The end of any semester inspires reflection on successful projects and areas that need improvement. This semester, I hope to take that reflection a step further by making plain what I usually try to keep invisible. I want to write about teaching with depression.     In offering this story, I do not want to indulge in what the late comedian Stella Young called “inspiration porn.” Trying to recalibrate depression medication was not inspiring. It was painful. I have written a great deal about ADHD (See David Bowie, Difference, and Basic Writing) and how the quality of resilience has inflected my teaching. But I have not written at all about depression, which also impacted my work this year. When I was growing up, depression was greatly misunderstood and largely kept secret from outsiders. “You take life too seriously,” people would say, “just snap out of it.” I did not know why I could not snap out of it. For many years, I internalized the shame of feeling “different” and even “difficult.” My ADHD diagnosis felt liberating, and allowed me better access to understanding difference and difficulty. Depression, hovering over this term in an ongoing fog of sorrow, touched every aspect of my life.   After oral surgery a year ago, my anti-depressant medication seemed to stop working. For months, my doctor and I experimented with trying to find a solution. Since I had taken that medication for several years, recalibration and withdrawal became physically painful. I felt tired all the time. I tried going to bed earlier, and found myself awake before dawn. For the first time in many years, I began drinking coffee again. That also did not work. Coffee lessened the effectiveness of my ADHD medication, and also my resilience. Once I realized what the coffee was doing, I gave it up immediately.   Indeed, ADHD resilience helped me gather up the strength to teach. In class, I knew I could hyper-focus my attention completely on students and writing.  Outside of class and the office, depression took hold. I felt distractible and disorganized. I cried often. It became harder to read, harder to write, and harder to grade. The future felt immensely bleak, even as I knew many people experienced great unhappiness through the long election season. When the symptoms did not abate, I knew that I could not blame everything on the election.   I paid attention to the qualities of unhappiness, afraid to speak out because my depression seemed invisible to others. People commented on my optimistic outlook. Like a cat, I felt an instinct to hide my despair. I did not want to listen to comments I had heard in the past: “Everyone feels bad now.” Or: “You need to stop overthinking everything.” I admired Disability Studies scholars who wrote openly on mental disabilities. I did not yet feel comfortable with that openness, and I carried in my thoughts the lifelong caution that I was raised with: keep depression secret. The difference this year is that I learned how to teach with depression. Or rather, by observing the work my students accomplished as writers, I have more perspective on the nature of secrets.   This year my depression was not invisible, and I cannot keep it secret any longer.  Yes, I made it through the semester, and felt relieved to read the writing that came from time spent with students. The students in my Stretch classes wrote powerful extended definitions of resilience, innovation, and compassion. The essays we read and the TED talks we watched focused on these topics because, despite our differences in age and background, these concepts offered strands of hope. In the Basic Writing Practicum, the graduate students and I designed a pedagogy website, which includes assignments, activities, and annotated bibliographies. We launched the website last week under the title Eclectic Scriveners Writing Beyond Catastrophe.   With the website that evolved from BW Practicum, we focus on the necessity for all teachers to cultivate compassion for our students and also for ourselves: efficacy, creativity, challenge, and difference. On the homepage, we offer this description of our group’s name— and of our pedagogical purpose: “Our eclectic group meets—and writes—with the daunting purpose of meeting head-on the crisis that surrounds basic writing, to show how basic writing may be used effectively in college settings, to show that for as many limits it implies and places for/on students, it offers just as many possibilities.”   To name the crisis allows us to honor the struggle. Depression is not a metaphor, and neither is Basic Writing. ... View more

For me, one of the most enjoyable aspects of teaching creative writing is finding new ways to break students out of their routines, getting them to look at their world and describe it a little differently, a little slant. This semester, I gave my introductory students an assignment, based on an exercise of John Gardner’s, in which they wrote 250-word sentences that might appear in a story. The assignment, I hoped, would make unavoidable a deep consideration of details, clarity, pacing, and of course mechanics. It gave them fits, in the best sense—but in the end they cooked up some doozy prose, also in the best sense. In fact, some of the best writing all semester was contained in these long, long sentences. I suspect that’s because when building and wrestling a sentence of that length, students can’t help focusing on the parts and the whole simultaneously. They see that form is content, that punctuation carries meaning, and that this sentence (and, by extension, all sentences) demands nothing less than our most considered attention. I’m going to use that assignment again. Next semester, I also plan to spring a “radio drama” assignment on my upper-level fiction workshop. I’m thinking that students would work in pairs, create a drama that is five minutes long, with nothing but dialogue and sound effects. No voiceover. My hope is that the assignment will cause them to pay close attention to dialogue and narrative structure. It should also be fun. We’ll play the finished five-minute recordings in class, maybe burn CDs with everyone’s work—an audio anthology of radio dramas. Perfect for long car rides. So my question, as this semester draws to a close, is this: What have you got up your sleeve for the spring? [[This post originally appeared on Litbits on December 28, 2011.]] ... View more

Much ado of late in response to one Scottie Nell Hughes, “News” Director of the Tea Party “News” Network: “There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore as facts.” From all the online chatter in response to Hughes’s “jaw-dropping statement,” you’d think that this is a new idea; Hughes is a force to be reckoned with; and reckoning with her word stream is a good way to spend your time. My responses, in order: it isn’t; she isn’t; it isn’t.   After the election, Ann and I were doing the kind of joking around you do when the world is ending. The search-for-a-way-to-make-the-present-bearable kind of joking. That’s the magical thing about laughter: it can help one gather strength and find community again; it can make what seems certain, pliable and what seems central, peripheral.   For some, Comedy Central’s The Daily Show performed this function on a nightly basis. Plenty of laughing there, for sure. Did you see Stewart last night? my students would ask. (Less so now, with Noah.) And now, after the election, one can even be lectured to by the show’s former host about the hypocrisy of liberals labeling everyone who voted for the president-elect a racist. In a discursive environment where one side contends there are no longer facts, arguing is a fool’s errand; so, too, is arguing with an icon of political comedy, now resting in comfortable retirement, about the significance of the fact that his neighbors think the most pressing problem at present is the prospect of higher insurance premiums. These are not arguments that can be won. [1]   Our students have long found refuge in the claim that everything is just a matter of opinion, and its corollary, opinions are something everyone has a right to. You can call that stance “post-fact” or “no-fact,” but those labels conceal what’s most important about claims of this kind: they are all founded on ignorance. You can’t argue someone out of a state of ignorance, but we can, as teachers, get our students to write their way out the foggy world of self-stupefaction by getting them to write their way into a world where facts exist and must be contended with.   What Ann and I argue in Habits is that creativity emerges out of deep engagement with facts. There is no way to assign this deep engagement: it emerges when we craft a sequence of assignments that gets students to experience what it feels like to think seriously about issues of genuine import. These experiences aren’t scalable; they arise when, as writers, we come up against a reality that is simultaneously incontrovertible and incomprehensible. When we give our students a chance to have this experience, we create a space where writing ceases to be a mere tool for arguing what one thought all along and becomes, instead, a technology for thinking new thoughts.   In my classes, my students always know what hard facts I’m writing about; I tell them so they will see that writing is so hard because it is always about encountering the limits of your own understanding; it is always about confronting your own ignorance.   Currently, I’m deep into a research project on Abu Ghraib. Here’s a fact I can’t escape:   Nine of the eleven soldiers who were eventually court martialed for abusing Iraqi detainees at the prison in Abu Ghraib were members of the Army reserves. Weekend warriors. One minute you’re a cashier at the local grocery store in Cumberland, Maryland, the next you’re stationed just outside of Baghdad, assisting in the effort to police and control a prison population whose proportions are distressingly amorphous. These reservists didn’t speak Arabic. They claim never to have been taught about the Geneva Conventions. They gave the detainees nicknames. Gomer Pyle. Mr. Burns. Big Bird. Gilligan. The nicknames came from their shared storehouse of cultural references—from what might be called their “collective unconscious” or their “imagined community.” What they shared, the reservists and enlisted alike, was the experience of watching TV.   This last fact interests me. What to make of it? It is incontrovertibly true and, at the same time, incomprehensible. It is, in short, an invitation to write. [1] El Burro, who never listens to a word I say, did exactly this. You can read his effort to pin his tail of disapproval on Jon Stewart here. ... View more

In the days since the recent election, several articles have listed terms that will never be the same: nasty woman, locker-room talk, deplorables, Buttercup. Who would have thought that labeling yourself a "nasty woman" would become a badge of honor? Or that the Tic Tac company would have to denounce a candidate? Or that Skittles and taco trucks and Cheetos would take on loaded meanings? (Biden: I left a bag of Cheetos in the bathroom. Obama: Why, Joe? Biden: In case he wants to powder his nose.) But that’s how connotations work.  A term takes on added meaning—meaning beyond its dictionary definition—because of context. The ugliest election in recent memory provided plenty of that as civility and decorum went out the window. As for dictionary definitions, it is enlightening to examine the words most often looked up during the campaign, as reported by Merriam-Webster. Among the first on the list: trumpery, presumptive, glass ceiling, plagiarism, oligarchy (and socialism), redacted, bigot, hombre, braggadocious. The word searched most often on election night? Fascism.  The top look-ups since Trump was elected, in order, are: fascism, racism, socialism, resurgence, xenophobia, and misogyny. A common response to that list was that it is too bad people didn’t look up those words before the election.  One suggestion is that there has been a spike in look-ups for them because of the number of Americans organizing against the President-elect.  That would also explain why the word emoluments has suddenly entered the political vocabulary and why more people than ever now know what the fourth section of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment says. There is even a Tumblr for Trumpgrets. Its purpose: “to screenshot the tweets of Trump voters as they slowly come to the realization that a billionaire with a hair trigger and zero political experience mightn’t be the best person to run their country.” The Oxford Dictionary chose as its 2016 word of the year the word post-truth. I’m sure that Trump’s team are now hard at work reinforcing the message that words truly do have consequences—and even more profound consequences when one is President or President-elect, even if they come in the form of late-night tweets. The best advice that Clinton ever gave him was to delete his account. Context does make a difference. Trump’s tweets criticizing China have alarmed foreign affairs experts. CNN reported that Victor Gao, a Chinese international relations expert, advised “that Trump could say what he liked as President-elect but his comments would have huge global consequences once in office.”  He added, “We hope President-elect Donald Trump . . . will handle himself with respect, accountability and responsibility and become a force of peace and stability rather than making whimsical and capricious remarks aimed at surprising the world.”   Credit: Nasty Women Win Elections | Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com | Flickr  ... View more

I recently had the pleasure of visiting the Writing Program and Writing Center at Wake Forest University and, as always, I wanted a full tour: it is endlessly fascinating to me to see what goes on in writing centers and programs and I especially love looking at what’s posted on the walls. In this case, I had a chance to meet with undergrad tutors, who were eloquent and thoughtful and deeply into their work. They told me that they’d learned how to get students to look beyond editing for surface errors, to concentrate on the substance and structure of what they wanted to say, to know when to offer friendly sympathy and when to push a little harder, to listen “between the lines” to students, and to ask open-ended questions that can lead to genuine dialogue. I was inspired, as I always am, by how seriously these students took their work but also by their great good humor. Some of the tutors had declared a new interdisciplinary writing minor, which will provide students… with opportunities to practice, refine, and extend their skills as academic, professional, and creative writers. The curriculum, composed of new and existing courses in rhetoric and writing, as well as writing-enhanced courses across the disciplines, prepares students to participate in various writing situations both inside and outside the academy. Because writing enhances reflection, reinforces learning, and improves critical thinking, the Writing Minor will provide students with the skills they need to excel in their majors, their professions, and their lives as engaged citizens. Writing minors (and majors) are springing up all over the country, and it’s encouraging to see the innovative approaches being taken. In this case, I was impressed with the inclusion of creative writing; the students I spoke with spoke passionately about wanting to experience a full range of writing, from poems to press releases, and such programs promise to offer that range. With 18 units of required coursework, students with this minor should get a strong sense of themselves as writers—and several students told me they intended to take substantially more than 18 units in the minor if they could find a way to do so. As I left the Center, I overheard a tutor and student talking animatedly about an assignment in progress. The student said he was “beginning to see what my main argument should be here,” and “huh . . . this is really helping me think.” That’s a line every writing center tutor or consultant loves to hear, and in this writing center it was echoed on a bulletin board where students had been invited to finish the sentence “I write because . . .” ... View more

What can we learn by exploring peer feedback practices in other disciplines?  That’s the central question driving this series of posts.  So far I’ve looked at creative writing and the studio arts.  In these next posts, I will consider acting.   Lynn McNutt is relatively new to Florida Atlantic University, but she’s already made quite an impression.  She’s energetic and enthusiastic, funny and approachable, and engaging - all qualities she brings to her classes, to the college, and to our football games (Go Owls!).  She’s also smart and a great director (I was entranced by her Lear). I had the chance to sit down with Lynn and talk about how peer feedback practices are developed in the acting classes she teaches for our department of Theatre and Dance, and one of the themes that first jumped out at me is the development of vocabulary.   Logistically these practices feel quite different, since Lynn doesn’t allow peer feedback until the end of the sophomore year.  The lack of a language with which to offer real feedback, a common theme in this post series, is a primary reason for waiting so long.  Students immediately want to say why a scene was good or bad, Lynn notes, without knowing why it was good or bad.  Thus, she spends a lot of time in the introductory classes instilling a vocabulary for talking about acting.  She’ll direct students’ attention by asking specific questions about a scene: “Do you see a difference between this way and that way?” Those questions direct responses, but also begin to introduce a vocabulary for talking about acting.  She then gives her feedback to the actor in front of the whole class so that they can see that vocabulary in action.  The development of such a vocabulary is a central pedagogical goal.  Acting is a result of a “soul connection to the technique” and while her students arrive with plenty of soul and emotion, what they need to develop is a way of talking about technique.   Lynn’s approach echoes a very common theme: students can’t give productive feedback without training on what is good and why it’s good.  I feel like we do a lot of that work in our own classrooms, and it’s one of the reasons I use peer revision sheets.  Often, I tie these sheets in to a particular element of writing that we’ve been discussing in the classroom.  For example, if we’ve been discussing how to make an argument, then I will ask students not only to identify the argument in a peer’s paper but then to also evaluate that argument using the language we’ve developed in class.  Vocabulary, in this sense, becomes a central goal of my classes, as well.   Lynn uses a host of handouts and worksheets about technique and also recognizes that students might arrive with a varied vocabulary of acting (some will have learned about “intentions,” while some would know about “goals” - and still others would be familiar with “goals”—all more or less the same thing).  I found that component familiar, too, as some of the students in my class will be used to thinking in terms of the “thesis” of a paper while some will know “argument.”  I prefer instead to talk about “project,” the thing they’re trying to accomplish in the paper.  But knowing the vocabulary students already have is a great way to transition them into the language of the classroom, a technique Lynn and I both share.   Chatting with Lynn helps me to recognize the importance of peer revision in developing a set of meta-skills around writing, skills that are centered around developing a language to talk about academic writing, both what it is and how it works and what makes it effective.  I plan on refining my focus there.   More from acting next time!     ... View more

I’ve written before about What’s the Story: the Vermont Young People Social Action Team and about some of the terrific work they’ve done (such as a video called Breaking Binary, which I hope you have seen). An experiential and digital storytelling course for middle- and high-schoolers, WTS is in its third highly successful year. As they put it in a recent update, WTS is working with 30 learners, aged 12 to 18 and representing 10 secondary schools in Vermont, 11 adult instructional team members, and an additional 25 dedicated academics and social change agents particpiating in our blogging. At last count, there have been 257 meaning-making blog posts on issues of social concern, twice as many comments, and almost 8,000 visits to our site and narrative research, since mid-September. I love WTS especially because the students are involved in identifying and acting on issues related to social justice and change. Much more than an ordinary “course,” this project brings young folks together in retreats, during which they propose issues for study and action, 5-minute “pitches” they work on and practice and then present before the whole group, hoping to inspire others to join them. A thoroughly collaborative project, WTS asks students to consider how narratives or stories told by others affect their lives and to conceive of and compose better stories of their own, stories more true to who they know they are. Working with Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf Teacher Network, these students are already writers/authors, thinking about and debating social issues of personal and national (and international) significance and making their voices heard on these issues. I would love to see schools in northern California band together to mount such a course of study and action, very much in the spirit of the course I taught at Bread Loaf last summer on Writing and Acting for Change. Goodness knows, we need these young people and their ideas today more than ever. I hope you’ll check out their website. If you do, you’ll see additional photos, but here’s one of the group at the retreat mentioned above. Hooray for What’s the Story! ... View more

Who would have ever thought that a Broadway musical about a man best known today for having been killed in a duel with Aaron Burr (and who was also one of the founders of nascent American corporate capitalism) should have become the hottest thing on Broadway since Cats?  But then again, who would have thought that a Broadway musical would get itself involved in what is arguably the bitterest American election since 1860?  That is exactly what Hamilton has done, and therein lies a semiotic tale.   The story here begins not with the creation and triumphal run of this Tony-record-smashing production, but with an event that took place after its creator had left the cast for other projects.  This event, of course, was the reading of a statement by a cast member to Vice President-elect Pence, who happened to be in attendance at a post-election performance.  That statement, which did not appear to have upset Pence (it basically implored the incoming Trump administration to play nice), did upset the President-elect, who took the matter to Twitter, where he appears to conduct the greatest portion of his communication with the American people.   The ironies—indeed, outright paradoxes—of this whole situation can hardly be overstated.  First, we have the paradox of the play itself:  a paean to diversity and inclusiveness whose ticket prices now average $411, and whose premium seats run $849.   The ironic symbolism of this—in the light of an election in which the Democratic candidate overwhelmingly carried America's centers of post-industrial prosperity, while the Republican candidate captured the Rust Belt—should not be lost on anyone.  Simply stated, while race relations most certainly played a key role in the election, so did socioeconomic inequality.  And while the billionaire standard bearer of the traditional party of the country club set saw this and exploited it in a campaign aimed at working-class Democrats who could hardly afford Hamilton's price of admission, the Democrats did not.    Then there is the paradoxical fact that the Democratic candidate out-fundraised and outspent her Republican rival by a considerable margin.  Making use of social media (especially Twitter) instead, a capitalist tycoon struck a populist note by communicating directly with voters rather than through expensively staged, and highly mediated, advertisements.  Whether this populist strategy was truly authentic is open to debate; that it was successful is not.   In short, the traditional party of class privilege won (at least in part) by playing upon the often-neglected emotions of social class, while the traditional (at least since FDR) party of the common folk, got blindsided by class resentment.  And while one can certainly understand why the cast of America's most celebrated stage entertainment would want to take advantage of a chance to speak directly to a man whose election appears to contradict everything that their performance stands for, the upper-class aura of the venue for their message was not, perhaps, the most effective setting for it. ... View more

Thanksgiving greetings and wishes to teachers of writing everywhere. I am certainly counting my blessings today, as I expect you are. I’m grateful that I’m still here on the planet and that I have sisters, nephews, nieces, and grandnieces to hold close and cherish. And I’m forever grateful to students I have known over some fifty-plus years now, who have taught me so much and shared so much of their lives with me. Just this week I had a chance to visit with a former student, from China, who is now working on a PhD in neuroscience, to break bread with her and to hear about her accomplishments and setbacks, her worries and also her dreams. I hope I remembered to thank her. So here’s to those who teach and to those who learn. And here’s a gift that I come back to regularly when I am giving thanks: Wendell Berry’s haunting, and comforting, “The Peace of Wild Things.” When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. --Openings: Poems, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1968 [Photo: Happy Thanksgiving everyone! by Satya Murthy on Flickr] ... View more

In this series of posts I am looking at what we can learn from peer feedback practices in other disciplines. Andy Brown and Sharon Hart talked to me about the studio art critique.   In my last post, I considered the history of critique in the art classroom.  In this one, I’d like to think about its future.   Sharon touched on this topic when she shared with me the challenges of photography in the digital age: “Images are ubiquitous,” she noted. “Why does anyone want to look at yours?” Indeed the rise of the digital is a big question for the Visual Arts and Art History department here at FAU.  In my time as Interim Chair, we wanted to engage with it directly so as to articulate a future trajectory for the department.  Andy suggested that critique needs a new trajectory as well. “Given the complexity and subject of art now the original model doesn’t work too well,” he observed, “We need to find new ways to approach art besides sit in front of it and chat about it.”  For me that also recalled Sharon’s investment in keeping approaches to technique new, fresh, and interesting to keep her and students both engaged in the process.   We might carry these same questions into the writing classroom. Huge swaths of the field are already considering the impact of digital technologies in how we write and in how we teach writing and any number of online peer revision products are available.  But the ones I have seen are simply electronic tools to do what we do in class: sit in front of writing and chat about it.  What it would mean to reconceive peer revision? How do new digital writing practices call forth new digital peer review practices?  I don’t have anything like an answer to that question but I do believe it’s a question worth asking.   Consider Facebook.  It constantly invites peer feedback with a single click and only recently moved past the singular “like” that so troubles art, creative writing, and composition students in the process.  What might it look like to do peer revision in such a context?  What if a paper were just a series of posts on Facebook?  What if it were an Instagram photo, which allows only a heart?   I may not have the answers but the questions aren’t going away.  As students come to our classrooms across the university with a muscle memory of the mind that suggests one click is all peer feedback is, how shall we challenge this reaction or harness it? ... View more

I grew up seeing sensational stories teased in commercials for the National Enquirer and similar tabloids on television. The claims about UFO invaders, scandalous affairs, and celebrity drama taught me long ago not to believe everything that I read. Like most writing teachers, whenever I teach research skills, I cover the importance of evaluating your sources before including the information they present in research projects. I have even written a lesson plan on how to conduct Inquiry on the Internet. I was a little surprised, then, when fake news became such big news after the presidential election. A simple search yields stories covering the influence of fake news like these: The Hoaxes, Fake News and Misinformation We Saw on Election Day (The New York Times) Facebook’s failure: did fake news and polarized politics get Trump elected? (The Guardian) Google and Facebook Take Aim at Fake News Sites (The New York Times) Click and elect: how fake news helped Donald Trump win a real election (The Guardian) Fake news goes beyond politics. This ‘wannabe weatherman’ allegedly lit fires for views. (The Washington Post) Predictably, these stories and the circumstances that inspired them led to suggestions on how to tell the difference between news and fake news. The NBC News story “How to Outsmart Fake News” (below) features Massachusetts professor Melissa Zimbdar explaining how to identify and avoid questionable news stories: Video Link : 1886 Zimbdar’s handout on False, Misleading, Clickbait-y, and/or Satirical “News” Sources includes the full list of tips. The Washington Post’s “The Fact Checker’s guide for detecting fake news” offers a similar list of suggestions. Students can use these tips to consider the validity of news sources, but I want them to think about why people believe these stories in the first place by exploring questions like these: What persuasive strategies make fake news seem to be true? What topics are likely to be the focus of fake news? Why are some topics better than others? What makes a topic a good choice for fake news? What kind of details need to be included? What kind of details would probably be left out? What audiences are likely to believe a fake news story? What circumstances would make a fake news story more believable? How does cultural background effect whether an audience believes fake news? What personal experiences could effect whether an audience believes fake news? Before using these questions, I would ask the class to discuss some historical situations where fake news had an impact. Fake news has a long history. If you include opinion columns in your discussion, you can point back to Swift’s Modest Proposal and then jump to contemporary pieces. If you want to explore the difference between satire and misinformation, Swift is a strong starting point. Once students think about the situation that led to Swift’s satirical commentary, you might talk about The Borowitz Report, The Onion, and The Daily Show. I like to start with the hysteria caused by Mercury Theatre production of The War of the Worlds from October 30, 1938 (MP3 recording and broadcast script). For the purposes of classroom discussion, the Wikipedia article on Public Reaction to the broadcast provides adequate details on the extent and causes of the panic that ensued in response to the fake new updates of a Martian landing in Grover’s Mill, New Jersey. Because of the distance students have from the events, they usually quickly understand how personal experiences and world events misled listeners who believed the updates were true. Once students explore The War of the Worlds broadcast, I ask them to think about the extent and causes behind the current fake news stories, using the ten questions to get discussion started. Class discussion can also take up the recent Wall Street Journal article, “Most Students Don’t Know When News Is Fake, Stanford Study Finds.” After considering the reasons that people believe fake news stories, students can have a strong conversation on whether they accept the findings of the Stanford study that the article discusses. With such articles appearing in the press, it’s an important topic for students to explore. Are you talking about fake news in the classroom? How are students responding? Do you have strategies to share? Please leave me a comment and let me know what you’re doing.   Credit: Quality Journalism Means an Informed Citizenry, by Mike Licht, on Flickr, used under a CC-BY 2.0 License ... View more

The recent presidential election was contentious, blistering in its attacks, and deeply personal in its tone. When the results were finally announced, the sense of division in the country only seemed to be heightened. Protests soon occurred on our streets and on our campuses. And if the election were not a topic in our classes previously, the aftershocks seemed to be a fact most teachers felt a need to discuss. We needed, I believe, to demonstrate the possibility of creating a space where open and honest dialogue could enable the finding of some common ground.   The question we faced as teachers, however, was “How?”   In taking on such work, I believe, we must resist the pull to imagine our classes as mirroring the coarse divisions of the past election season. In each of us resides an inner complexity that too rarely has a venue to be expressed. Each of us carries a sense of what a just world, enriched by such complexity, might allow, and the desire to build such a world exists as a collaborative vision for all of us.  My role as a teacher is to create a space where that complexity is not only expressed, but woven into a common narrative which can allow my class to have difficult, but necessary, conversations.   One of the tools I use to create this space is the “Story of Us” workshop. I learned this workshop through being involved in community organizing – undertaking the difficult work of trying to get individuals to sign on to a common project. By the time the “Story of Us” occurs in the workshop, the participants have shared a story about who they are and what brought them to the workshop. They have practiced forming a common agenda, developing decision making procedures, and soon will move to forming a plan of action. The “Story of Us” is designed to occur just before the “plan of action” and encapsulate what they have learned about each other, confirm the common values they have discovered, and point to work that still needs done.   My class is at a similar moment. My students have shared personal experiences. They have developed a common intellectual agenda and developed a way of talking which helps them decide where the conversation should go. They are about to move to building projects for the end of the term. Yet I believe the aftermath of the election has hurt this hard won sense of trust and collaboration. I am using the “Story of Us” as a starting point to rebuild this sense of community and, as importantly, to help students understand the complexity of their classmates. It is a reminder of the intersecting beliefs that allow action to occur. In fact, in almost all classes I have taught, I have found deploying this workshop to be a powerful way to have students recognize what they have accomplished and what they can achieve together as the term concludes.   The “Story of Us” process is pretty simple - see the linked worksheets based on the work of Marshall Ganz - and results in a set of common values being expressed and endorsed by the class: Team Breakout Session: Story of Us  Worksheet: Developing Your Story of Us  Coaching Tips: Story of Us  Worksheet: Coaching Your Teammates' Stories of Us  Since the worksheets go into minute by minute detail, I will focus on our role as teachers during the workshop.   First, our role is to make sure that the schedule is followed. This ensures it will fit into the class period. (Here it is structured for a 50-minute class.)    Second, our role is to enact the strong listening required by each student in class. We might do this by telling our own “Story of Us,” what values we have heard the class expect, what work we can now undertake. We might also visit each group, asking questions which help students form their narrative.   Third, our role is to highlight the need for a strong narrative structure. What choice did this classroom (or larger student) community face? What choice did it make? What was the outcome? In my class, which was about politics and race, the challenge was that students often spoke ineloquently about their beliefs. My class had to decide whether to listen literally or to attempt to hear the point trying to be made. They chose the latter and, because of that choice, we built a trusting community that was able to gain a greater understanding of the complexity of race in the U.S.A.   Fourth, when students are selected to share their stories to the whole class, our role is to ask students what values they hear in each speech, writing them on the board. Our role is to then conclude the class with a statement on how these common values can help us continue our work. (We should also make sure that after each speech the students applaud for the speaker.)   Depending on your class, how they best operate, you might decide to pass these worksheets out the day before. This will let them prepare a bit. You might also ask them to look online for “Story of Us Marshall Ganz” which will let them see how individuals in the full workshop have structured their speeches. Those search terms will also provide them videos of the full “Story of Us” workshops to watch, like this one: Video Link : 1881   Although such background isn’t necessary, I have found this usually helps folks visualize the work. And if you are intrigued by how narrative can help create community, you might find it interesting.  Here I should also add, I talk about Ganz, his workshops, and their role in a writing class in my textbook, Writing Communities.   Finally, if you send me videos of your students’ “Story of Self,” I’ll try to link them to his blog post. (Though we will need student permission.) Also please feel free to comment below or write with any questions.   Let’s begin, that is, to build our own community of “us.”   Contact:Stephen Parks‌ | Stephenjparks.com | @StephenJParks | sjparks@syr.edu ... View more

Stephen Parks‌'s Coaching Tips for The Story of Us. See https://community.macmillan.com/community/the-english-community/bedford-bits/blog/2016/12/06/the-story-of-us-finding-community-in-our-classrooms-in-a-post-election-world  ... View more

Stephen Parks‌'s worksheet for Developing Your Story of Us. See https://community.macmillan.com/community/the-english-community/bedford-bits/blog/2016/12/06/the-story-of-us-finding-community-in-our-classrooms-in-a-post-election-world  ... View more