood vaccines. The truth was that by 2001, thimerosal had been removed from all childhood vaccines. Kennedy went beyond using fraudulent data to misrepresent his sources. An article published in Scientific American, which analyzed his misuse of sources, details how he took quotations from authorities out of context to misrepresent what those authorities said and ignored basic rules for documenting research. Even Kennedy’s family eventually went public in an attempt to distance themselves from his faulty scholarship and extreme views. Their open letter is reprinted in the most recent edition of Elements of Argument. His niece and two of his siblings state, “We stand behind him in his ongoing fight to protect our environment. However, on vaccines he is wrong. . . . He is part of this campaign to attack the institutions committed to reducing the tragedy of preventable infectious diseases. He has helped to spread dangerous misinformation over social media and is complicit in sowing distrust of the science behind vaccines.” Kennedy’s famous name seems to lend him authority and therefore, people who distrust vaccines rely on him to defend their beliefs. Those who are not familiar with his earlier writing about childhood vaccines may remember his recent opposition to the COVID-19 vaccines. An AP article in the Chicago Sun-Times summed up his extremism: “Kennedy has repeatedly invoked Nazis and the Holocaust when talking about measures aimed at mitigating the spread of COVID-19, such as mask requirements and vaccine mandates. He has apologized for some of those comments, including when he suggested that people in 2022 were worse off than Anne Frank, the teenager who died in a Nazi concentration camp after hiding with her family in a secret annex in an Amsterdam house for two years.” Michael T. Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, also stated in an article by the New York Times: “His conduct ‘undercuts 50 years of public health vaccine practice, and he’s done it in a way I’ve never see anyone else do it. He is among the most dangerous because of the credibility of who he is and what his family name has brought to this issue.’” Will the fact that Kennedy continues to spread misinformation about vaccines in the face of indisputable scientific facts affect his presidential bid? Only time will tell, but in order to move past the violent division that the country has experienced over the past few years, America needs a president that leads with integrity. "39 RFK Jr"  by Felton Davis is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

Elizabeth Catanese is an Associate Professor of English and Humanities at Community College of Philadelphia. Trained in mindfulness-based stress reduction, Elizabeth has enjoyed incorporating mindfulness activities into her college classroom for over ten years. Elizabeth works to deepen her mindful awareness through writing children's books, cartooning and parenting her energetic twin toddlers, Dylan and Escher.     My colleague Kate Sanchez and I are currently working on a new YouTube channel, Present-Minded Professors, which contains meditations, activities and other musings to help educators and students build awareness skills for academic success. Kate and I like to think of mindfulness as a process of noticing what is going on in the body and the mind, and we feel that this awareness can especially help students be more present for their final exams and therefore do their best work. Here is a guided meditation for final exams to play for students. It contains a brief introduction to the practice and a meditation focused on getting one’s mind and body ready immediately before taking an exam. You can pull it up on YouTube on your phone at high volume, or you can play it on a SmartBoard. If time is a consideration, pick a short piece of the meditation to play for students, or simply give students the link to the meditation so they can listen before they come into the exam room. Do what feels comfortable for you! I always find it hard to do anything “extra” during exam time, but if you have metaphorical bandwidth, the text of the meditation is at the end of this blog post. You can feel free to modify it to suit your needs and your voice and then lead your students in the meditation. As Kate and I build our YouTube channel, we would also love your feedback, especially about topics for the videos you would like to see! Feel free to comment below or in the comments section of Present-Minded Professors on YouTube. Wishing you a meaningful end-of-semester!   A Meditation for Final Exams Hello everyone. This is Elizabeth Catanese from Present-Minded Professors.  I’m here right now to provide you with a brief meditation to help prepare your mind and body for the final exam you are about to take. Please engage with this meditation in whatever way feels helpful to you. You do not have to be good at meditation to benefit from this practice. Please see all directions as suggestions. For example, when I suggest that you close your eyes, do so only if that feels possible and comfortable. The goal of this meditation is to get your body and mind ready to take the exam. Maybe you have some extra anxious energy that is not serving you. Maybe you are a bit too calm for the task ahead. When I was taking exams, I used to be so anxious that my palms would sweat and my legs would bounce up and down. We all handle exams differently. Through this meditation you will become aware of where you are. How you are feeling is okay.  Let’s begin!  Take a deep breath and exhale. If you are comfortable doing so, close your eyes. Take a moment to notice how you feel in this moment. You may be excited and anxious. You might feel ready and annoyed that that test is not in your hands right in this moment. Simply notice. How you feel right now is valid.  Take another deep breath and exhale. What does your body need right now? If you think it would help, wiggle your fingers. Stretch your arms above your head. Notice how you feels. Is there a way you could move your body right now that would help it feels it’s best? Do so now.  Take note of the energy in the room. Relax your body for a moment and in your head give good wishes to those around you.  Take another deep breath. And exhale. As the final part of this practice, please come up with an affirmation to say to yourself if you get stuck during your exam. Say it in your head a few times. For example, I often say “I am brave and capable.” And many people like “I can do this.” Take a moment to think of one unique to you.  At this point, there is no more studying left to do for this class. It is time to show what you remember, what and how you think. I would like to extend my congratulations to you for getting this far. To get to the point of a final exam takes a lot of hard work and effort. I see and applaud your effort. Your progress is beautiful. Take a final deep breath and exhale. If you feel comfortable, open your eyes.  It is now time to take your final exam. ... View more

When I was a grad student at Ohio State University, one of the professors in the department insisted that the sign announcing our department be changed from “English Department” to “Department of English,” and I remember the debate that ensued on the ramifications of that grammatical shift and the high dudgeon many colleagues worked themselves into over it. I also remember at the time thinking what an odd name it was in any event. Though I had read William Riley Parker’s 1967 essay “Where Do English Departments Come From?” and understood the lineage that had shifted, at Harvard, from rhetoric, briefly to folklore, and then to literature, and particularly literature in English, the name still seemed odd to me, given what I knew about the Department I was currently studying in. “English” did not seem parallel, to me, with the Departments of German or Spanish or Chinese. In my department, students studied and wrote dissertations on literature in English and sometimes literature in translation, certainly, but also on the history and theory of rhetoric, on folklore, on creative and other forms of writing. So “English” just seemed an odd name to me.    University Hall at Ohio State University   So odd, in fact, that in the 80s I advocated for changing the name of our departments, arguing that our name should reflect the work that we actually do. My arguments went . . . nowhere. Nevertheless, as the years wore on and as scholars of rhetoric and literacy/writing studies began to grow in number, some departments began to change their names (Oregon State, for example, went from “English” to “Writing, Literature, and Film” and new departments, separated from English, grew up around the country, with names like “Writing and Media Studies” or “Writing and Rhetoric Studies” or “Rhetoric, Media, and Social Change,” “Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication,” and so on, names that signal more clearly what the department studies and values than does the single and vague word “English.” In “The Colonialism and Racism of the ‘English’ Department,” Elizabethada A. Wright doesn’t consider this slow evolution away from “English” and doesn’t cite William Riley Parker’s work or a number of others, such as Gerald Graff or John Guillory or Robert Scholes, who examine and question the formation and practices of “English.” But that is not the focus of Wright’s critique, which centers on the hegemony of English and of its colonializing tendencies. In this regard, I was expecting to encounter the work of James Slevin, whose Introducing English includes a searing indictment of the earliest attempts to force “English” on native inhabitants.  Nevertheless, I take the point of Wright’s article seriously, and I think all of us—especially all of us in departments of “English” should be at work right now examining how when and why our departments came by that name, articulating the mission that name suggests and comparing it with the missions that other, alternative names could carry forward. We would also do well to be asking our students what they think of the name of our departments – in what ways the name seems appropriate and adequate to what they are studying and learning in their classes and what alternative names they might suggest, along with their rationales for doing so. What’s in a name? A very great deal. Years ago, my colleague Nicholas Howe said if he could form a department of his own, he would call it “The Department of Interesting People.” I am still not sure what my department title would be, but I know it would aim at using language together to create a better future. And it would NOT be “English.” What would your department name be—and why?   The image in this post is in the public domain. ... View more

One year ago, I wrote here about the threat of a Constitutional crisis. In doing so, I cited a speech made by Thurgood Marshall, the first African American to serve on the Supreme Court, on the occasion of the 200th birthday of the Constitution in 1987. Marshall wrote, “I plan to celebrate the bicentennial of the Constitution as a living document, including the Bill of Rights and the other amendments protecting individual freedoms and human rights.” He continued, “Along the way, new constitutional principles have emerged to meet the challenges of a changing society. The progress has been dramatic, and it will continue. The men who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 could not have envisioned these changes. They could not have imagined, nor would they have accepted, that the document they were drafting would one day be construed by a Supreme Court to which had been appointed a woman and the descendent of an African slave. ‘We the People’ no longer enslave, but the credit does not belong to the Framers. It belongs to those who refused to acquiesce in outdated notions of ‘liberty,’ ‘justice,’ and ‘equality,’ and who strived to better them.” Since the 2020 elections, across our nation, dozens of laws have been proposed—and most of them have been passed—that acquiesce in outdated notions of liberty, justice, and equality. Often these laws have been passed with their proponents knowing full they will not withstand a constitutional challenge. They do, however, reveal the biases of those who support them. They also reveal why Marshall was right in stressing that the Constitution was and must remain a living document. For example, there is endless debate about what rights to gun ownership are established by the Second Amendment, an amendment written before bullets as we know them had even been invented, let alone semiautomatic weapons. When Marshall wrote of “new constitutional principles [which] have emerged to meet the challenges of a changing society,” he had in mind, among others, the Thirteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which ended slavery and the denial of the vote based on race, respectively. During his lifetime, he saw progress toward a more just and equal nation. Had he lived into the twenty-first century, he would have been horrified to see us moving backward. Last week Marshall would have seen a glaring backward movement in the area of racial justice as he watched with the rest of the nation what happened in Tennessee. The Tennessee state legislature expelled Rep. Justin J. Pearson and Rep. Justin Jones, two young black representatives because they took part in a peaceful protest against the gun violence that most recently took six lives at an elementary school in Nashville. These representatives were removed from political office after being duly elected by their constituents, leaving those constituents temporarily without representation. Representative Gloria Johnson, a white Democrat, participated in the same protest but was not removed from office. Ironically, quiet racial gerrymandering of voting districts is what brought into power state legislatures that are able to get by with such blatant injustices. While both Rep. Justin J. Pearson and Rep. Justin Jones have been reinstated, the backlash from their expulsion will unravel in the weeks to come. Our Constitution assumed men of honor would be the ones enforcing it. Unfortunately, as the Constitution evolves we may have to legislate standards of integrity as well. For the better part of 200 years, Americans used the power of the vote to say no to politicians involved in a scandal or espousing blatant racism—except in the South, where that remains a problem. Our Founders didn’t think they needed to be made explicit. Perhaps today they do.   "Constitution"  by EpicTop10.com is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

Bedford/St. Martin's is pleased to announce the participants in the 2023 Bedford New Scholars Advisory Board! Advisory Board members are: Emily Aguilar   Emily Aguilar (recommended by Danelle Dyckhoff) is a Master's student in English at California State University, Los Angeles, where she is also a Teaching Associate. Her experience teaching first-year writing has amplified her approach to equity-based teaching, especially for ESL students and students with disabilities. She hopes to teach writing as an exercise toward liberation. In addition to her interests in pedagogy, she is interested in literary trauma studies, theories in modernism and postmodernism, speculative fiction, and literature of the incarcerated. Hannah Benefiel Hannah Benefiel (recommended by Kyle Jensen) is a Writing, Rhetoric, and Composition PhD student at Arizona State University. She writes about eating disorders, food as medicine, embodied technical communication, and religious trauma. Currently, she is working on her dissertation that frames eating disorder recovery texts as rhetorical education through the lens of rhythm, myth, and graphic medicine. She serves as the Assistant Director of Writing programs and teaches Professional and Technical Communication, Composition 1&2, and the First Year Composition TA practicum. Jacqueline Cano Diaz Jacqueline Cano Diaz (recommended by Joel Schneier) is pursuing an English MA in Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Central Florida, where her thesis work centers on the rhetorical aspects of clothing choice, particularly as a woman of color in academia. She teaches Composition I and Composition II as part of the First Year Composition Program. Her research primarily focuses on material and visual rhetorics through a feminist and queer studies lens. In addition to her thesis research, she has applied these interests to study alienation and identification in Halloween costuming and, most recently, literacy activities involved in birdwatching. Ronada Dominique   Ronada Dominique (recommended by Courtney Wooten) is pursuing her PhD in English concentrating on Writing and Rhetoric at George Mason University. She teaches FYC courses and served as the Graduate Writing Program Administrator, overseeing PhD mentoring and professional development and assisting with MA/MFA/Phd orientations. As a Black Millennial Mother in higher education, Ronada explores the representation of Black scholars in Writing Studies publications and how research impacts the Black Experience in higher education classrooms. Starting her PhD studies with a 3-month-old infant, Ronada understands the importance of representation and legacy and wants to ensure that those who are responsible for shaping the academic landscape of the future are equipped to do so. Samira Grayson   Samira Grayson (recommended by Kate Pantelides) is pursuing her PhD in English with a concentration in Rhetoric and Composition at Middle Tennessee State University. She has taught Expository Writing and Research and Argumentation (the first year writing sequence at MTSU), and currently serves as the University Writing Center’s program coordinator. Her research interests include writing center and writing program administration, spatial rhetorics and place-based pedagogy, feminist historiography and research methods, and notions of authorship in collaborative writing. She is a member of WPA-GO’s digital presence committee and was recently published in Peitho. Hannah Hopkins Hannah Hopkins (recommended by Diane Davis) is pursuing a PhD in the Rhetoric & Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. She is an Assistant Director of the Digital Writing and Research Lab and an Assistant Instructor for the Center for Teaching and Learning. Hannah teaches a variety of courses in writing and pedagogy, with a focus on digital rhetoric. Students in her special topics course "Rhetoric of Data Justice" create podcasts that explore data justice controversies. Hannah also teaches an introductory pedagogy course for graduate students. Hannah's research investigates storytelling with and about data, data centers, and networked technologies. Her current research engages ways that communities build power through, with, and against digital memory infrastructures, including recent work building solar-powered computers. Amanda E. Scott   Amanda E. Scott (recommended by Brian Gogan) is pursuing a PhD in English with a concentration in Creative Writing at Western Michigan University, where she currently serves as an Assistant Director of First-Year Writing. She's taught a variety of undergraduate courses, including developmental writing, first-year composition, technical writing, and editing, as well as graduate-level courses in publishing. Her research, which often explores the intersections between inclusive writing practices, ethical design, and social inequities, has appeared in Technical Communication Quarterly and the Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning. Christopher Luis Shosted Christopher Luis Shosted (recommended by Brooke Rollins) is currently enrolled at Lehigh University where he studies the intersection of rhetoric and literary studies. He teaches courses in the First-Year Writing Program at Lehigh focusing on introducing students to the conventions of academic writing and research as well as persuasive arguments as they exist outside of the university. Additionally, Christopher has also served as the assistant to the First-Year Writing Program working with the director to build protocols for programmatic assessment, educating new teachers joining the program through a year-long practicum, and drafting new iterations of shared syllabi. His research areas focus on applications of classical rhetoric to modern situations and the assessment of student writing along large and small scales. Christopher also currently serves as a co-editor of the Program Profiles section of Composition Forum. Kristen Wheaton Kristen Wheaton (recommended by Dr. Roxanne Mountford) is pursuing her PhD in English with a concentration in Rhetoric and Writing Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She teaches primarily First-Year Composition and is currently one of only three instructors leading the co-requisite course first introduced in Fall of 2022. In addition to her teaching role, Kristen is currently the Senior Assistant Director of First-Year Composition. Her research interests include resistance rhetorics, genre theory, ethos, and rhetorics of difference. Ashleah Wimberly Ashleah Wimberly (recommended by Elias Dominguez-Barajas) is pursuing their PhD in Rhetoric and Composition at Florida State University, where they hope to defend their dissertation on graduate instructor literacies in Spring 2024. They teach a variety of courses, including first and second year composition and upper-level courses in FSU's Editing, Writing, & Media program such as Rhetoric, Article & Essay Techniques, and Writing in Print & Online. Ashleah has served as a mentor to incoming graduate instructors and as an assistant to the Composition Program. In these roles, they've overseen the mentoring and training of graduate instructors, helped design and implement assessment protocols, and assisted the program director in various administrative tasks. Prior to their work at FSU, Ashleah also co-wrote a custom textbook for the University of North Dakota and assisted librarians in creating custom lessons tailored to the Composition program there. Ashleah's research primarily centers around pedagogy, with strong interests in literacy studies, identity, and accessibility. ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Jordan Hill, composition instructor in the Global First Year program at Florida International University. A recently-selected Fulbright Scholar, he will soon move to Italy to research a short story collection. Idioms I tell my class of international students that a certain American literary character is “an odd duck.” They stare at me with tilted heads and confused smiles. I imagine what they must be imagining—Jay Gatsby as a strange waterfowl. I clear my throat. “Sorry, everyone,” I say. “An ‘odd duck’ is an idiom. An expression.” How can I explain this? “An odd duck is sort of like a black sheep.” Again, the quizzical faces. Too late, I register my second, unintentional idiom. I sigh and explain what happened. They laugh, and I try again.   Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines.   ... View more

  Elizabeth Catanese is an Associate Professor of English and Humanities at Community College of Philadelphia. Trained in mindfulness-based stress reduction, Elizabeth has enjoyed incorporating mindfulness activities into her college classroom for over ten years. Elizabeth works to deepen her mindful awareness through writing children's books, cartooning and parenting her energetic twin toddlers, Dylan and Escher.   While taking education courses in college, my peers and I were asked to think of metaphors for our pedagogy. At the time, I found inspiration in the idea of being the conductor of an orchestra, using my conductors’ wand to help bring out the creative genius of my students. I imagined my hair getting ruffled by the breeze created by my own motion as my body kept time—the community of it all, the uproarious appreciation of the crowd. But after 15 years of being a college professor, my metaphor for teaching has evolved from “I am a conductor,” to “I am a circle-creator.” It’s a metaphor that reminds me to bring students together (often into the shape of a circle), to constantly renew my commitment to circle back to previous concepts before building on them, and to help students build cyclical routines. My new metaphor is not as glamorous, and in the strict sense of definitions, it’s only metaphor-adjacent, but it works a lot better for me. The circle-creator metaphor speaks to me because I find it valuable to be at the edges of the classroom, alongside my students, where we can encourage each other and learn collaboratively. This allows for insights to come from the voices of students, rather than just my own, resulting in a deeper understanding of the material. However, creating a literal circle in the classroom can be a challenge, as my current Humanities 101 students can confirm. After attempting to arrange desks into a circle, the result often looks more like an octopus having a bad day. Additionally, one or more students may end up sitting outside of the circle (by choice or by chance), and the pace of discussion can make it easy to miss opportunities that help students deepen their analysis. That being said, I like the circle formation precisely because it is not always easy; together in the circle, we strive to make meaning together, and there is always something about the literal or metaphorical configuration to improve upon next time. The circle-creator metaphor also works for me because it reflects the iterative nature of teaching. A student may understand a concept one week and forget it the next. To solidify and deepen our understanding, I remind myself to circle back to previous concepts before moving on to new ones. For example, before discussing the shift to monotheism in Ancient Rome under Constantine, I asked my students to recall what they remembered about the shift to monotheism under Akhenaton in Ancient Egypt. My students and I think about how history repeats itself, and we repeat ourselves too. Thinking about the circle-creator metaphor helps me to slow my teaching down—to offer reminders and opportunities to rethink, instead of just plowing ahead. When teaching study skills in my English 097 class, I also think about the circle-creator metaphor in terms of routines. I encourage my students to make small changes in their study process, such as writing down exactly when they plan to do their homework for the class. We then circle back the next day to see how it went. If a student says that a strategy didn’t work for them, I remind them that it may be useful to try it more than once. We also talk about how good habits, once established, can come and go. I share with them that I, too, constantly slip and have to circle back to my better habits like going to bed on time, and properly managing my grading time. I believe that using metaphors for teaching can clarify our practices and our values and keep us fresh. The circle-creator metaphor works for me because it reflects the power of collaboration and the cyclical nature of learning. Comment below about the metaphor(s) that work for you! ... View more

Kim Haimes-Korn is a Professor of English and Digital Writing at Kennesaw State University. She also trains graduate student writing teachers in composition theory and pedagogy. Kim’s teaching philosophy encourages dynamic learning and critical digital literacies and focuses on students’ powers to create their own knowledge through language and various “acts of composition.” She 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.   Overview Writing in digital spaces asks us to rethink the nature of writing. Our students compose through non-linear writing and interactive formats. Site maps are used in interactive design to help users find our sites and content and enhance SEO (search engine optimization).  Although this is important for those composing in online formats, I use site maps in my classes as part of the planning and revision processes.    It is often difficult for students to get their minds around non-linear writing. They are used to writing in a vertical format, where readers read from top to bottom and left to right. Generally, the author controls where the reader goes through linear progression. With webtexts and interactive writing, the audience takes on a participatory role through which writers and readers work together to understand meaning and readers have choices about where to go next, thus creating documents that are read deep vs from top to bottom. Celia Pearce in the Ins and Outs of Interactive Storytelling, provides a good working definition for these terms: “In the context of interactivity, linear is defined as any body of content (i.e., information) that is meant to be seen or heard in the same order every time it is experienced.” She continues, “Non-linear, on the other hand, is defined as any body of content that is structured such that its final delivery is variable. Each time it is seen or heard, it can be presented in a different order, based on input from the user, or (as I prefer to call it) the player.” Teaching students to write in this way is a challenge as it asks them to include multimedia and multimodal components, embedded links and incorporate design cues that allow readers to move around and participate in the narrative. See my previous post on Foundations for Non-linear Writing for including these components.   I use site maps in my courses to help students see the connection between their ideas and the ways that form and content work together. My students are not web designers and my goal at this point is not to have them understand SEO and other back-end strategies for location and distribution of their work (although this is important down the line if they continue in these areas).  Instead, I use them as planning and revision documents that help them conceptualize the structure of non-linear writing.    Here are two examples of how I use them in my classes:    Sitemaps for Interactive Writing I have students write interactive feature articles that require many branching directions and pathways. For these articles, the site map helps students organize their work and shape the writing through identifying embedded links, exploratory paths, and multimodal components. Here is a sample from a Sense of Place interactive article:  Talia Dodenhoff’s Site map for Sense of Place Interactive Feature Article (2022)   Sitemaps for Organizing Online Portfolios  I use online portfolios in many of my classes. One class in particular encourages students to curate a collection of artifacts that represent their marketable skills. This portfolio assists them on the job market as they shape a professional identity and allows future employers to understand the connections between their work and their abilities.  Students in this context need to understand the connections between their artifacts through categorizing and organizing.    For both of these examples, students need to create a hierarchy of pages and elements and detail the connections between components. Here is a sample of a site map for an online portfolio: Isabel McNamara’s Sitemap for an online portfolio (2022)   Steps to the assignment:  Give students context through discussing linear and non-linear composition.  Explain the concept of site maps and talk about how they are similar and different from outlines and other processes of linear writing. Students are generally familiar with outlines, so this is a good place to start.  I usually show them a couple of examples to get an idea of the visual sitemap.  Have students to review their work and list the components included in their articles and in their portfolios. Ask them to specifically name their ideas rather than rely on generic naming. Encourage them to talk about hierarchy and to look for categories and connections between their ideas and components.    I introduce a site map generator tool/app that allows them to create the maps in real time and through fluid design that can change as the projects progress. I like Gloomaps because it is simple and free but there are many other free tools and apps for site map design. This app helps you create a map that is available for 14 days unless it is revisited and will renew each time for dynamic interaction as students revise and refer back to it as an organizing document. Students can also save their sitemaps to their computers in PNG or PDF formats. Here is a short instructional video on the site that demonstrates the building process.  Share sitemaps in peer groups or project for the whole class to get feedback.   Have students revisit the sitemap several times during the process and revise it based on new ideas and directions.        Reflection on the Activity  This activity goes far to help students understand that they are not just dropping a paper online and that they must think differently in these contexts. It allows them to engage in dynamic, fluid design that trains them to be strong interactive composers. It emphasizes a visual planning and revising through new conceptual lenses.      Works Cited:  Pearce, C. (1994, May 1). The ins & outs of non-linear storytelling, ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics. DeepDyve. Retrieved March 27, 2023, from https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/association-for-computing-machinery/the-ins-outs-of-non-linear-storytelling-QwtZIQstxb  ... View more

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been re-evaluating the power of digital technologies. But not, as you might expect, AI tools like ChatGPT. Actually, I’ve been pondering Google Translate.   Ten or twelve years ago, I recall discussions among ESL and FYC colleagues in which Google Translate was censured as an impediment to both language acquisition and writing development.  But within a few years, the tone had softened considerably, and many of us working with multilingual writers recognized the benefits of this Google tool for academic readers and writers trying to deal with unfamiliar vocabulary. There was a  particular value in classes with students from many language backgrounds: students with shared linguistic resources could rely on each other, but others—such as speakers of Nepali or Korean or Lingala in the class—often felt left out.  Google Translate was a resource for them, and it seemed to level the playing field. For translations of words and short sentences, this tool made sense.   Still, 1o years ago, I would not have encouraged a student to write a complete piece in a different language and produce the English version through Google Translate.     This spring, however, one of my students submitted the first draft of his literacy narrative in both Spanish and English. He had added an annotation:  the English version came from Google Translate.     My first instinct was to invite the student to my office and make it clear that he should not do this again.  But I hesitated. After all, it was not a final piece, and it was clear the student was engaged in the assignment. When I asked about his process, he explained that he just “felt more comfortable” beginning in Spanish.     So I let the process stand, and I provided feedback as I normally would, asking questions about the content, organization, word choice. The student began revising the English version. To my surprise, however, he did not delete the Spanish original on his working draft. It was a touchstone for him, a point of assessment and reflection.  The student asked questions of his own, met with our writing fellows, and discussed the piece with classmates.     He has since completed two additional assignment drafts using the compose/translate/revise method.  He recognizes the potential difficulties and risks inherent in this method, and he does not use it for every assignment. He knows he has to assess meaning, word choice, paragraph structure, and syntax.   I am not sure this process would be effective for all students, but for this student in particular, the use of Google Translate in the composing process engages him in metalinguistic and meta-rhetorical talk. As Myhill and Newman have suggested:   “Learners’ capacity to think metalinguistically about writing and to enact that thinking in the composing of text is enabled through high-quality classroom talk. . . . Potentially, classroom talk can be the cultural tool which supports the construction of shared declarative metalinguistic knowledge and the psychological tool which supports writers’ cognitive capacities to use that knowledge procedurally in the shaping of their own written texts.”  (Myhill and Newman, 2016, p. 178).    My student is certainly developing “declarative metalinguistic knowledge” and using that knowledge to shape his own written texts.   In a sense, my student is deploying all the tools and resources (community, digital, and linguistic) available to him to compose, revise, and transform meaningful texts.  His process, in fact, reminds me of my son’s artwork; my son uses a host of digital tools to transform photos into abstract works of art, as in the example below.      The initial inspiration is no longer recognizable or even recoverable: each choice my son makes takes the piece further from its original source.  But those choices are thoughtful and purposeful, made according to his initial vision of the piece. We can even see the process of composition and transformation condensed in a time-lapse video of his work.         I would love to have a time-lapse video of my student’s composing process—from his freewriting and revision in Spanish, to the first iteration of an English translation, to the interactions and edits which will ultimately lead to an essay in his final portfolio. Through notes and annotations, he has already documented at least part of his process.     Ten years ago, I might have told this student that his extensive use of Google Translate wasn’t really “writing in English.”  But like my student’s narrative or my son’s artwork, I have seen my teaching transformed through disciplinary communities, interactions with students and colleagues, and a host of digital, rhetorical, and linguistic resources.  Such transformation is certainly a good thing.   Image credit: Murray Moore ... View more

  Logical fallacies can be the source of humor or the source of the most successful acts of deceit ever pulled off. To learn to avoid fallacies in their own writing, students need to practice recognizing and understanding the fallacies in what they read and hear. They will be less susceptible to flawed logic if they practice spotting it in everyday rhetoric. Commercials and ads provide plenty of examples for practice. You can ask your students to bring in or jot down examples of fallacies they find in ads and then can discuss in class what fallacies they illustrate. Here are a few examples: Faulty Use of Authority: Mila Kunis endorsing Jim Beam. False Dilemma: “Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s Maybelline.” Ad Populum: “Lipton Ice Tea. Join the Dance.” Appeal to Tradition: For lemonade (or almost anything else) — "Just like grandma used to make.” It’s not always easy to categorize logical fallacies, but the important thing is for students to recognize what is wrong with the logic even if the line between types of fallacies is sometimes blurry. Remember also that the fact that an advertising strategy is not logical does not mean that it is not effective. You may want to move from such an exercise to consider logical fallacies drawn from the news, perhaps bringing in some examples and asking the students to find others.  False Analogy: The most infamous example this month has been Fox News’ Tucker Carlson’s editing 44,000 hours of January 6th footage and characterizing the remaining brief clip as the actions of innocent sightseers being escorted through the Capitol. Post Hoc or Doubtful Cause: Because some childhood inoculations are given around the same age as parents often become aware of the first symptoms of autism in their children, a group of anti-vaxxers now object to having their children inoculated. It has been proven that the inoculations do not cause autism, but the misguided belief of a few has led to a rise in the number of cases of some diseases once virtually eliminated in the U. S. Ad Hominem: It is common in politics to attack an opponent, and in this age of a decisive split between parties, those attacks are as heated as ever. An ad hominem fallacy occurs when the person making an argument is attacked instead of his or her argument. It is an attempt to distract from the issue at hand. For example, critics have been using Biden’s age to argue that he is not fit to be president of the U.S. Slippery Slope: This sort of poor reasoning is exactly why a bank failure such as the recent one in California sends shock waves through the financial community. Unfortunately, it has happened before that the failure of one or a few banks caused a panic, which caused people to pull their money out of other banks, which caused more banks to fail. It’s not hard to find examples of bad logic, but it takes practice. Students generally enjoy these exercises. The challenge comes in seeing their own flaws in logic as they draft their essays. "I must be a cat"  by Nattiebug is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

For our 2nd writing project this semester, we are working on creating multimedia projects. The intention is to create a deeper understanding of our class’s key source, “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity” by James Baldwin. We are returning to this source with 3 central goals in mind: To practice part-to-whole analysis, students will find a section from “Artist’s Struggle “ that caught their attention while composing Writing Project 1. They will analyze how and why this part of the text caught their attention, and explain how this section exemplifies  Baldwin’s overall message.  To prepare for Writing Project 3, the researched essay, students will engage with deeper reading of “Artist’s Struggle.” For WP 3, students will use the section from WP 2 to find an additional source by James Baldwin that speaks to connected or similar concerns. “Artist’s Struggle” presents many of the germinal themes that Baldwin revisited throughout his life, including the idea of artists bearing witness to and recording cataclysmic events in order to move audiences to action. In investigating Baldwin’s work in more depth, the hope is that students will explore and synthesize questions and concerns from across the semester. To understand Baldwin’s work more fully, students will engage with the artistic process of writing for discovery. For facilitating this part of the assignment, I will offer examples of projects that students have created in the last several years, including videos, drawings, and collages. In reconsidering the third goal, I wondered how to introduce poetry as an additional possibility for a multimedia project. Then I remembered the concept of cross out, or erasure, poems. To create an erasure poem, the Poetry Foundation suggests the following process: “Cross out words or entire phrases to make a new poem ‘within’ or ‘underneath’ the real one.”  My thought was that, using their selected section from “Artist’s Struggle,” students use Baldwin’s original words to create their own cross out poem. I tried out this process myself  to see how it might work and what it might look like.   First, in order to have a clear reference point, I copied a sample section into a Google Doc: If I spend weeks and months avoiding my typewriter—and I do, sharpening pencils, trying to avoid going where I know I’ve got to go—then one has got to use this to learn humility. After all, there is a kind of saving egotism too, a cruel and dangerous but also saving egotism, about the artist’s condition, which is this: I know that if I survive it, when the tears have stopped flowing or when the blood has dried, when the storm has settled, I do have a typewriter which is my torment but is also my work. If I can survive it, I can always go back there, and if I’ve not turned into a total liar, then I can use it and prepare myself in this way for the next inevitable and possibly fatal disaster. But if I find that hard to do—and I have a weapon which most people don’t have—then one must understand how hard it is for almost anybody else to do it at all. (Baldwin 68) Next, I recopied the section and added cross outs using strikethrough formatting. This was not an easy process, and I spent some time figuring out what words to keep to make meaning (and a poem!) from the original section.  If I spend weeks and months avoiding my typewriter—and I do, sharpening pencils, trying to avoid going where I know I’ve got to go—then one has got to use this to learn humility. After all, there is a kind of saving egotism too, a cruel and dangerous but also saving egotism, about the artist’s condition, which is this: I know that if I survive it, when the tears have stopped flowing or when the blood has dried, when the storm has settled, I do have a typewriter which is my torment but is also my work. If I can survive it, I can always go back there, and if I’ve not turned into a total liar, then I can use it and prepare myself in this way for the next inevitable and possibly fatal disaster. But if i find that hard to do—and I have a weapon which most people don’t have—then one must understand how hard it is for almost anybody else to do it at all.  In the process of choosing the cross outs, I found myself slowing down and reading more deeply to discover how Baldwin used language to make meaning. I noticed, as if for the first time, how Baldwin used verbs, conjunctions, and punctuation to create meaning. Even though I regularly teach these stylistic features, I realized that I was creating something new from something seemingly very familiar. I looked more closely at sentences and key words to figure out how the component parts could work together as a reimagined whole. What I discovered was that erasing words and punctuation allowed me to better understand the heart of Baldwin’s message—a condensed version, in a sense. In other words, the erasure of words helped me to concretize meaning in a text where meaning can seem abstract and elusive.  I wished I had thought of this for WP 1, I noted to myself. Perhaps it would have helped with the initial struggles with the text. On the other hand, those initial struggles seem like an important part of the process. In and out of the classroom any of us might struggle to make sense of a complicated world. The hope is that having struggled with a difficult text there will be a transfer of skills that is applicable to other situations in which students find it difficult to make meaning from a first encounter.  The final step in my process was to put my strikethrough formatted text into a Word document and to use the drawing function to cross out the words in digital purple marker. Here is a screenshot of the poem:   Cross Out Poem using a section of “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity” by James Baldwin Poem and Photo by Susan Bernstein March 15, 2023. It is perhaps an interesting way to teach paraphrase, as well as a different approach to the writing process and close reading and analysis. Indeed, as with any form of interpretation based on existing evidence, I imagine that the same passage would yield many different cross out poems. But for the moment, the hope is that students will experience for themselves what it means, as artists writing for discovery, to struggle with their integrity. ... View more

A few weeks ago I climbed the steps at 100 East End Avenue in New York, which the independent Chapin school calls home. I was there to celebrate teachers, the mission driving The Academy for Teachers, a nonprofit dedicated to honoring and supporting teachers “as valued professionals in need of the latest knowledge and inspiration.” Conceived of and directed by teacher and writer Sam Swope (see his The Araboolies of Liberty Street and I am a Pencil, for example), the Academy urges all of us to give teachers the R E S P E C T that Aretha sings about, along with “the support they need to keep them where they belong—in the classroom inspiring our children for years to come.” In pursuit of this goal, Sam and his team at the Academy offer “master classes” for teachers from public, private, and charter schools to attend three ninety-minute sessions led by artists and thinkers like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Gloria Steinem, Jane Goodall, Julia Alvarez, Robert Battle, and others. The intense workshops and conversations led by these experts continue to enrich and inspire the teachers who get to spend time with them, so much so that these teachers are four times more likely than others to stay in the classroom, often against the great odds that all of us know about. The faculty for these master classes come from across the disciplines and artistic fields. On this particular evening, we are gathering to hear The Kronos Quartet perform “A Teacher’s Suite,” commissioned by the Academy to honor teachers and featuring the voices of many of the Academy fellows who have participated in master classes. Kronos had led transformative master classes for the Academy, working with teachers of music to bring new ways of thinking and experiencing music into their classrooms, and this concert followed up on those classes and showcased Kronos’s own interest in and dedication to teaching and to learning.     A teacher teaches a classroom of students   I was sitting with a large group of teachers that evening as we experienced the magic that Kronos so often produces: I could actually feel the room expand with hope and pride as the music cascading around us, could feel what it means for teachers to feel honored and respected. Such a small thing, giving respect. And yet it can change lives and, perhaps, the world. In addition to master classes and special performances, the Academy publishes small chapbooks, written by master class teachers—about a teacher who was important to them. I have a collection of these gems, and looking through them now I’m drawn to one by Jacqueline Woodson, author of Brown Girl Dreaming. She remembers “Ms. Pat,” who “taught me most about what it meant to move through the world as an empath, as a philanthropist, as a thinker, as a doer, as a truly good human being.” Ms. Pat, she goes on, “rarely stepped into our classrooms. Instead, she invited us into her office—and she guided us. She truly guided us.” A teacher like that, Woodson concludes, “stays with you for a lifetime.”   I hope that each of us has a “Ms. Pat” held close in our memories, and I hope that our students will all encounter such teachers, those who will be with them for a lifetime. In the meantime, if you are reading this and have a few spare moments, check out the Academy for Teachers, and consider contributing to their mission. Director Sam Swope dreams of similar academies springing up in cities across the country, all dedicated to supporting and honoring teachers. That’s a dream I can believe in.    Image by Kenny Eliason.    ... View more