I always spend the largest amount of time on the comments when I grade students’ writing. I can frequently tell with a quick skim what needs attention. The work comes in determining the best way to help the student understand, finding resources in the text or online to support them, and encouraging them to keep writing.   In my post about Explaining Labor-Based Grading to Student Writers, I found an idea that inspired me to make an immediate change by stopping my practice of writing end comments and long annotations. So this week, I am not only thinking about students’ labor, I am also focusing on the labor that I bring to the course.   Asao Inoue, whose research has inspired me, writes about the workload involved in assessing student work on their labor in his article “A Grade-Less Writing Course That Focuses on Labor and Assessing.” Inoue explains, “Since I only read the writing, and do not grade or even respond to most of it, weekly work goes smoothly and quickly . . . I’m only looking for patterns of issues and examples to use in class discussions” (91).   Students know about this practice from the beginning of the course. The contract that Asao Inoue used at Fresno State discusses the “culture of support” that the course will build as they provide feedback for one another. Inoue tells students, “Always know that I will read everything and shape our classroom assessment activities and discussions around your work, but you will not receive grades or comments directly from me all of the time.”   Inoue’s ideas made me wonder why I was spending so much time on individual comments. Frequently, I was repeating the same basic ideas, as I wrote unique comments for each student. I was putting in a lot of work, and I wasn’t sure that students even read it carefully. Since my classes are all online, I couldn’t discuss patterns and examples in class, in the way that Inoue mentions. I realized though that I could accomplish the same thing with a grading summary post after I finished reading through students’ work on an assignment.   My first assessment summary was Grades on the Analysis of Writing Project. As with my end comments, I started out with comments on what students had done well and moved on to frequent errors and improvements that they could make. I don’t think it's the best advice that I will ever write, but I’m happy with it for a first try. In particular, I liked the fact that with the audience of the whole class (rather than one individual student), I could put the praise and advice in a broader context. Students were not alone in the additional work that they needed to do. They knew that others needed to make the same or similar changes.   I also used this grade summary page to outline the options for revision. Since I have not totally converted to a system of grades based on labor, I had a series of reasons that students might need to revise that ranged from forgetting to include the self-assessment checksheet and reflection to not turning in the assignment at all. Instead of writing specific instructions into an end comment for each student, I wrote one list that included the options for everyone.   I am still adding annotations with the SpeedGrader tool in Canvas (our CMS) to point out strong work and ask questions to help students revise, but I have stopped adding most of the end comments. I am saving myself a little time, since I don’t write all the individual comments. Better yet, I feel as if these comments to the whole class remind everyone about ways to improve their writing. I haven’t gotten much feedback from students yet, so I would love to hear what you think about this system. Please leave me a comment below, and let me know.     [Photo Credit: Untitled by Neil Conway on Flickr, used under a CC-BY 2.0 license] ... View more

I’ve received a few questions from faculty interested in using An Insider’s Guide to Academic Writing about recommended assignment sequences, so I would like to discuss two possible plans I believe might work well in First-Year Writing.   Assignment Sequence #1 The assignment sequence I currently use emphasizes a rhetorically-based approach to writing, reading, and research with a central focus on active learning. It asks students to engage in primary resource data collection (quantitative and qualitative) appropriate to their intended academic majors.   Literacy Narrative Research Topic Proposal Primary Research Logbook Academic Poster Portfolio Reflection Assignments 2, 3, 4 scaffold, building from one to the next. That is, in Project 2, students propose a research topic they would like to investigate, and they begin to brainstorm a research design they might use to answer their research question. Project 3 then follows, and students collect primary resource data appropriate to their academic major in order to support or refute their hypotheses based on their proposed research questions. Project 4, the academic poster, then gives students a context for thinking critically about their methods, results, and their results’ meaning from Project 3 in order to represent their findings in a poster.   Assignment Sequence #2 Another possible assignment sequence I’ve begun to draft that might work well for faculty using An Insider’s Guide emphasizes a rhetorically-based approach but doesn’t engage as deeply with primary research methods. As a result, it be more suitable for someone teaching a WID-based curriculum for the very first time. Literacy Narrative Project Assignment Sheet Analysis Faculty Interviews Comparison/Contrast of Interviews Portfolio Reflection This assignment sequence emphasizes reflection in Projects 1 and 5. Project 2 would be an analysis of a project assignment sheet that the students have from a different course. It could be an assignment sheet from a course the student is presently taking or from a course they have previously taken. I would ask the student to perform a rhetorical analysis of the assignment sheet, assessing the sheet’s rhetorical context (specifically focusing on purpose and topic). Project 3 asks students to engage in qualitative research by interviewing two to three faculty members in their academic majors. These interviews could be written or multimodal (perhaps asking students to use video, audio, or some other technology). I propose asking students to focus their interview questions on the types of writing and research faculty in their academic majors engage in and the expectations faculty have for student writing. Project 4 would then follow up by asking students to perform a content analysis of the interviews and describe the results of their analyses in the form of a comparison and contrast paper assessing the interviewees’ responses from Project 3. What I like about this assignment sequence is that it asks students to begin to investigate the kinds of writing and research that might be expected of them in their academic majors. The Project 2 Assignment Sheet Analysis paper serves a practical purpose of encouraging students to read closely the sheets they might have for another course. It also serves the purpose of giving the instructor a sense of the kinds of writing students may be required to do for other courses, which has the potential to improve transfer of skills and create a dialogue about disciplinarity and discourse across the university. Perhaps you have another assignment idea that could work well in asking students to engage in qualitative or quantitative data collection for the very first time. As always, if you have comments, feedback, or suggestions, I would love to hear from you in the comments section below! ... View more

When it’s time to get back to the basics—as I think it is right now—a little dose of George Orwell is always a good place to begin. Indeed, the specter of 1984 hangs heavy these days, so it seems more than worthwhile to reacquaint our students with that novel, and especially with the concepts of Doublethink and Newspeak. Explaining doublethink, Orwell says it is   The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink.    Newspeak is the fictional language Orwell created for the dystopia of Oceania: it makes use of English but is so highly circumscribed and limited that it allows only authorized forms of expression common to IngSoc (English Socialism), suppressing free thought and speech as well as agency. Much of Newspeak, as Orwell points out in 1984, means exactly the opposite of what it says.   The National Council of Teachers of English combined these Orwellian concepts in creating its annual Doublespeak Award in 1974, as a way to “honor” public speakers who have perpetuated language that is grossly deceptive, evasive, euphemistic, confusing, or self-centered.” Last year’s “winner” was—of course—Donald Trump, who may well receive a second award at the end of this year. (The deadline for nominations is September 15, 2017, and I hope teachers of writing across the country will challenge their students to come up with the person most deserving of the award and the very best example of Doublespeak for 2017). Certainly, learning to recognize, analyze, and unpack Newspeak, Doublethink, and Doublespeak must be a major aim of our courses in the coming semesters and years.   Two other concepts are worth considering as we build pedagogies and curricula for students to use in becoming critically literate citizens. One is “semantic gravitation,” which I learned about from Joseph Bentley and his article “Semantic Gravitation: An Essay on Satiric Reduction.” Bentley’s essay is an analysis of Aldous Huxley’s work, but we can see semantic gravitation atwork in everyday life as well. Basically, Bentley shows how association among words works to exert “gravitation” upward or downward on a particular word or cluster. I saw semantic gravitation at work decades ago when the Oxford English Dictionary first came online in searchable form. Just playing around with it one day, I typed in “woman,” and found—not surprisingly, of course—that this word appears quite infrequently in the OED, which fairly brims with “man.” I extended my search to ask what words were most often found accompanying “woman.” Can you guess what number one was: OLD. Downward semantic gravitation at work. Ask your students to look around today to see which words are “raised” or “lowered” through their association with certain other words. Once they start looking, they will find this force field at work everywhere.   I.A. Richards’s concept of the interinanimation of words is also worth discussing with students. Richards invents the word “interinanimation,” which is one key to his context-based theory of meaning. In one instance, Richards famously says that in any particular sentence, the meaning is what is NOT there. That’s because the meaning grows out of the “interinanimation” of the words in the sentence, which depend on one another to mean. As Richards says, "I conclude then that these expressive or symbolic words get their feeling of being peculiarly fitting from the other words sharing the morpheme which support them in the background of the mind." So it’s very important for student writers to look closely at what words cluster together, at how they “consort” with one another. (Think of “old” and “woman” here.) Meaning for Richards arises out of the context surrounding words; words do not have fixed or absolute meanings but develop meaning in context.   Teachers of writing can use these concepts to generate discussion in class and to create exercises that will help students investigate how they are at work today, and every day. They can choose almost any current topic and gather texts about that topic as data they can analyze. Interested in the Environmental Protection Agency? Gather statements about the agency from its website and from its advocates and opponents, from social media to carefully vetted newspapers. Then see what words are most often associated with the Agency and how they work together to create certain meanings—and evaluations—of the EPA. The same exercise will work for texts on any other topic.   Over the years, I’ve found that students gain agency and empowerment from such exercises, that they are excited to put their minds to work at tracing how meanings build up or accrue. Part of the joy of our jobs is helping them acquire such agency as they learn that, indeed, words matter! Credit: Flickr Image “Oxford English Dictionary” by mrpolyonymous, used under a Creative Commons Attribution License ... View more

Critical thinking, I like to believe, is at the core of what I do in the writing classroom. One of the reasons I love to teach with Emerging is that the readings place ideas front and center.  Students learn critical thinking in my classes by first finding the ideas, then understanding the ideas, then using the ideas.   Finding the ideas is the first step and doing so takes careful reading of the essays.  We go over how to annotate while reading so that students can mark critical quotations and parts in the argument of the essay.  I reinforce this work in class with group exercises where students locate the most important concepts and their meaning in a particular reading.   Understanding those ideas is the next step.  Group activities are again very helpful.  Groups can work to explain the ideas and offer examples from outside the text, ideally by looking to other readings.  That work of locating examples is then the first step in using the ideas.   Using the ideas, I like to say, doesn’t mean swallowing them whole.  Part of the work of critical thinking is figuring out when a concept doesn’t work and why it doesn’t, often prompting students to offer a development of the concept and thus offering new knowledge as a contribution to the conversation.  I find that working connectively across multiple readings (2 or 3 work best) is a great way for students to develop facility in testing and modifying concepts.  Along the way they start to develop concepts of their own, and that for me is the most exciting part of critical thinking.   How do you use readings in your class to develop these skills? ... View more

I have been working this year to shift my assessment practices toward grading students less on error and more on the labor that they bring to their writing for the courses that I teach. Ever since I heard Asao Inoue’s plenary on “Racism in Writing Programs and the CWPA” at the Council of Writing Program Administrators Conference last summer in Raleigh, North Carolina, I knew that I wanted to give the strategy another try. What is Labor-Based Grading? It is a pedagogical tactic that I have been developing on and off since my first year of teaching. At this point, I am in an in-between place: I am currently blending in some of practices that Inoue describes, and I am developing resources for a more complete conversion by the fall. Recently, I have been focusing on that ways that the grading system is discussed. The contract that Inoue used at Fresno State is long and, well, contractual. It’s a three-page document that outlines everything about how the work in the course is assessed, beginning with the approach and ending with details on requirements and logistics. As you would expect of a syllabus-style discussion of course requirements, it is explicit and detailed. Approaches for Students to Consider for Labor-Based Grading Remind students that your course is based on your labor - which is the time and intensity that they put into their writing. Students will not be punished for making mistakes as long as they improve throughout the term.  This grading system will not be what they are used to, so you can share the following guidelines on how they should approach their assignments: Focus on Ideas Focus on your ideas and what you are trying to say. Forget about the pressure to be perfect. Focusing on perfection can distract writers from developing their ideas. Because students are graded on labor, mistakes won’t undermine the grade.  Write for Yourself  You’re studying the kinds of writing that are important in your field and developing a sense of what makes that writing effective. Don’t worry about impressing me (the instructor). Write what will make you successful in the workplace.  Take Risks Try kinds of writing that stretch your abilities to help you learn new things. There’s no need to play it safe. After all, the safe, easy route doesn’t push you to improve your writing.  Have a Do-Over If you take a risk and it doesn’t turn out, you can always try again. Just as in a game, you have unlimited do-overs. Making mistakes is part of the learning process. As long as you are trying to improve your work, you can’t fail.  Put In the Effort You will write, rewrite, start over, and try again. All this work counts, as long as you listen to feedback, incorporate what you hear, and reflect on how to improve.  Wrap Up & Additional Resources on Labor-Based Writing Obviously, courses need this kind of document, but I wanted to break the explanation up into a series of shorter pieces. To begin, I wrote When Your Grades Are Based on Labor, a webpage that introduces the key aspects of the system from a student’s perspective. As I explained last month, I have been using Infographics as Readings in an effort to align course materials with students’ reading styles, so I also created the infographic on the right to present the ideas. My goal is to list the basic details in the infographic, with additional information explained on the webpage. I would love to get some feedback on whether I’ve succeeded in the comments below. Additionally, if you would like to know more about this assessment strategy, read Inoue’s publications on anti-racist assessment and on grading students’ labor on his Academia.edu page. Credits: Infographic was created on canva.com. Icons are all from The Noun Project, used under a CC-BY 3.0 license: report by Lil Squid, Fluorescent Light Bulb by Matt Brooks, analytics by Wilson Joseph, aim by Gilbert Bages, Switch Controller by Daniel, and Gym by Sathish Selladurai. ... View more

 Today’s guest blogger is Kim Haimes-Korn (see end of post for bio).   This week I have an important assignment for multimodal composers. When we have students work in digital spaces as content creators, there are often questions about ethical citation and usage practices and how to share content. Although we have many great resources, these notions are complicated when students share content, post images, and embed links on blogs or within other projects. Digital writing involves remixing and sharing content, but it complicates issues of plagiarism and ethical use. Even when you look for examples, you will notice that there is disparity and a great variety of possibilities. It is by no means an exact science. I like the idea of having students create a Style Guide for Digital Citation and Usage that becomes the class reference for these practices. In addition to their handbook, I start them with some readings that address the subject. I also show them sites like Creative Commons and other ways to find copyright-free images that are in the public domain or labeled for reuse. It is also important to show them that large blogging sites have usage guidelines that are specific to their situation. In order to be a good digital writer you have to have the knowledge and motivation to dig a little deeper. For example, the site Hubspot has plenty of content to share and is happy to have people use it according to their Content Usage Guidelines. These guidelines explain usage and permission rights along with expectations defined by the group. It also gets complicated when you want to share data or ideas that have been repurposed multiple times. It is important for students to critically read these sources to try to get to the original source rather than citing the last place they found it. In the worlds of digital writers there is a term, newsjacking (coined by David Meerman Scott), in which authors pull stories trending in the news and add them to their own sites for marketability. Basically, it is a way to draw on the Kairos of an existing situation to boost and enhance your own content. The Assignment Images are essential to successful online content. Students need to know not just how to cite them but where to find them. This exercise asks students to share copyright-free image sites and other strategies for understanding the usage guidelines. For example, when you conduct a Google Image search, you can go to the tools menu for a drop down list of usage rights where student can choose from a list of suggestions. When they choose, “labeled for reuse,” Google filters those images that fit the category. The internet has a lot of information on these topics, such as this infographic created by the Visual Communication Guy, Can I Use that Picture, which provides a visual representation of these concepts. It is useful to have students go to these different types of sources (textual and visual) to try to make sense of and enter the conversation. This assignment helps them to think critically about the choices they make as content creators. Have students read and review online sources (articles, infographics, blogs) for citation practices and usage guidelines. Put them in small groups to discuss what they found, looking for overlaps and distinctions. Discuss the ways these definitions are communally constructed. Ask each student to summarize a source on a presentation slide and present it to the group. As a group, assimilate the information and create a collaborative style guide slide that simplifies and defines the citation and usage practices for the particular classroom context from the summarized sources. Place this slide at the front of the presentation for easy future access. Share the presentation with the class – revise and shape through feedback. Publish the style guide in a place where students can access it for reference for future writings in the class. Reflections on the Activity It is always easier for students to remember information when it is communally constructed on their own terms. This exercise allows students to critically explore these issues in relation to their own real needs and expectations. The assignment defines a consistent methodology for these practices within a single classroom but also makes students aware that these practices are fluid and constantly changing. The class style guide invites them into the conversation and makes them aware of their ethical responsibilities as digital writers. Guest blogger Kim Haimes-Korn is a Professor in the English Department at Kennesaw State University. Kim’s teaching philosophy encourages dynamic learning, critical digital literacies and focuses on students’ powers to create their own knowledge through language and various “acts of composition.” She likes to have fun every day, return to nature when things get too crazy and think deeply about way too many things. She loves teaching. It has helped her understand the value of amazing relationships and boundless creativity. You can reach Kim atkhaimesk@kennesaw.edu or visit her website Acts of Composition. ... View more

I recently returned from the National Association of Developmental Education (NADE) annual conference in Oklahoma City, and I then headed to Portland for the CCCC annual meeting. On the plane to Oklahoma and back, I was able to catch up on some much neglected scholarly reading. I attended the 4Cs with three colleagues, and we took advantage of the coast-to-coast travel time to discuss some of the thorny issues we have been grappling with as a department – issues for which there is never enough time in our regular schedules. Participation in regional and national conferences, for me, is the best and most effective professional development available, keeping me connected to the discipline, to colleagues, and to my identity as a scholar and teacher; it is development I bring back to my local context. But even as I write this, I am aware that many of my colleagues teaching composition in two-year colleges do not take advantage—cannot take advantage—of this professional development. For many, there is no travel budget for national or regional conferences. For others, there is no time amid teaching schedules that may require 5, 6, or 7 courses per semester. For some, there is no incentive to attend, for top-down, completion-driven agendas prevent faculty from being agents of innovation, research, or change. At NADE, in fact, only one other faculty member from the Virginia Community College System attended, and he and I discussed and lamented barriers to involvement in professional communities. The sessions I attended at NADE stimulated and challenged my thinking: Peter Adams, for example, explained the local context that led to the development of the Accelerated Learning Program (ALP) at the Community College of Baltimore County and traced its evolution over the past 10 years. Jennifer Ussery and Christine Moore of Phoenix College challenged participants to update CSU-Chico’s CRAAP test to reflect the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy as well as local and disciplinary contexts – a great exercise for my own college, which is currently developing a Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) targeting information literacy. Cheryl Burk, Lori Dees, and Laura Kalbaugh of Wake Tech Community College offered a rebuttal to a working paper from the Community College Research Center (CCRC), providing a local context from which to question the research methods and conclusions presented in that paper. Alexandros Goudas presented a careful review of data on accelerated learning programs and questioned the wisdom of mandating variations of ALP which have not been subjected to rigorous study. In all of these sessions, I kept coming back to two words: disconnect and local. The sessions I attended revealed a number of disconnects which affect community colleges: disconnects between theory and practice, policy and theory, policy-makers and practitioners, faculty and researchers, faculty and librarians, those whose research focuses on developmental education and those whose research addresses composition and rhetoric. These disconnects frustrate teachers and researchers, and perhaps none is more irksome than the disconnect between talking points from national think-tanks and local, institutional voices. Those local voices are critical. ALP, for example, grew out of a very specific local context, and it was implemented by a local faculty cohort who controlled the structure and content of the courses. Phoenix College’s revision to the CRAAP Test was the result of a local faculty and library partnership. Wake Tech Community College’s response to the CCRC working paper arose from faculty questions about the extent to which research methods and conclusions reflected local curriculum and teaching practice. Finally, TYCA’s White Paper on Placement Reform emphasizes the need for local context and local control. NADE members at the Friday plenary were urged to reconsider the narrative they tell about the work they do. That narrative must speak to national trends and policies, of course, but it must also, ultimately, be a local story. In order for two-year college faculty to have a platform for shaping and telling that story successfully, they will need professional recognition, recognition which includes power to make locally-informed decisions, as well as support for participation in state, regional, and national professional organizations. When that recognition is afforded to two-year college faculty, they may overcome some of the disconnects highlighted at NADE and change the narrative at the local level. Tune in next week to hear local stories from my two-year and four-year colleagues at the 4Cs in Portland. Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Join the Macmillan Community to nd defend the work they do. get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! ... View more

For anyone who wasn't able to make it to 4Cs this year - or anyone who had the same problem I did in choosing from among the amazing sessions available - I thought I would share a quick rundown on a great session I attended called  Curriculum Design for Online Writing Centers.  This fascinating session looked at three different instances of online writing centers in different contexts, for the purpose of exploring what did and didn’t work for students. The first speaker, David Elder of Morningside College, was creating an online center for grad students in specialized programs.  While this was the only writing-center access presented to those students, the undergrads had access to a traditional, in-person writing center, which Mr. Elder also manages.  He addressed questions of feedback in an asynchronous setting, including the types of comments that were not useful (things like “Awkward” and “Consider revising this sentence”) the sorts of actionable comments that best benefitted students, and how big-picture thinking and positive commentary played important roles in effective asynchronous feedback. The second speaker, Ryan Vingum of Miami University, also asked important questions about how skills translate between asynchronous and synchronous teaching and emphasized that the importance of administrators and students embracing them as merely different options, with neither one being inherently better than the other. Shelah Simpson of Liberty University closed with a discussion of her research on the different student reactions and outcomes to her college’s “home-grown” writing center as compared with a simultaneously available corporate option made available by the school.  Unlike the prior speakers, her entire student community were online-only.  Like Elder, she concluded that encouragement served to make students feel connected. She also discovered that while solid academic growth was rated as an important factor in the student’s selection of which writing support to use, convenience was also an important driving factor. She added that accessibility issues greatly impacted the usefulness of certain writing center options for a small set of the students in her survey. For a closer look at the presentations, check out the files uploaded by the presenters here.  ... View more

Flying home to SFO after this year’s CCCC gathering gave me time to reflect on this conference and its long history as well as on its evolution. Bigger than ever (I gave up trying to count the number of sessions) and replete with poster sessions, think tank sessions, and caucus meetings, the program offered more than any attendee could possibly say grace over. Yet in spite of the profusion of panels, I missed some of the excitement I used to feel in looking through the program for sessions of particular interest to me. There was very little on history or historiography, very little on rhetorical history, theory, or practice, few student voices. In recent years, at least as near as I can tell from looking at CCCC programs, our field has turned away from rhetoric as our foundational discipline; and for that, I am sorry.   Still, I came away very glad to have been in the company of so many smart and dedicated scholars and teachers and, as always, I learned from inspiring work. I will write more in another posting about some of the great sessions I attended, but today I want to share just one presentation that taught a powerful lesson. The presenter was Dion Simmons, from the University of Kansas, and he spoke (with eloquence and passion) about what he termed “interrogative feedback,” starting with its importance to his own learning. He told of his experiences at a primarily white institution, where, as a beginning undergraduate turning in essays for his composition class, he fell back (as we all do) on familiar and comfortable ways with words. He remembers that he had an affinity for the phrase “I just feel like,” which helped him get started, to get into a topic, or to sum up a response. This phrase was his, and he liked it, though he hadn’t thought much about it. But his teachers didn’t agree, responding with comments such as “Your feelings don’t matter” or “This is opinion; I need facts.” These comments told Simmons, loud and clear, that this wasn’t a good phrase, that he should not use it.—but nothing more. Then, as I recall the story, he moved to an HBCU, where he once again turned in an essay including this familiar phrase. This time, however, his instructor did not offer criticism or warnings but instead one simple word: WHY? That one word, that “interrogative feedback,” led him to think hard, not only about why he felt a certain way but why he used that particular phrase, and subsequent discussions with his instructor, who went onto become his mentor, led him to understand that he was trying to get his own voice into his writing, to use it to establish some authority, however tenuous. He kept asking “why” as he grew as a writer and thinker and as he completed his undergraduate studies and began pursuing his Ph.D. Now he is teaching students of his own, asking them questions and using these questions to help students learn why they make the choices they do, where those choices come from and what implications they hold.   This was a lesson I can never learn too often, especially because it’s an easy one to forget: rather than leveling a criticism, why not ask a question that will allow student writers to explain what they are doing and why? Looking back, I realize I first took this lesson to heart when I read Mina Shaughnessy’s Errors and Expectations, in which she demonstrates over and over again that listening to students, asking them about their choices, and taking in their explanations, is the key to teaching them effectively. Ask questions. And then listen hard. That’s the way to open the door to learning.   Credit: Pixaby Image 1870721 by 38344328, used under a CC0 Public Domain License ... View more

The following headline caught my attention today, and I thought I'd give it a semiotic treatment.  Here it is: "Why 'Beauty and the Beast' will be the biggest box-office hit of the year so far".   I'm not interested in the reasons given for the predicted success in the article but, rather, in the larger picture that this apparently sure-fire box office bonanza presents.  It's worth looking into because it re-illustrates a number of points that I have made over the years in this blog about Hollywood semiotics.   The first, and most obvious, point to make is that this Disney live-action reprise of its own animated smash is a signifier of what could be called the "if at first you do succeed, do, do again principle." That is, with so much at stake financially in the modern movie business, commercially successful films tend to become franchises for the studios that produced them, and clone-opportunities for the studios that didn't.  Why take a creative risk when a little new technology can let you redo the animated original with real people this time around, and be pretty darned assured of a big-time box office hit?   Another fairly obvious point (though it took the movie industry a little while to get it ) could be called the "forget the fourteen-year-old boys for a moment and focus on the little girls realization."  That point has been amply made by such absolute blowouts as Titanic and all the Harry Potter films.  Heck, just to make certain, Disney has brought back Hermione Granger, I mean Emma Watson, as the Beauty.  And did I mention The Hunger Games trilogy?   Then there's what I'll call "the prince and princess paradox":  that is, in our proudly egalitarian democracy, one of the best ways to ring in the cash is to make a movie about princes and princesses—especially Nordic ones.  (Beauty is really a king's daughter in one of the early versions of the tale.)  For some reason, American middle-class desire still seems to be fixated on Old World privilege—which is a point I made on this blog when Frozen was still fresh a few years ago.   Related to "the prince and princess paradox" is the long-standing medieval revival, which has swept American popular culture ever since The Lord of the Rings exploded in popularity in the 1960s, and subsequently was given a postmodern makeover by Star Wars, a British "public school" inflection by Harry Potter, and a grand guignol do-over by Game of Thrones.  The paradox here lies in the way in which New World America, which has no actual medieval history of its own, continues to be obsessed with a fairy tale world of hereditary aristocrats, swords, and sorcerers.  This brings me to my final point - When I cast the "new" Beauty and the Beast into a system of associated entertainments, I find in that system two somewhat similar shows that are also significantly different.  These are the 1987-90 television series Beauty and the Beast, and the DreamWorks franchise, Shrek.  The TV B & B was significant because it took the old fairy tale about what might be called a dis-enchanted prince into modern times, and turned the beast into a kind of mutant homeless person (who's actually rather handsome in his leonine way —one wonders what audience reaction would have been if Beauty was male and the beast was a female, however), who lives, literally, in the Manhattan underground.  The series was drenched in socio-political overtones, with the Beast being really a beast and not an enchanted prince who will go back to being a prince as Beauty's happily-ever-after reward.  While rather soupy and over-the-top, the series did, at least, Americanize the old story.   Then there's Shrek.  While rather cornball and over-the-top, Shrek gleefully shredded the old prince-and-princess framework entirely to give us an ogre-and-ogress happy ending, with a really creepy Prince Charming thrown into the saga just in case we didn't get the point.  Shrek, who first appeared in print form in 1990, was a creature from the Age of Attitude, the Bartman days when Bart Simpson, and not Homer, was the Simpsons star, and irreverence was a national pastime.    So, I wonder about this back-to-the-Beauty stuff.  There's a New Yorker cartoon from Roz Chast that I'm reminded of here.  In the cartoon, entitled "Comes the Revolution Fairy Tales," "Cinderella" is retold with Cinderella ending up running away with "Henri, an idealistic student," as Prince Charming meets a gruesome end.  Now that's a fairy tale for the land of Thomas Paine. ... View more

One day late, but I couldn't wait until next week to share! This fantastic assignment by Angela Laflen (Marist College) is subtitled "Collaborative Learning in the Literature Classroom" and it delivers exactly what it promises: a chance for your students to approach literature as a conversation space through the power of wikis. For more great digital assignments for your literature classroom, see Tim Hetland's complete resourcehere. Wiki Critical Editions: Collaborative Learning in the Literature Classroom ... View more

A common complaint from students is that they have nothing to say in response to an assignment.  Part of the challenge hiding behind that complaint is, I think, the very challenge of assuming a voice of academic authority a la David Batholomae’s “Inventing the University.” But sometimes the problem isn’t finding an academic voice, but breaking down the assignment and what it’s asking for.  And sometimes, yet again, the issue is understanding what an argument is and what it looks like.  I thought I would share some of the strategies I use with students when they feel like they have nothing to say.   First, I encourage them to come into my office hours to discuss the reading.  In part I offer that to make sure they’ve done the reading and more importantly that they understand the reading, but I also start there because when they start talking through the reading they also start saying something.  I might prompt them with questions (“What did you underline?” “What felt important?” “What does this author really care about?” “What part confused you the most?” “What did you think was the most compelling evidence the author used?”) but just having them talk through the reading gets them saying something and often helps them increase their overall comprehension of the work.   Next, I walk them through the assignment to make sure that they understand it. Often we do this work in class and I will also often have groups work on sample arguments for the assignment that we discuss and assess as a whole.  In office hours this work can be even more focused.   Then I help them find an argument.  Again I find a conversational model useful.  I ask them to talk through a response to the assignment and then jot down key words and phrases that I feel have the most potential to lead them to an argument.  I offer these back to them as seeds they can use or as a scaffold for a developing argument. Of course often what students mean by not having anything to say is that they don’t know how to meet page length requirements.  They’re afraid that they won’t have enough to say.  I tell them that working closely with quotations from the text is the best remedy to that, as each quotation (and its accompanying analysis) adds length and strength to the paper.  Once they have an argument sketched out, I will also ask them to find some quotations that they think might work in supporting the argument.   Often when students leave, they have all of the material they need for a solid draft.  It usually takes only a bit of hand-holding and, as they reflect on the process, they find that it’s all work that they can do on their own for the next paper.  Each successful draft, even if it’s not a successful argument, reinforces that they have something to say, even as they continue to acquire the requisite skills to say it well. ... View more

4c17‌englisheditorblog‌ Assignment design can be rough. It's one of those talents teachers of writing develop over time with coffee, a sense of humor, and reflection. Too few of us get the mentoring we need to build successful writing assignments--the kind that are scaffolded enough to provide authentic learning moments and to produce writing aligned with course goals, but also the kind that engage and inspire writers. I admire the tenacity of Bri Lafond, who teaches at Riverside City College and CSU San Bernardino. In her 2017 CCCC presentation "Thinking Outside the 'Box Logic': Curating Context in the FYC Classroom," she described multiple attempts at a single assignment and semester after semester of reflecting and tweaking. Courageous work. She asks her students to pick a year in history, locate primary sources (a song, a news story, a work of art), juxtapose the sources, and produce a multimodal composition in which they analyze patterns and make an argument. She admits it hasn't gone well. She's changed up the requirements now four times to account for students' lack of knowledge of 20th century history, struggles with information literacy, and lack of experience with analytical writing. What I loved about Lafond's presentation is that she didn't end with a "Ta-da!" moment. She didn't present a perfect assignment for the taking. She presented a process-- a messy, head-scratching, sometimes-head-banging process. She presented a case study in reflection. And she presented, I think, an argument for more attention to assignment design and development in teacher training and mentoring programs. ... View more

Recently, I had a chance to visit with colleagues and students at the University of Oklahoma, where the writing program, with the leadership of Roxanne Mountford, is implementing a new curriculum that they have worked long and hard to develop. Indeed, as I travel around the country, I am seeing more and more writing programs engaged in similar exercises, and for very good reason. As the U of Oklahoma group realized, while they have been working on this curriculum for some time, it is particularly pertinent—indeed kairotic—at this moment in time, given the new administration and its programs.   At Oklahoma, the new curriculum focuses on understanding and interrogating values in its first term course, “Principles of English Composition I.” In this course, students work through a sequence of four linked projects. The first asks them to identify a value that is important to them, to define that personal value and to show how their personal history/experience led to the articulation and evolution of that value. After this deeply self-reflective assignment, students move on to analyze a “group value,” by identifying a campus group that they do not belong to and then identifying a meaningful value that group members hold and how they put that value into practice. Students then conduct research in order to understand the group value as thoroughly as possible. In the next assignment, students explore a text that “offers a point of view that differs from your own on a current social or political issue.” As you may imagine, this assignment draws on Ratcliffe’s work on rhetorical listening that leads to understanding first, analysis second. The goal of the assignment is not to argue for or against the values represented in the text but to explain “why the author of the texts holds the position and what values connect to that position.” The final assignment asks students to write a reflective essay on their term-long interrogation of values and the representation of values. The entire sequence then leads into the second-term course, which focuses on values-based arguments of their own, delivered in both written and spoken forms. I very much admire the way such sequenced curricula guide students in the practice of critical inquiry and analysis, but without prescribing either what they can write about or the position they should take. This slow and steady approach to becoming critically aware seems to me especially effective with students who may be wary of what they’ve been told is the liberal agenda of higher education in general.   This curriculum is already being tested in the crucible of the classroom, and it will be evaluated and refined and revised as the group works to make it engage with all students. I look forward to learning more about this evaluation and about student response to it.   While at the University, I also had a chance to visit the Writing Center, directed by Michele Eodice, and to meet a student working away there. And to have a reunion with Roxanne Mountford and Susan Kates was, as always, pure pleasure.   Credit: Photos by Andrea Lunsford ... View more

At my school there’s continued pressure to offer fully online classes. The state has issued a mandate that 40% of state university undergraduates be enrolled in online classes by 2025.  Our Center for eLearning is well-funded, we’ve moved to Canvas as our online learning management system, and we’ve started placing more and more degree programs fully online.  My own experience with online teaching has been decidedly mixed and the class I am teaching online this semester, an introduction to interdisciplinary studies, has only confirmed that.   I’ve always felt that the challenge in teaching writing online is that writing courses are process courses and not content courses, and the best way to teach process is a lot of guided practice.  When I hear about teaching writing online it sounds as challenging to me as teaching violin or painting online (though, of course, such courses exist).  Continued evolution in technologies will, no doubt, assist but I am wondering how people have faced the more fundamental process versus content challenge.  I know any number of writing programs offer classes online so I am also wondering how you do it.   If you have experience teaching writing online I’d love to hear about it.  We’re offering some small test sections online here at school but additional advice or insight would be great.  What’s your experience been? ... View more