Four years ago in the Bronx, I taught Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” in a first-year writing course. New York City was still emerging from the impact of Hurricane Sandy, and the trauma of unanticipated change was very much on all of our minds that spring. “Allegory” was a required text in this student cohort’s Introduction to Liberal Arts class, as well as in our writing course. In our course, the program required that we read a novel from a preselected list. That was how I came to teach The House on Mango Street with “The Allegory of the Cave.” Our focus, growing organically out of students’ writing and class discussions, became the significance of education, and the development of resilience in difficult times. Four years later, “Allegory” seems equally relevant, and brings back memories of studying this text as a first-year student many years ago. My first-year liberal arts education did not include a first-year writing course. Instead, I wrote weekly papers for Introduction to Philosophy, gaining an understanding in basic concepts of theory and rhetoric that has kept me grounded both in and out of the academy.  As a result, I remain convinced of the value of a liberal arts education for all students, across majors and disciplines. From that experience of education emerged a key question that still holds value for a first-year students: “What is truth?” Because students enrolled in our institution’s Stretch program have the benefit of having the same teacher and cohort across two semesters, I already had an awareness of students’ concerns with growing as writers. Indeed, as I read students’ reflective writing after the election this past November, I began to brainstorm readings for the spring semester. My goal was to begin in January with a reading that would take up the themes of change and transitions with the question of “What is truth?” In the fall, we had briefly discussed Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize, and over break I listened again and again to Patti Smith’s rendition of Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” which she performed in Oslo as part of the Nobel ceremonies. “Hard Rain” is the story of a prodigal son who has returned to his community to tell the truth of his experiences. “Allegory” is the story of leaving the Cave for the light outside. When a person returns to the Cave, the Cave’s inhabitants do not believe the truth of the world in the light outside. Different experiences, different truths: How does the audience for “Allegory” make sense of these differences? In other words, “What is Truth?” remains both a contemporary issue and an ancient rhetorical question. In teaching and learning Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” or any difficult text, an important strategy is not to abandon the text at the first signs of students’ struggles. Indeed, those struggles can become significant points for discussion and close re-reading. At the same time, it can be helpful to pair the text with more contemporary and accessible sources so that the students can synthesize rhetorical and thematic relationships across time and place. Those sources may be required by our writing programs, open for us to choose, or selected by students in collaboration and on their own. In any case, the search for truth continues and I look forward to why and how we will address this subject in class this semester. Activity With these thoughts in mind, we completed the follow activity on the first day of the course, in preparation for taking on the first writing project of the semester: Consider the meaning of this following passage from Plato's "The Allegory of the Cave."   And do you see, I said, men passing along the wall carrying all sorts of vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials, which appear over the wall? Some of them are talking, others silent. You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners. Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave? True, he said; how could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads? (Plato) Then consider the connections to these two interpretations of the song "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" by Bob Dylan. The first interpretation is sung by Bob Dylan in 1963. The second interpretation is sung by Patti Smith in 2016. What connections do you find between “Allegory” and the two interpretations of “Hard Rain”? Make a list of those connections, offering specific examples to support your ideas. Use this list as your study guide for your first reading of “Allegory.” When you reach a difficult place in the text, consult the list. We will discuss and write about “Allegory” in our next class.   Image source: By Veldkamp, Gabriele and Maurer, Markus [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons ... View more

Today's guest blogger is Amanda Gaddam‌ (see end of post for bio). Before November 8 th last year, my students and I talked at length about the election: the powerful role of rhetoric throughout the campaign cycle, different paths of civic engagement, and how to productively engage people with different political beliefs. (See ) Classroom discussions came relatively easy leading up to the election—there was always something new to talk about, and my first-year students and first-time voters were fired up about finally being able to take part in these conversations.   The day after the election, however, I found myself speechless, and many of my students were, too. I struggled with finding the right way to address their feelings in the classroom without alienating students with diverse political beliefs and making sure our discussion was constructive and in service of the course learning outcomes.   With the inauguration right around the corner, this project, a take on the six-word essay and adaptable as an in-class activity or take-home assignment, can be used effectively to get students thinking and talking about their hopes, fears, and visions of the future.   Assignment Before starting this assignment, it might be helpful to look at examples of six-word essays with students. NPR and the Race Card Project have lots of excellent multimodal examples that incorporate audio components. Talk to students about the challenges and opportunities the format presents for tone, word choice, and rhetorical grammar and syntax choices. Ask students to participate in a long free write about their reactions and responses to the election results. Emphasize that they don’t have to share this free write with anyone, including you, if they don’t want to. This assurance of privacy is integral to getting students to genuinely engage in honest reflection. If they are required to share these personal, often raw, free-written texts, they may hold back for fear of judgment or reprisal. I gave them about twenty minutes in class, and most students used the entire time. Students then read through their reflective free writes and identify ideas or themes to represent in their six-word essays. The essays can be a cohesive sentence, a couple of phrases, or a group of individual words. Refer students back to the examples discussed in class for successful uses of ethos, pathos, and logos in short texts. Once students have a working draft of their six words, task them with representing their essay with complementary media. My students who completed this project over the course of a three-hour class created short videos, digital collages, PowerPoint presentations, and Prezis using images, video, audio, memes, screenshots of social media posts, and excerpts from articles and speeches. A couple of examples appear below: Six-word essay: “I’m so tired. It’s only begun.”   Video Link : 1928 Free write: I am tired.  I am so tired. I am                 ANGRY Hurt                 scared in pain- physically and emotionally sad music has been my escape   This isn’t about me being upset the democratic party lost. No. If I see that argument one more time, I will scream. This means way more to me. This is a loss for humanity. This is a leap backwards in history- in progress. All the progress made since the civil rights movement will be unraveled and our country will GO NO WHERE. I AM A WOMAN. I AM HISPANIC. I CANNOT HAVE THIS MAN BE IN CHARGE OF MY COUNTRY. As with other multimodal projects, I ask students to reflect on their rhetorical choices in a Statement of Rhetorical Objectives (SORO). I usually use some version of the template I’ve shared on this blog before, available at the DePaul Office for Teaching, Learning & Advancement. The student who created the PowerPoint slides featured above wrote about the particular emotions they wanted to elicit from their audience when choosing their media, and they had an interesting and insightful justification for using less-than-credible sources for their screenshots of tweets in the “Hate & Injustice” slide:  “The one slide that may be lacking in ethos is the Facebook posts about people’s personal experiences of being discriminated against post-election. I found these posts through tweets from political commentators, but that doesn’t mean they are necessarily credible. This aspect of my six word essay does tie into logos because it appears to be unsupported by other evidence. However, the point of using those posts was less about credibility, and more about making the point that Trump’s election has validated peoples’ hateful ideologies.”    Reflection This assignment did exactly what I hoped it would do, which was provide both private and public spaces for students to reflect on their feelings about and responses to the election while maintaining one eye on the course goals. The flexibility of the assignment, in terms of requirements, deliverables, and timeframes, make it easily adapted to multiple different course formats and schedules. Students appreciated having the time and space to work through their complicated reactions to their new reality, and this assignment helped to prepare them to talk productively about this complex situation with others outside the classroom. Guest blogger Amanda Gaddam is an adjunct instructor in the First-Year Writing Program and the School for New Learning at DePaul University. She holds a B.A. in English with a concentration in Literary Studies and a M.A. in Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse with a concentration in Teaching Writing and Language from DePaul, and her research interests include first-year composition, adult and non-traditional students, and writing center pedagogies. Want to be a guest blogger on Multimodal Mondays? Message Leah Rang for more information. ... View more

Donald Trump has made it clear during his days as President-elect that Twitter is his medium of choice when it comes to   expressing his opinions. We will see if that changes once he is inaugurated. Apparently, when he uses the official Presidential Twitter account, his messages will have to be approved before they can be transmitted, which could dampen the spontaneity of his late-night proclamations. The problem is that they are just that—proclamations. They are essentially claims, but the very medium, with its 140-character limit, does not allow room for support. The more controversial the claim, the more need for support. A press conference would allow members of the media to push for support for his claims, but Trump has delayed for weeks meeting with the press, a delay unprecedented in recent history. He based his campaign on distrust of the media so that his supporters would believe what he said, instead of what they could read online or hear on the news or read in print. Americans now know that they were right not to trust everything they read and heard because some of it was being fed to them by the Russians. Perhaps Trump should have told Americans to believe the media, since some sources were being hacked by a foreign power that wanted him to win. What to believe...Trump has proven himself a sophist; time will tell if in his presidency he can grow into an orator, to use two very ancient terms. In ancient Greece, sophists were teachers. Today, they are those who reason by means of fallacious arguments. A sophist will tell an audience what it wants to hear, when it wants to hear it. On his recent Thank You Tour, Trump recently admitted that he didn’t mean what he said during the campaign: “That was the campaign; this is now.” He is no longer interested, for example, in sending Hillary Clinton to jail, in spite of the many times he led audiences into a frenzy of cries to lock her up. She is no longer a “nasty” woman, but rather a good person whom he doesn’t want to hurt. The Wall Street Journal has had to come up with a policy for how to deal with the new President’s untruths: “The Wall Street Journal does not refer to President-elect Donald Trump’s ‘challengeable’ and ‘questionable’ statements as ‘lies,’ no matter how false, because doing so would imply ‘moral intent’ and runs the risk of looking biased, the paper’s Editor-in-Chief Gerard Baker said Sunday.” A rather unusual view of the role that definition plays in argumentation. Certainly a lie implies moral intent, no matter what it is called. The classical definition of an orator was a good man skilled in speaking. Our hope should be that our new President will grow into an orator, in the classical sense, as he grows into his office. His goal in speaking to the nation and the world should be that perfect blend of logos, ethos, and pathos that characterizes the orator. He’s center stage, and the world is listening.    Credit: Donald J. Trump screenshot from Republican Debate on January 14, 2016 by Bill B on Flickr  ... View more

One of the key components of modern writing instruction is the rhetorical attention paid to the question of audience.  And I hardly need to tell whatever audience I may have here what that's all about and why it's important—especially in the era of socially-mediated inscription.  But there is another angle to the matter that, if a great many recent news stories are of any significance, appears to require some attention too, not only by students, but by instructors as well.    I am referring here to the seemingly endless stream of news reports—both from such sources as Inside Higher Education and the Chronicle of Higher Education, on the one hand, and numerous mass media news sources on the other, if the story is shocking enough—concerning college instructors who appear to forget that when writing on Internet-mediated platforms the whole world is your potential audience, because no matter how you may set your privacy settings on Facebook, or no matter how obscure you may assume your Twitter account to be, there is always someone out there ready to take a screenshot, no matter which side of the political divide you may find yourself.   The most recent cause celebre in this regard involves the Drexel University professor whose "All I want for Christmas is white genocide" tweet particularly lit up the holiday season this year.  The point of my analysis here has nothing to do with academic freedom and the related question of what Drexel administrators should or should not have said about it: I'll leave that to the innumerable online commentators who have been doing battle over those matters.  Rather, what I am interested in is the question of audience, and how a failure to consider that question can lead to all sorts of unintended consequences.   The crux of the matter here lies in the assumption that everyone who read the tweet would be aware that the phrase "white genocide" has become a special term of reference for alt-right sorts who use it to deplore the rise of multiculturalism and the impending loss of a white racial majority in the United States.  Those who have rushed to the defense of  the offensive tweet—along with its author—have assumed that everyone would have seen that the tweet was a sarcasm-inflected endorsement of a multicultural, multiracial society, not a call for a massacre.   But here is where the question of potential audience comes in, because while the author of this tweet and his intended audience of Twitter followers may be well aware of the alt-right meaning of the phrase "white genocide" these days, the majority of potential readers of the tweet are not, and to such readers the tweet is going to look appalling without some sort of semantic clarification.  But that is something that you can't do in the text-restricted medium of Twitter, and no amount of after-the-fact backfilling can repair the damage that may be done after a careless tweet. This brings up another, related point.   This is the fact that social media in general—but especially those of the Twitter and Instagram variety—either require or encourage writing in a kind of shorthand.  Unlike the blog form, which allows a writer to stretch out and elucidate when the inevitable semantic and rhetorical ambiguities of discourse threaten to fill the air with confusion, the preferred modes of digital communication today almost presuppose a homogeneity of audience, a readership that understands what you are saying because it already agrees with you and shares your perspectives.  Hence a writing in shorthand, even when the platform allows for discursiveness.   And that raises a risk.  For there is something about social media that seems to encourage provocation rather than argumentation, especially in the form shorthand-ed jabs.  Certainly this is the case when writers assume that they are writing in safe echo chambers wherein those who "belong" will nod their heads in agreement and those who don't will be offended.  But while offending those who aren't on one's side in a dispute may be "fun," it sure doesn't make for an effective argument.  In fact, it is likely to backfire—which is one reason why social media do not provide a sound platform upon which to learn university-level writing.   This matters, because at a time when America is tearing apart at the seams, it behooves us as educators to be doing everything that we can to encourage careful argumentation rather than reckless provocation.  I am not so naïve as to believe that simply resorting to rational argument will always win the day (Aristotle himself made no claim to guarantee this in his Rhetoric), but a carefully developed, audience-aware argument will, at least, have a far smaller chance of backfiring than a provocative tweet will.  Thus, it doesn't really matter whether the Drexel tweet was intended to be provocative or not (I suspect, however, that with its openly-avowed sarcastic intent, provocation certainly was part of its composition); what matters is that its disregard for audience has produced a situation that puts higher education on the defensive, not those whom the tweet meant to ridicule. In short, the thing has backfired, and, in the context of a number of similar recent backfires, this is not something that higher education can well afford. ... View more

As one who loves language and is fascinated by words, I spend some time every year thinking about the words that have seemed somehow to capture or define the year. And what a year 2016 has been for words! Unfortunately, many of these words have been full of hate, ridicule, or misinformation: “lock her up,” for example, or “loser,” or words appearing on social media that I won’t repeat here. So groups who regularly decide on a “word of the year” had their work cut out for them this year. Merriam-Webster ended up choosing “surreal,” which they define as “marked by the intense irrational reality of a dream” – or a nightmare. The folks at Merriam-Webster traced the spike of “lookups” of various words, finding that people looked up “surreal” in large numbers beginning with the terrorist attacks in Brussels last spring and then spiking again with the coup attempt in Turkey, the terrorist attacks in Nice, and then the biggest spike of all following the U.S. election in November. Surreal. The Oxford Dictionary chose “post-truth” as its word of the year, an “adjective defined as relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Dictionary.com chose “xenophobia” and the Cambridge Dictionary “paranoid.” Another nominee high on most lists was “fake news.” It’s a pretty depressing list: surreal, post-truth, xenophobia, paranoid, fake news. In fact, so depressing that Dennis Baron, whose instructive blog “The Web of Language” is a must read for me, decided that the word of the year was “too terrible to name.” Tongue firmly in cheek, Baron writes: President-elect Voldemort announced that when he takes office on January 20, his first official act will be to deport all foreign words. Voldemort told supporters at a rally in Ohio this week that he will build a wall around the English language, and make the lexicographers pay for it. Which they greeted with an enthusiastic chorus of, "Build the wall." And then they shouted the 2016 word of the year, the word that shall not be named. I appreciate Baron’s humor and would just note that many countries have tried to build a wall around language (see France, for example). So the U.S. wouldn’t be the first to try to deport foreign words. Or the last. All this thinking about words of the year left me confused as well as depressed. So what would I choose as word of the year 2016? I’m very tempted to go along with post-truth or fake news, because these phenomena pose such a serious, terrifying threat to rational discourse and to any kind of true understanding. But instead, I keep coming back to a phrase rather than a word: the Saturday after the election, Kate McKinnon sat at a piano on Saturday Night Live, in her Hillary Clinton outfit, and sang several verses from Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” They were poignant at the least, elegiac and elegant too. Then she turned toward the camera and said “Don’t give up. I won’t and neither should you.” So I think I’ll choose “don’t give up” as my phrase of the year: it should give me good company as we head into 2017. What’s your word of the year? Video Link : 1913 Source: Saturday Night Live,  Election Week Cold Open - SNL - YouTube  ... View more

It is not always easy to distinguish between drama as literature and drama as theatre.  My view has always been that good drama is based on good literature, but having said that, we all know that there are moments in the theatre when the action moves far beyond the printed page and its stage directions.  Those are the moments when we realize that drama is theatre. This meditation is a result of my having just seen a wild adaptation of Molière’s A Doctor in Spite of Himself directed and adapted by Christopher Bayes, whose roots are in the Theatre de la Jeune Lune.  Bayes tossed out the standard text and built a commedia dell’arte version on the comic bones that Molière had provided beneath the dialogue. The result was dynamic, wildly comic, and enthralling to the audience.  And while the slapstick, the ham acting, the sometimes lewd jokes, the inappropriate, but funny, music, and all the  screaming, shouting, dancing and romping was over, we realized that the story line that Molière concocted as a way of ridiculing the current medical profession was in a bizarre way, still intact. What I realized–and what delighted me–is that no printed version of this adaptation could ever have done justice to it.  And that goes for any version on YouTube or even the iPad or laptop–because much of the fun of seeing the play was in sharing the pleasure with a living audience. In teaching I think it is important to try to talk about the aspects of the play that go beyond the printed page, but at the same time to make sure that the literary values are clear and that they remain the bones on which the production must be animated. How do you teach students the difference between drama as theatre and drama as literature? What plays and/or performances have illuminated this difference for you and for your students? [[This post originally appeared on LitBits on December 21, 2011.]]  ... View more

There are many reasons to observe the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, which falls on Wednesday, December 21 in 2016.  I hope to be at a friend’s home, which was designed to catch the light in special ways at noon on the solstice, so I am hoping for some special effects from Mother Nature.  The solstice leads up to Hanukkah, which begins on December 24, and to Christmas the next day and then Kwanzaa on the 26 th .  In what has been a dark season for me and many others, I am wishing peace and light for everyone.  I will be thinking, through all these holidays, of students everywhere and hoping that the right to an education will be a human right, all around the world. In the words of Leonard Cohen, I am going to ring every bell that will ring, and seek out the light wherever I can: Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack, a crack in everything That’s how the light gets in.                        --Leonard Cohen, “Anthem” [Photo: bells by deshkhanna on Pixabay] ... View more

I kicked off this term by setting some New School Year’s Resolutions for myself, following the model of David Gooblar’s 4 Resolutions for the New Semester on Chronicle Vitae. Overall, my focus was on building more community (and by extension, participation) and improving assessment. Now that I have reached the midpoint in my school year, it’s time for some reflection on what I have accomplished and what I still need to work on. I’ll address my ten goals from the fall one-by-one: Increase class participation. Oddly enough, the Digital Design Journals that I added to my course led to more interaction among students. I intended the journals to give students more practice in analyzing digital texts, which they did accomplish. Each student also presented a journal entry to the course, which led to great full-class discussions of rhetoric and design. I need to figure out how to accomplish the same engagement in my online courses. Give students more choice. I asked my technical writing students to Choose Their Own Projects, but I need to revise the assignment a bit. In particular, I need to make some Changes to My Coursework Proposal Assignment, which invites students to choose their assignments. I also need to do some work to ensure that they are stretching themselves with new genres they have no experience with. Switch to Pass/Fail grading. I did use Pass/Fail grading extensively in both courses I taught. The system isn’t perfect yet, however. Toward the end of the term, there was no time for revising, undermining the entire system. I wasn’t comfortable with failing students in the courses when their work didn’t achieve B-level standards. I have to build in more structure to ensure that students have time for revising failing work. Give feedback more quickly. The Pass/Fail system helped me out with my speed. I zipped through grading for all in-class work and weekly writing activities. Using mini-conferences more in my face-to-face class helped me provide lots of feedback as students quickly needed it. I need to figure out how to bring that dynamic to the fully-online courses. More formative feedback. I am doing better on this goal. When students did turn work in early enough or consulted me on drafts, I worked on providing constructive criticism and challenging them to improve their work. I need to do more for this goal, though. The timing complicates things—when I don’t receive work until the last minute, formative feedback is useless. There’s no time for revision, so students won’t use the advice. Ask students to track their own work. I added a participation log assignment to ask students to spend more time Tracking Their Participation. In addition, I developed a Participation Log Analysis Assignment to help them evaluate their participation in the course. Encourage more (or better) reflection. I need to spend more time on this goal in the spring. I asked students for reflection statements when they turned in their major projects; however, I haven’t done much to improve the process. I am going to work on integrating reflection more with the structures that encourage students to turn drafts in earlier. Add videos to online courses. I started the Fall Term with a WebEx session where I walked students through the course website and answered some basic questions. Only two students were present during the video, not surprising given that we share no common time when we can meet. Worse yet, I never managed to edit the video and post it online, so only those two students benefited. There are definite challenges. For example, I need to find $170 to buy Camtasia, so that I can edit footage properly. I think the videos are worth it, but it is a harder goal to achieve. Add an AMA session. I added an Ask Me Anything session, to all my classes this fall, as I explained in my Inviting Students to “Ask Me Anything” post. The discussion went really well. Seeing the questions students asked probably told me as much about them as my answers reveals about me. I’m definitely going to keep it as part of the beginning of all my courses. Encourage community. Around mid-October, I tried Organizing Online Writing Groups for my classes. I asked them to connect with one another for feedback and support as they needed it. The strategy still needs work. The biggest problem has been that students waited until the last moment to post to each other. The assignment led more to checking off a requirement than connecting and building community. I think it can be successful, but I’ll need to do more work to make it happen. Overall, I accomplished a lot during this fall. There are still several places where I need to do more, but I’m happy with my progress so far. How about you? Was your fall term successful? What are you looking forward to doing next term? Leave me a comment below and let me know.   Credit: Kitten Meme created on the ICanHazCheeseburger site ... View more

In this series of posts, I am looking at what we can learn from peer feedback practices in other disciplines. Lynn McNutt talked to me about peer feedback in acting.   My chat with Lynn focused largely on the logistics of peer feedback in the acting classroom, but she did make one comment that continues to stick with me: “I feel like I have become better as an actor once I became a teacher, because I used to skip steps.”  She went on to explain that teaching brings it back to basics, and that process helps her as well.   I do know that I too have become a better writer from having taught writing.  I have a better sense of how to do what I do as an academic because I have spent so much time trying to explain it to people who have no idea how to do it.  I’ll end this semester by keeping this post brief, but I wonder - do you find the same? ... View more

Allison Adams wrote an article titled “Helping Faculty Find Time to Think” for the Chronicle of Higher Education a couple of weeks ago. In it, she suggests that faculty development programs need to support more than scholarly output; instead, they can “foster rich pockets of time and space for faculty members to think, talk, and write about what they do. . . [and] create discrete, accessible opportunities for quiet conversation and stillness of mind.” As a composition instructor, I have a wealth of data from this past semester: essays, reflections, emails, and questions from students, along with my own notes, jotted on handouts or sticky notes – or emailed from my phone as a quick reminder to think about an insight in a quiet hour. I also have a stack of articles and book chapters waiting for a lull in my schedule, an opportune moment for reflection. But I am afraid that once again, I’ve left myself little margin for such reflections. The 5/5 teaching load at my college offers few quiet moments during the semester.  Finals, of course, are not alone in consuming our time in mid-December.  Our annual performance and professional development goals are due, and there are accreditation reports looming. My family would also like a bit of attention during the holidays – there are cookies to be baked, pot-lucks to attend, and gifts to purchase.   And yet reflection is critical.  I have pushed my students again and again this term to reflect intentionally and explicitly on their rhetorical choices, their writing process, their shifting understanding of how words, reading, and writing interrelate.  When they have complained, I have reminded them that we make time for that which is valuable to us; the meta-rhetorical assignments invite students to discover the value of the practice of reflection, in hopes that they will continue after the class, when there are no points to be earned but insights yet to be discovered. I believe that quiet reflection and review of my semester data will yield insights that make me a better writer and a better teacher, so I will carve out some dedicated time over the next three weeks, before I write spring syllabi, to think about what I am learning. How do you handle reflections? Do you keep a teaching journal? Do you review student compositions and the assignments which generated them? Do you make teaching notes? In what format or medium?  I am looking for a different approach to my reflections this year, and I would love to hear what others do. Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Join the Macmillan Community to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! ... View more

Recently, I was having a meeting with a friend at a local coffee shop to hand him copies of Working, a book in which his writing and his writing group had been featured. Our conversation soon turned, however, to what he was writing about now, what new projects he had undertaken.   His life, he said, had become centered around supporting the children of Somalian refugees. He was to think about how a focus on writing might not only help them in their studies, but enable them to tell their story to a wider public at this fraught political moment. He also wanted to help children support their parents documenting their own journey out of political turmoil and into the United States. He wanted everyone to see their humanity, how we are all equal.   Maybe, he wondered, we might work on this together.   I am sure that many of us have such moments. Moments which speak to our belief in the public power of writing and seem to offer opportunities for our classrooms to connect with an exigent moment – here, the public debate over immigration. And often, we have to decide whether this is a project that can support both the community and our students.    I’ve developed a rough set of questions I ask myself at such moments before deciding. And if you are facing such decisions, I hope they will be helpful.   1. Is the work important? Everyone will define “important” differently. I believe something is important if it offers the chance to change public dialogue in a specific location or if it will lead to a possible change in public policy. Ideally, a project would do both. At the outset, I don’t ask whether it is important to my student’s education. I try to keep my lens on its importance to the community’s goals and values.   2. Do I have a strong relationship with the individual proposing the partnership? I also need to know how this person works, creates plans, implements strategies, and responds to crises. The person does not have to be perfect – I’m certainly not – but if I have a sense of their strengths and weaknesses, I will better understand the specific type of work required of me.   3. Does this partnership work align with the goals of my assigned courses over the upcoming academic year as well as my department goals? I then consider how it might support classroom or departmental goals. I explore if the type of writing/literacy work necessary for the project (determined in consultation with my partner) aligns with the goals of my assigned courses (determined by my department). I also consider who the students will be in class (freshman, writing majors, graduate students). If I believe I can ethically link my classes to the project, I then consider how the project might support current departmental initiatives (which isn’t necessary, but can help bring additional faculty into the project).   4. Is there adequate funding? I now consider any budget needs. My strategy here is to develop the least expensive version of the project possible, then if more money is raised you can expand the work. You know, though, that at least some version of the project is possible. I then determine when the funding will be needed and develop a plan with my partner on how we will raise the money and, often, how much funding we will need before we can begin a project linked to my class.   5. Is there a clear ending to the project? Some partnerships can exist productively for years – such as the writers group with my friend. I always, though, try to articulate clear endings to any partnership – such as completing a book. This allows you to ethically end your work with a community. It also, allows you to use that moment to assess the strengths/weaknesses of the partnership. Before you continue or expand the work, it is important to assess what has occurred. Clear endings allow such assessment.   I suppose the question hanging out there is “Did I agree to join my friend’s project with Somalian refugees?”   My impulse is to say “yes” immediately. But I also need to remember that it is not about my impulses, about what I might find exciting. It is about the community’s goals, about their agenda for change. It’s about whether the partnership can enable my students to understand the political responsibilities of joining such efforts.  Ultimately, that is, I believe deciding to start a new partnership is about moving from the excitement inherent in the impulse to “do good” to the sustained work of joining personal and institutional resources to a community’s effort to create systemic change, to bend the arc of justice a little closer towards their neighborhood.     And deciding, I’ve found that takes time.   Stay tuned. ... View more

In the small town where I live, one of our nicer restaurants often has their satellite radio tuned to a station that plays exclusively soft rock from the 80s and early 90s.  Air Supply.  Foreigner.  A little Journey or, if we’re really lucky, solo Steve Perry.  But there’s one song that seems to come on every time we eat there, one song that causes my wife to reach across the table, grab my hand and whisper, “Don’t sing.  Don’t sing.  Don’t sing.  I mean it.” The song I’m talking about is Chicago’s song “Look Away,” which a quick Internet search tells me was written by Diane “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” Warren.  I didn’t know this until just ten minutes ago, but I can’t say I’m surprised.  Like every other Diane Warren song I know, “Look Away” expresses its ideas about love in rather obvious, sentimental ways.  The song is written from the point of view of a young man whose ex-girlfriend—with whom he still has a friendship—calls to tell him about her new love.  In fact, the lead vocalist (whose name is not Peter Cetera) opens the song with the observation, “When you called me up this morning/ Told me about the new love you’d found/ I said I’m happy for you/ I’m really happy for you.”  Of course, things aren’t really that simple; as it turns out, our speaker is still in love with his former paramour/ current friend, but he can’t possibly act on those feelings.  For some reason.  So he assures her that he’s “fine,” but then admits that “sometimes [he] just pretend[s].”  In the chorus he tells her:  “If you see me walking by/ And the tears are in my eyes/ Look away, baby, look away… Don’t look at me/ I don’t want you to see me this way.” This is not a particularly good song.  In fact, I don’t think it’s very good at all.  But I love it anyway, and feel the urge to sing along with not-Peter Cetera every time it comes on.  This desire has nothing to do with Diane Warren’s craft or not-Peter Cetera’s singing, and has everything to do with the memories this song evokes for me. Imagine, if you will, your humble narrator as a 7 th -grade boy.  In the dimly-lit gym, wearing his nicest slacks and a shirt with buttons, watching—sadly—as the love of his life smiled her metallic smile at or rested her permed head upon the shoulder of… well, that doofus she was in love with.  They slow-danced awkwardly, while the young me stood off to the side, heart breaking, while not-Peter Cetera assured his own love “I’m really happy for you” even though he was dying on the inside as surely as I was.  Yes, I thought, this song must have been written specifically for me. I know that this sounds like a bad memory, but as a disciple of Joan Didion, I agree with her that “we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.”  And the truth is, I kind of find that super-intense, comically angst-y  12-year-old good company.  I like that even now, after decades and other relationships have reshaped how I understand love and romance, I can still remember a time when I was innocent and naïve enough to believe that I could find a type of personal truth in such a cheesy song. I’ve found that most people have such a song—a song whose opening bars can transport them back to a specific moment in their lives.  In fact, some of us have several.  So in my creative nonfiction classes, I begin the semester with something I call The Music and Memory Exercise.  First, I have them read Hope Edelman’s “Bruce Springsteen and the Story of Us” and Bob Cowser Jr.’s “By a Song.” We discuss the way Edelman describes the Springsteen-dominated “soundtrack” of her late adolescence, and how Cowser finds solace at a difficult time through  the music that transports him back to a time of innocence and protection.  Then, I tell my own story about young Bill Bradley, alone at the dance in the gym, and how old William Bradley loves a song he doesn’t really like because of the way it tethers him to that sad little boy. And then, of course, I ask the students to write the story of their own song and the memories it evokes in a mini-essay of 3-5 pages.  We usually read their essays out loud in class, a nice icebreaker for the beginning of the semester.  In the eight years I’ve been teaching creative nonfiction writing, I have never had a student find this exercise difficult to complete.  Even the concerned student who corners me at the end of the first day of class and admits in a panic, “There’s nothing interesting about me to write about” gets into this assignment.  It’s an enjoyable way to inspire reflection, and it assures the student that we all have experiences and a point of view worth expressing in essay and memoir writing. So, anybody else have an interesting—or, preferably, embarrassing—song that inspires such reflection?  Leave a comment if you do, and I’ll tell you all about the “late 80s/early 90s rap and hip hop” playlist I have on my iPod (needless to say—yeah, I totally have Vanilla Ice’s song about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on there). [[This post originally appeared on LitBits on January 12, 2012.]] ... View more

Recently I read (but can no longer find!) an article discussing the rise of social media in terms of its relationship to orality. The writer made the point that much of what we read on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites is conversational, deeply inflected by the conventions of speech and oral culture (with more and more emojis offering substitutes for emphasis, tone, etc.). I’ve written before about Walter Ong’s notion of secondary orality and its influence in our hyper-mediated society, and I’ve described what we might call “secondary literacy,” which is literacy infused with orality—as we see today on social media. It’s writing, all right, but writing that aims to be very much like speech. Like many other teachers of writing, I’m pondering what such shifts mean for our classrooms, for what we teach and how we teach it. In a course on the history of writing, I always began with the struggle for the vernacular in medieval Europe . . . tracing the eventual downfall of Latin and Greek and the rise of indigenous languages/vernaculars. Think of early writers of vernacular languages (Chaucer, e.g.) and you will think of some of the world’s great literature. So hooray for vernaculars! But it’s seemed to me for some time that social media brings a new sense of “vernacular,” or everyday speech, and its rise has been swift and pervasive. Challenging traditional notions of decorum or civility as well as conventional norms of all kinds, social media writing crests like a huge wave over us, bringing with it experimental uses of language that seem downright magical and innovative as well as threatening (hate-based messages especially). I have only begun to scratch the surface of this issue, to which I hope to return soon. But right now, I am concerned that in our writing classes we look closely at this “return of the oral” and its implications for how we lead our lives, especially online. Bakhtin writes of “the ability to respond” or “respondability” being key to discourse exchange, and I agree: all of what we write and speak responds in some way to what others have written and said. And we need to take advantage of this ability to respond, to get our voices out there with the messages we care most deeply about. But we also need to talk with our students about responsibility, the ability to be accountable for what we write and speak, to present credible and detailed evidence in support, and to accept consequences attendant upon our words, whether spoken or written. In a time when very powerful people want to “shut down” parts of the Internet, to move away from “net neutrality” and otherwise police the Net, and when very powerful others want absolutely no curbs on what is posted, then we badly need writing teachers and students everywhere to search for some middle ground that will encourage and reward personal responsibility and to put that responsibility to work in social media writing. [Photo by Johan Larsson on Flickr] ... View more

It has long been a commonplace of cultural studies that the "news" is never an objective presentation of the way things really are, but reflects instead the ideological perspectives of those who present it.  More profoundly, the post-structural paradigm that continues to influence contemporary cultural studies (even if the word "post-structuralism" is beginning to show its age) goes even deeper to argue that reality itself (conventionally presented in scare quotes along the lines of a Derridean erasure) is a social construction without any objective grounding.  But in the wake of the recent revelations concerning what can only be called the "fake news industry"—and the potential effect that it appears to have had on the just-concluded presidential election—I think that it would behoove the practitioners of cultural studies to take "reality" out of scare quotes, because the reign of anti-realism is really getting out of hand.   To say that this will not be happening soon, however, is to risk considerable understatement, because I've made this call before.  Many years ago I published a book (Discourse and Reference in the Nuclear Age, 1988) in which I tried to establish a semiotic alternative to post-structural anti-realism at a time when the sliding signifiers of the Reagan administration were giving the most fact-averse scholars of deconstruction a real run for their money.  And to say that I was not successful would also be to risk considerable understatement.  But I would like, nevertheless, to offer some tips to composition instructors who may be looking for ways to help students distinguish between outright fantasy and defensible reality in an era of "truthiness," "post-facts," and fake news.   To begin with, your students need to be informed that the "news feeds" that they receive on their Facebook pages reflect the same kind of data mining techniques that digital marketers employ.  By spying on the content posted on your Facebook page, Facebook can predict just what sort of news you are likely to want to get.  This not only means that "liberals" will accordingly receive "liberal" news and that "conservatives" will receive "conservative" news, but that liberal or conservative third parties—who have access to Facebook's data mines—can effectively spam your page in the same way that advertisers do—except in this case the spam is "news," not advertising.  The result is an echo chamber effect, within which everyone hears only the news that they want to hear (or already agree with).   So the second thing to realize is that the polarized (and polarizing) "news" situation in America is no longer simply a matter of whether you watch MSNBC or Fox News: these days the social network is the echo chamber, and that is a much trickier thing to resist.  For now it is not some network stranger who is providing you with your news, it is your own friends and family, whom you are lot more likely to trust, no matter what weirdness they send you.  The only way out of this echo chamber, then, is to get off social media and do some research, constantly seeking out multiple sources of —and perspectives on—information, especially when something you hear just doesn't seem very likely.  I'm not saying that unlikely things don't happen in this world, but, as they say in science, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," and so, extraordinary news requires extraordinary levels of active media scrutiny.   Finally, at a time when each side of the great American political divide doesn't trust anything that the other side reports, it is important to recognize that the concoction of fake news is not an ideological monopoly, especially at the extremes, where, to take one all-too-common example, the so-called "false flag" conspiracy narratives of both the left and the right can be disturbingly similar in their levels of sheer evidence-deficient fantasy.   So the best ground for refuting such post-fact fantasies remains good old-fashioned empirical evidence.  But we can't demand such evidence if we insist that there is no empirical reality and that everything is a social construction.  That is why the semiotic paradigm that I use, as influenced by Charles Sanders Peirce, is not a post-structural one.  It accepts a reality outside our sign systems and against which our signs can be tested and evaluated.  Absolute objectivity cannot be theoretically achieved by this paradigm, but it does supply a basis for identifying outright fabrications. In short, in this "post-truth" era, it's high time to get real. ... View more

In this series of posts, I am looking at what we can learn from peer feedback practices in other disciplines. Lynn McNutt talked to me about peer feedback in acting.   Beyond the need to develop a vocabulary of technique, one of the common themes of my chat with Lynn was emotion.  I found that interesting given that it also popped up quite a bit in my chats with my creative writing and studio art colleagues.  But while those discussions discussed how to bracket emotion in the context of peer feedback and creative activities, removing emotion is far more challenging when it comes to teaching acting.  “They always want to emote all over the place,” Lynn shared, “Come in and cry.  But technique is trying to get something from somebody—that’s your action.”  It’s the combination of emotion and technique that makes acting a powerful craft.  The challenge then is how to negotiate those emotions in feedback practices.   Lynn approaches this challenge through a language of engagement, asking students in the class to pay attention to when they were most engaged and most disengaged while watching a scene.  Students then discuss those moments of engagement using the language of acting they’ve developed in the class.  Focusing on engagement moves the discussion away from student’s emotional response (particularly bored) and towards the effect of the scene, which is where technique offers the most insights.   I’ve noted before that this affective component feels very foreign to me but Lynn’s coupling of emotion and technique does have me thinking about the motivations behind really good academic writing.  In this model, I consider academic writing a function of technique, not simply at the level of language or citation but also in the certain habits of mind that produce arguments or that allow effective analysis of quotation.  And, while I don’t often see an emotional component to student writing, I do feel that passion plays some role.  After all, one has to care about what one is writing about.  At least, I know I have to care about this blog or about Emerging and that care—that emotion—coupled with technique, is what produces the result.  The question then becomes, of course, how to get students to invest in FYC writing.  I haven’t a clue how to go about that.  But thinking about these issues has given me one more avenue of approach, one I intend to explore.   ... View more