Stephen Parks‌'s worksheet Coaching Your Teammates' Stories 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 Team Breakout Session handout. 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

Today’s guest blogger is Jeanne Bohannon (see end of post for bio).   As many of my colleagues and student-scholars, I have spent the past few weeks ruminating on the culmination of our country's presidential election cycle. No matter where we live on a political continuum, I think we all agree that we need to provide spaces for and mentor all of our students to take their feelings and turn them into scholarly action. Today, I want to invite readers to checkout and contribute to an assignment series that engages students as public, digital researchers with a topic connected to civil or human rights.   Context for Assignment Our students depend on us, no matter what happens, to provide mentoring and writing that helps them engage at a point of need. By researching historical civil rights movements and then developing digital content curating the rhetorical activities within these movements, students gain a deeper understanding of human struggles and are able to insert their own voices into recovering and analyzing them for 21st century contexts. Measurable Learning Objectives for the Assignment Investigate a civil or human rights campaign Apply peer review as recursive writing process Create digital texts in a blogging genre for public audiences Background Reading for Students and Instructors Acts of reading and viewing visual texts are ongoing processes for attaining learning goals in dialogic, digital writing assignments. Below, I have listed a few foundational texts. You will no doubt have your own to enrich this list. The St. Martin’s Handbook: Ch. 27, “Writing to the World”; Ch. 28, “Language that Builds Common Ground” The Everyday Writer: Ch. 26, “Writing to the World”; Ch. 27, “Language that Builds Common Ground” Writing in Action: Ch. 17, “Writing to the World”; Ch. 18, “Language that Builds Common Ground” EasyWriter: Ch. 17, “Writing across Cultures”; Ch. 18, “Language that Builds Common Ground”   Digital Deliverables for Classroom Use Sample Feedback Criteria/Rubric Blogging Guidelines Multimodal Elements for Students In-Class/Out-of-Class Work Students watch excerpts from a Civil Rights History video to introduce them to some key people and places connected to the 1960s movement. As a class group, students then choose two topics connected to the movement. Our class chose the Rich's Department Store sit-ins in Atlanta. Then, students divide into groups to craft two blog posts per group on people and places connected to your civil rights topic, using the Blogging Guidelines. Drafting blog content can occur outside of class, but revision and editing are best-completed in-class. Use a Feedback Checklist to maximize effective peer time. If you can't get a computer lab (a frequent occurrence on my campus), host a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) day. Some of my students' best revisions are made on their tablets and phones! Budget at least one revision and two editing sessions, where students collaborate to research and insert tags, refine their conversational tones, design multimodal elements, check for accessibility and even integrate SEO analytics.  This assignment lends itself to digital, democratic learning and unique contributions across types of classes because students choose their methods of composition, reflect on their process, and have the opportunity to present their work to their peers and publics.   Student Blog Examples   The Atlanta Student Movement -- Nick Pasley Women in the Movement -- Shiloh Gill Dr. Martin Luther King and Reidsville Prison -- Joseph Kimsey   Check More Out...  Our class took these blogs a bit further and curated everyone's blogs into a website: Anyone Sitting Here. Please also view a sample page: The Rhetorical Activism of Lonnie King. If your students have more content to add to our website, send it along, and we'll help get it published!   Our Reflections Our class community engaged authentically with this assignment, writing and designing texts both before and after the recent election, which motivated us to continue our public work of civil rights recovery. The work brought all twenty of us together as a group, each person contributing expertise and learning from everyone else. We were even able to bring Lonnie King to campus to help us start a student organization dedicated to this work. As Andrea Lunsford has taught us: our writing is valuable when we share it with the world.   Try this assignment and get in touch with us to contribute to our academic website!   Jeanne Law Bohannon is an Assistant Professor of English in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Kennesaw State University. She believes in creating democratic learning spaces, where students become stakeholders in their own rhetorical growth though authentic engagement in class communities. Her research interests include evaluating digital literacies and critical engagement pedagogies; performing feminist rhetorical recoveries; and growing informed and empowered student scholars. Reach Jeanne at: jeanne_bohannon@kennesaw.edu and www.rhetoricmatters.org. ... View more

The news is bad enough these days without the extra burden of having to deal with fake news. But that is just what Facebook users have been dealing with. In fact, following Donald Trump’s surprise win, some argued that the election was affected by fake news circulating on Facebook. Mark Zuckerman initially denied that fake news could have had that impact, calling the idea "crazy," but since then, he has announced a number of new initiatives to crack down on fake news. Why would people fall for fake news on Facebook? Some of the stories are outlandish:  “Terrorists are funding 20% of Hillary’s campaign;” “Obama told illegal immigrants to vote;” “Trump Confirms that He Just Googled Obamacare.”  That last example is the title of a satire. Its author, Andy Borowitz, has written more than one satire taken as fact by some readers.  An insightful article by Judith Donath explains why people want to believe what they read. She argues, “Posting fake news stories is a modern form of identity politics.” By that she means that people post and share the news stories that identify them with a certain community with shared values.  Often the fake stories that get circulated the most are the most partisan ones, because they conform to the political beliefs of those who pass them on. Fake news stories actually often gets shared more than factual ones. Donath writes, “Posting any story, real or false, that conforms to your community’s viewpoint bolsters your ties with them. Even if it is false, you have still demonstrated your shared values.”  She goes on, “If  . . . the news you post is fake, outsiders are more likely to be outraged. If you stand by it tenaciously, they may call you a fool or a liar. This infuriated response makes posting fake news a convincing signal for your allegiance to your in-group.” Hostility from outsiders strengthens the cohesion of the in-group. On the other hand, the threat of hostility from outsiders has caused some Facebook groups to go underground by becoming secret groups. There they can share news, fake or otherwise, secure in the knowledge that they are sharing with kindred spirits. This can be reassuring for those who voted against Trump, particularly since he has already been dubbed “Tweeter-in-Chief” and does not shrink from using his tweets to criticize his opponents for exercising their First Amendment rights. Textbooks have had to try to keep up with students’ use of technology for research. Long gone are the days when students relied solely on print sources. We have had to teach them how to document online sources, but also how to evaluate them. We still have to fight their tendency to believe that one source is as good as another and their inclination to go to the source listed first when they Google key terms. Now it seems we are going to have to teach them to look critically even at what they read on Facebook. One of my friends recently posted on her timeline, “I miss the old Facebook. Just saying.” She misses the days before Facebook got so politicized. Maybe between elections it may go back to being a place where people discuss their personal problems, document their travels, and even post pictures of the meal they are eating—to say nothing of all of the cute cat videos. Even Hillary admitted that she found the cat videos a welcome break from campaigning. Maybe we will never go back to that naïve a time. At least we can never go back to trusting completely everything we read on Facebook, and that is probably a good thing.  Credit: Facebook by Pascal Paukner on Flickr ... View more

In light of recent events, I’ve taken to my bed, hanky across my forehead, a delicate buttercup, as the victors would have it.   Fortunately, my dear friend and colleague, El Burro de Fromage, has agreed to share his reflections on recent discussions of the future of the humanities at my university.   I’ll be back in two weeks, smelling salts in hand.   rem   Education as Experience   As part of the celebration of Rutgers University's 250th anniversary, the powers that be decided to host an all-day discussion entitled, "Why the Humanities Matter." There was an Ivy-league keynoter and a panel of thoughtful respondents, including Habits co-author Ann Jurecic.   It came near the end of a year-long celebration of the university’s birthday, a year-long on the hortatory, on the eternal cheese cube, and short on cake and presents. Oddly, although there were also all-day discussions over those twelve months about the other major areas in the university, those sessions weren't entitled, "Why the Hard Sciences Matter," "Why the Social Sciences Matter," "Why the Biological Sciences Matter," or even “Why Being in the Big Ten Matters.” This was no mistake on the organizers’ part, as the university’s CEO made clear at the humanities event: he was there to be convinced - and, by the end of the day, there was no evidence he had been.   I think framing the question in this way, though, is a category error. We’re not dealing with an issue that yields to the provision of evidence and counter-evidence. Really, it's a matter of experience, so we’d be better off right away if we posed the question rather differently: "Does human experience matter? Does the experience of self-reflection matter? Does the experience of beauty matter? Does the experience of hopelessness and despair matter?"   This past week, the year-long birthday party ended in a hail of fireworks, with well-heeled insiders mingling gaily in a glorious circus tent. And a few days after that, the Chancellor’s Office hosted Scarlet and Black: Slavery and Dispossession in Rutgers History, a presentation of the findings of the Committee on Enslaved and Disenfranchised Populations in Rutgers History. Simultaneously, the RU Press released a volume of the same name, edited by the Committee’s chair, Deborah Gray White and Marisa Fuentes, both professors from the History Department. It’s an extraordinary volume that speaks to the historical realities of being an institution that is 250 years old—an institution older than the US, an institution whose history overlaps, intersects and commingles with the history of slavery in this country.   You’d never know from the coverage in the local press that professors, graduate students, and undergraduate students were involved in this project—because, well, we live in an age of miracles! But if you venture into the comment section below the local coverage, you will find it populated by remarks from people who have not experienced either self-reflection or thoughtfulness, though they've had a virtual lifetime of experience being enraged. To them, all this stuff about slavery is ancient history, irrelevant, more blather from the libtards and the buttercups.   El Burro says the humanities matter because they allow us to get beyond the childish need to separate the world into what's "great" and what "sucks." The achievement of Scarlet and Black is one of those instances that shows the vital importance of the humanities—when done correctly, the humanities train you to look fearlessly at the facts, even when all the powers that be tell you to look away. If you’d like to learn more about El Burro’s reflections on the humanities, friend the old donkey on Facebook. ... View more

I received an email from a student who could not attend class yesterday.  In the email, she noted that she was having trouble with her glasses and had decided to get contact lenses.  Her lenses arrived the day before she sent the email, and she got them in, but after working several hours, she found she couldn’t get them out.  She had to return to the eye doctor during class time to have the lenses removed. She was told not to drive, even with her glasses.  She ended the note by saying she was looking for a ride for the next day, because she wasn’t sure she could get the contacts back in on her own.   Just last week, this same student expressed fear that members of her family, who are waiting to immigrate to the United States as she has, will face tougher restrictions and delays or rejection in their efforts to come here; she wonders if she and her family will be welcome, if they can be accepted members of the college and the community.  In the wake of that fear, she had not finished the essay assignment I gave last week.   It would be easy to condemn her.  Excuses, excuses.   Ten minutes after our 8:00 class began this morning, she slipped in quietly, exhausted after working the night shift yesterday.  In our ESL grammar class, we were working on the punctuation of essential and non-essential adjective clauses.  I watched this young woman during class as she peered at the screen where I was projecting examples:  she wrote diligently, stopping every so often and wrinkling her head in thought.   Towards the end of the class, I gave the students ten sentences and asked if commas were needed.   On sentence #3, she responded incorrectly; hearing me say “No, that’s not it,” she sighed and shook her head.   Another student pointed out why the commas were not needed, and in turn, I paraphrased explanation, using the grammar terminology I had introduced in class: “Yes, the information in this adjective clause is essential; the readers need it in order to identify which particular group of people the sentence describes.”  After a quizzical glance from the student, I repeated myself, slowly.  I could see her parsing my words, and then she nodded.  She answered all the remaining questions correctly.   This student reminds me of what my community college students—immigrant and non-immigrant alike—are facing.  They want to see, and they know that they need tools and experience to do so.  But some days, the contacts just won’t go in, and the world is blurry and muddled.  As teachers, we can be tough on them (and rightly so, much of the time).  But I also need to remember what it was like to be at the beginning, learning to put my contacts in as a middle-schooler, learning to write and diagram sentences (yes, I did diagramming) in the 8 th and 9 th grades.  I need to remember a time when I couldn’t make sense of all the pieces, but I had to move forward anyway.  I need to remember a time when I put my work in front of a professor, completely uncertain as to whether or not I had met the standards of the academy – standards I could not begin to articulate.  I need to remember standing outside the English building at Baylor University, drawn by the tall windows, the smell of wood and old books, and the conversations within.  But I was nervous:  at some point, I might be exposed as an imposter.  In my classes, I planned my words and parroted my instructors cautiously; I never had confidence that I could contribute much of substance, even though my mind delighted in the novels and poems we were reading, in the language we were using.   And I was a student from a background of privilege.    In their work on threshold concepts, Meyer and Land suggest that students are in a liminal state, crossing a threshold and shifting their understanding of the world around them as they acquire disciplinary knowledge.   Some days, the contacts slip in, and the concepts fit together easily.  On other days, the contacts are left at home, and nothing quite makes sense.  In her overview of threshold concepts, Glynis Cousins notes, “Because it is difficult for teachers to gaze backwards across thresholds, they need to hear what the students’ misunderstandings and uncertainties are in order to sympathetically engage with them,” and “there is no simple passage in learning from ‘easy’ to ‘difficult’; mastery of a threshold concept often involves messy journeys back, forth and across conceptual terrain.”  She counsels teachers to “demonstrate that they can tolerate learner confusion and can ‘hold’ their students through liminal states.”   This young woman got adjective clauses today, but she may not get conditionals next week.  I need to stick with her regardless, not blaming her for confusion and not condemning her attempts, however clumsy and uncertain, to make sense of it all.  And when, in the writing class she is also taking with me, she does not apply these grammar concepts with mastery in her essay, I must remember what she has in fact mastered, and how her writing has progressed.    I need to take myself back to the beginning.  Then I can stand at the threshold and keep the door open. ... 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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.   Critique in the art classroom has a particular history I found quite interesting.  According to Andy, it emerged out of Modernism and the demise of the salon, with its list of rules for art.  As the definition expanded and art became more subjective, critique became both more complicated and more important.  Sharon’s use of “salon style” in our conversation also underscored for me the particular history of this discipline in relation to the salon.  Andy also explained how the current shape of our Foundations curriculum also emerged from the wider world of art through the Bauhaus movement.   Both indicated a deep knowledge of the extensive history of their fields and the ways in which that history persists in practices such as critique.  It got me thinking about the history of our own field.  In particular, I am wondering about the history of peer revision in composition.  I did some quick and dirty research and wasn’t able to find anything like a clear genealogy for the practice, though it’s clear that we’ve been doing it for some forty years or more.   I’m wondering about how history impacts practice and in particular I am wondering about the history of peer revision within our field.  It’s easy enough to tie it into some larger movements, particularly those that are social-epistemic, but if you should know more about the specific history I hope you will enlighten me in the comments.   Of course, not having so weighty a history may be of great benefit to us as writing teachers.  There is perhaps a way in which we are much more mobile in our understanding, practice, and use of peer revision as we are not so clearly restrained.  I’m not sure, so I welcome your thoughts. ... View more

Today's guest blogger is Matthew Bryan, an associate lecturer in Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Central Florida, where he graduated with his MFA in Creative Writing in 2009. There, he serves as the faculty editor for Stylus: A Journal of First-Year Writing and as a coordinator in the first-year composition program. Most recently, he updated the instructor’s manual for the third edition of Writing about Writing.   The longer I teach, the more acute my fear becomes that I will one day enter a classroom and make absolutely no sense. Here’s how I picture it: I’ll be going on about writing processes or rhetorical situations or some such thing, and while students might still nod politely and smile—take notes even!—they’ll know that there’s nothing really behind what I’m saying, the emperor has no clothes, etc. A related fear is that I’ll start to actually believe all of the easy explanations I’ve given my students over the years, when I was some combination of too lazy or too tired to give them a real answer. I imagine the effect would be much the same. These fears were at the front of my mind when my wife, a writing-about-writing neophyte, began teaching first-year composition this semester. In our conversations about teaching, would I be exposed? Would the carefully constructed lessons and insights I’ve stored in my toolbox over the years be shown for so many jargon-infused bromides under the scrutiny of somebody from the outside? An early test came when she was preparing a class on discourse communities. She wanted to know why I thought it was useful to teach students about the concept.             “Well,” I said, “it’s a helpful lens through which they can think about how groups of people use writing to get things done.”             “Hm.” She wasn’t buying it.             “Swales defines discourse community in such a way that it becomes a useful, common unit of analysis so researchers can compare how these groups work.”             “Okay, but why do they need all of these new terms?” she asked. “Couldn’t we just tell students the concept exists—groups of people use writing and they share some of these characteristics? Do they really need to read this whole article to get that?” This was a version of a back-and-forth I’ve considered myself over the seven years I’ve been teaching using Writing about Writing, and a conversation I’ve had several times with other teachers and, sometimes, students. We talked about how she might apply the concept to her work as a nurse, tracing the characteristics of the different discourse communities who impacted her work on a daily basis, and how she has, in turn, adapted her writing and communication practices in light of these communities. We talked about how students would benefit from hearing these real examples of discourse communities in action. We talked about how they can benefit, too, from reading the dense, scholarly articles about subjects like this, not simply because it’s practice in reading dense, scholarly articles (though it is that), but also because it allows them to see some of the messy work of new ideas being developed—over time, through back and forth with other writers, through constant questioning (“Discourse community wasn’t a thing,” I like to remind my students, “until some people came together and convinced each other it was”). And we talked about, finally, how the way she talks to her students about these subjects would likely be rather different from how I do, but that that’s okay and even valuable. In finding her own way, she’d be able to talk with students honestly, developing her own arguments and explanations for what they should be considering as well as—critically, I think—having room to hear their own perspectives.   I’ve always found these sorts of conversations helpful, serving as a chance for me to learn as well as re-think what I’m doing as a teacher and why I’m doing it. Writing-about-writing is not orthodoxy, as Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs have pointed out many times (see, for instance, here and here). Indeed, a key part of the value (pedagogically) and the appeal (from the perspective of teacher satisfaction) of the WAW approach stems from just how delightfully squishy so many of the subjects we can talk about are. This squishiness presents opportunities for teachers from different educational backgrounds (say an MFA in creative writing, or a an MA in English literature) to leverage the expertise they’ve developed in their specific field; even though English and writing faculty from different disciplines might have different ways of talking about and valuing writing, they all have some experience and perspective to share. And though some students may bristle at the label of “writer” (when I tell them we’re all writers at some point, how many scrunch their faces up with that mixture of disbelief and pity for me in being so naïve?), all of this talk about writing—why we do it, how we do it, what we think about when we do it—gives them places to jump in, too.   WAW has long struck me as an approach to teaching for skeptics: nothing is set in stone, and the chances for questioning and debating are many, if we allow them. While this can complicate assignment sequences and plans for assessment, I’d argue that it’s a productive sort of complication. In framing the key writing tasks as not only chances to apply course concepts, but as opportunities to test, challenge, and extend them, we can invite students into these conversations about writing and encourage their abilities as critical thinkers as well. And so I find myself, semester after semester, trying to meet each class anew. There’s always the impulse to relax into calcification, to reuse the same old lessons and repeat the same old explanations. But there is also the never-ending self-doubt: am I doing enough to help students? Is this going to prepare them for where they want to go? Is my curriculum engaged enough with the messy, sometimes ugly world beyond the walls of the classroom, and is it preparing them for that, too? It’s in these moments that I relish the opportunity to talk to others new to the WAW approach—students and faculty alike—to hear about what they’re thinking and doing, and to try to see what I’m doing and saying in my class through their eyes.   A new edition of Writing about Writing containing new readings and ideas no doubt occasions similar opportunities for re-visioning a course, and I hope that the new material will be helpful for teachers getting up and running for the first time and perhaps encourage others to give WAW a try—in particular, a new FAQ section in the instructor’s manual and on the catalog includes answers to questions like, “What if my background isn’t in Writing Studies?” and “What are students producing?” Because, for me, my favorite part of teaching has been and will likely always be the conversations it’s opened up about writing and how it works. It seems to me that these conversations can help to keep us honest and to keep us learning, and they only get better as more and more people join them. ... View more

Although many do not recognize it, local theatre is the cornerstone of the dramatic arts. (By local theatre, I mean what people watch in their own towns.) While metropolitan centers like New York City exert influence, what really counts is the theatre that people see. A theatrical production is often unavailable either in print, film, or other media: it is experienced only by those who gather to see it; and, since most individuals stay close to home, close to home matters. While famous plays have impact, the effect is diffuse when compared to print-centered writing or to film. The effect of non-local theatre works only along the lines of a “trickle-down” influence, rather than the direct impact of other forms: people read a story, but read about a theatrical production. Given the importance of local theatre, one would think that such performance would be thriving — unfortunately, it is not. This is especially true for local playwriting. Because local theatres have no obligation to present new, local work, they typically turn to renditions of familiar plays that audiences have seen before. While productions of such plays may be comfortable for audiences and for the theatre makers involved, they create minimal opportunities for local dramatists. Though most regions of the country — even far-out, rural places — have some local theatre, they do not often have local dramatic writing. Such a situation hurts local writers and theatre as a whole by inhibiting regional diversity in a form that, of necessity, must be regional. For this reason, playwriting instructors must not only be writers, but also theatre artists. Specifically, they must act as producers, arranging shows and making them occur. It is not enough to ask students to stuff their plays into envelopes, send them to faraway theatres, and hope for the best: instead, the instructor must ensure local performance opportunities. Print publication is unlikely for beginning dramatists. Because of the pre-eminence of live production, playwrights have far fewer opportunities for print publication than do poets and other writers. Production at distant theatres is similarly unlikely. Most theatres that produce new work already have relationships with playwrights-in-residence and are unlikely to assist beginning authors who live far away. These theatres tend to prefer local writers because proximity makes for an easier working relationship. Instructors can collaborate with existing local theatre companies; but, most often, the instructor will have to run his or her own “production company” — whether it’s something as simple as a series of public readings or as innovative as a podcast/videocast theatre. Plays must be performed — there is no other medium for them — and, like it or not, the playwriting instructor must be on the front lines of performance. How do you incorporate performance/production in the playwriting classroom? [[This post originally appeared on LitBits on July 26, 2012.]]  ... View more

  Jeanne Bohannon‌'s Academic Blogging Guidelines. See Multimodal Mondays: Engaging Student Activism in Writing Classrooms,Multimodal Mondays: Visual Analysis and Content Creation for Beginners in Two Parts, and Multimodal Mondays:  Engaging Sustained Student Activism in Writing Classrooms‌.  ... View more

Jeanne Bohannon‌'s grading criteria checklist for blogs. See https://community.macmillan.com/community/the-english-community/bedford-bits/blog/2016/11/28/multimodal-mondays-engaging-student-activism-in-writing-classrooms  ... View more

During the last weeks of November, I like to share this quotation from the Autobiography of Mark Twain that focuses on Thanksgiving: Thanksgiving Day, a function which originated in New England two or three centuries ago when those people recognized that they really had something to be thankful for — annually, not oftener — if they had succeeded in exterminating their neighbors, the Indians, during the previous twelve months instead of getting exterminated by their neighbors the Indians. Thanksgiving Day became a habit, for the reason that in the course of time, as the years drifted on, it was perceived that the exterminating had ceased to be mutual and was all on the white man’s side, consequently on the Lord’s side, consequently it was proper to thank the Lord for it. When I ask students to brainstorm things that they associate with Thanksgiving before they read this quotation, they discuss things like family, turkey, football, friends, pie, parades, and shopping. When they turn to more abstract concepts, they talk about tradition, patriotism, and thankfulness. Twain’s take on Thanksgiving forgoes all these feel-good ideas and zeros in on some ugly facts about the treatment of American Indians. Twain’s syntax is complex, so I start by breaking down Twain’s passage and unpacking the words. I ask students to look in particular at the word choice Twain is using to communicate his opinion on the meaning of Thanksgiving: It’s a function, rather than a holiday or celebration.  The pilgrims are “those people.” The function marks “exterminating their neighbors.” There’s no whitewashing in Twain’s account of Thanksgiving. He uses tough words, and his meaning is clear. Thanksgiving for Twain is not about a harvest festival, family, or the good old days. It’s about “the white man” exterminating American Indians—and constructing a scenario where the Lord approves and should be thanked for this accomplishment. Currently, American Indians from many nations are coming together to protest the pathway of the Dakota Access Pipeline through the sacred lands of the Standing Rock Tribe. As I consider the protesters’ fear that the pipeline will contaminate their water supply, I have to wonder if Mark Twain would see the situation as yet another moment in America’s history focused on exterminating American Indians. It’s a question that I want students to take up in their discussion by exploring the facts that are reported, those that are not mentioned, and the language that is used to discuss the protesters and their fight to protect their community. The idea of discussing Mark Twain’s perspective on Thanksgiving is one that I originally explored in a 2010 post from my personal blog. Sadly, his commentary on treatment of American Indians is still on point if the situation in North Dakota is any measure. How are you talking about political issues and current events with students this term? Please share your ideas in the comments.     Credit: Bakken / Dakota Access Oil Pipeline by Tony Webster, on Flickr, under a CC-BY-SA 2.0 license ... View more

Some forty-five years ago now, I began my college teaching career at Hillsborough Community College in Tampa, Florida, where I learned in just a few short months what I did NOT know about how to teach writing. I had an excuse, of course; I had never taken a writing course (exempted, stupidly) and had only figured out how to write papers for my college classes by a kind of osmosis. Still, that first year was one long series of lessons in humility. My students were wonderful; they deserved a teacher who could guide them. Instead, they had me. But I didn’t give up easily, and with their help I began to understand what I needed to do: analyze their writing carefully, systematically, and listen intently to what they wanted to write about, and why they wanted to write about it. By the time I left Tampa to return to school for a Ph.D. (and to learn more about writing and about rhetoric!), I had found some footing, again thanks to my students. Together, we improved. Today, roughly half of students in college began their work at a two-year school. Yet these institutions get much less funding than their four-year counterparts and hence have fewer resources: year after year, decade after decade, they are asked to do more with less. Yet in my travels around the country, I am regularly inspired and heartened by colleagues teaching at community and junior colleges. They often seem to know their students better, more deeply, than at four-year state colleges, and they care deeply about them. I wish that all those state funders, all those legislators, could visit the schools I visit, talk with the faculty and meet with the students I meet. I think they would be heartened and inspired too. Maybe even enough to make some changes in their state’s funding formula. Recently I visited Northeast Junior College in Sterling, Colorado, where I met with faculty from across the disciplines to talk about students and about writing. As always, I came away impressed: with the philosophy teacher who had started five or six extracurricular clubs for students and who challenged his in-class students with forward-looking assignments; with the agriculture teacher who started every class with some writing; with the nursing faculty who asked piercingly insightful questions about how to help their students improve as writers and thinkers; with the English teacher who had started a writing center from scratch and made it part of the campus Comprehensive Learning Center. In this small northern Colorado community, this college felt very much like where the rubber meets the road, a no-nonsense, let’s get to work right now kind of place. I came away wondering how I could make more connections with two-year colleges and how much we would all have to gain if four-year and two-year college teachers of writing made opportunities to work together. I know that some states, such as Oregon, encourage such collaboration, but more often than not, such encouragement comes without any support or funding. But today’s technologies may offer ways for colleagues to work across boundaries with minimum expense: webinars, google hangouts, and other ways of meeting up now abound. Do you teach at a two-year college or at a four-year college? If so, what ways can you imagine sharing, partnering up, and maybe even fostering some on-line exchanges between students? How can you imagine breaking down the walls between institutions? In the meantime, here are some photos I took at NJC: what a happy day I had there! Student writing displayed in the Center. One room in the Center. It's always snack time! ... View more

Given the immense significance of the outcome of the American presidential election, I awaited its results before writing this blog.  And though I, like a great many other people, was rather taken by surprise by what happened, the overall semiotic outline of the event was clear both before and, now, after it.  So, doing my best to avoid partisanship, I will sketch out that outline here in the shape of a series of fundamental takeaways.   First, as the chapter on cultural contradictions ("American Paradox") in the ninth edition of Signs of Life in the USA explicitly explores in the light of the Trump campaign, America really has split apart into hostile camps, each one, in part through the use of social media, creating its own "echo chamber," largely deaf to the discourse of the other, and lodged, essentially, in its own construction of reality.   Second, when we situate the election into a larger system that includes the British Brexit vote and the rise of populist parties in Europe voicing similar complaints to those in America, we can find signs of the turmoils induced by demographic change in a highly unsettled global context.  Try as one will, there is simply no way of avoiding the racial component of these events, and pretty much every hope of having achieved a post-racial society in the wake of the Obama presidency has been dashed.   Third, Trump's success signifies a highly paradoxical rejection of neoliberalism—paradoxical because such rejections are commonly viewed as a preoccupation of the political left.  But alongside the Sanders campaign (which was explicitly a rejection of neoliberalism), Trump's rejection of the ideology of the global marketplace, which resonated so strongly with working-class voters, is itself a challenge thrown down before all of the global elites whose power and privileges owe much to the neoliberal order of things, no matter which side of the aisle these elites may sit.  In short, this was a mighty challenge to America's socioeconomic elites—Republican and Democratic alike, led, paradoxically, by a member of the elite class himself.  But America has been here before, as when the uprising of Jacksonian democracy in the 19th century was conducted by a plantation-owning aristocrat.   Fourth, the election signifies just how important the Supreme Court has become in a society so divided that neither its Executive nor Legislative branches can govern any more.  A lot of voters (especially Evangelicals) swallowed their disapproval of Trump's personal life to vote, essentially, for future Court justices.   Fifth, and finally, the election has illustrated a point that I often make to my students about the difference between sociology and cultural semiotics.  Both fields, of course, analyze human society, but while sociology relies very much on the measuring of human behavior and consciousness via quantitatively constructed surveys, semiotics simply takes the actual behavior of people (what they do rather than what they say) as evidence.  The failure of pretty much all of the polls to predict what happened despite all of their surveys and quantitative data (just as the pollsters failed in the Brexit vote) indicates that people can be very chary about what they say about their beliefs, especially in the case of this election in which support for Trump was socially frowned upon.  After all, it wasn't only uneducated working-class voters who supported Trump, and the pollsters missed that.   And since semiotics is an interpretive, not a predictive, activity, we can now see just how much louder actions have spoken than words in this election. ... View more

Part of leading a discussion in a creative writing workshop involves encouraging students to give rigorous feedback and criticism to their classmates, while also fostering an atmosphere of respect and friendship.  Hank Devereaux Jr.—the narrator of Richard Russo’s academic satire Straight Man—observed that, in the creative writing classroom, “tough, rigorous criticism is predicated on good, not ill, will.” As teachers, it’s part of our job to create an environment where student writers feel comfortable receiving—and giving—detailed feedback and constructive criticism.  The workshop, after all, isn’t going to work if the only thing the student author hears is “great job” or “I really liked the words you used to convey your ideas.” Creating an environment of friendly and well-intentioned critique is difficult in any creative writing classroom, but it’s particularly difficult in a creative nonfiction classroom.  As writers, we’re frequently defensive when it comes to our work, but as creative nonfiction writers, we sometimes wind up feeling defensive about our experiences and ideas as well.  Once, as a student in a workshop, I had to listen as a classmate explained that she didn’t like the piece I had written because the “narrator” was so whiney and self-absorbed.  And while I like to think that I have thick skin … come on.  That hurt. I try to be particularly conscious of the student author’s feelings and protectiveness of her work even as I ask my students to talk specifically about what isn’t working in a piece.  Still, even with my attempts at sensitivity, some students are stressed out and even hurt by the entire workshop experience.  Who can blame them? They’ve just revealed themselves—exposed their realest, innermost selves—without the safety net of a fictional narrator or poetic speaker, and now they’re getting criticized for their efforts.  That can be disheartening, even infuriating. A couple weeks ago, my book—this manuscript I’ve been working on, in various forms, for over five years now—was rejected by a publisher.  Again.  As most working writers know, rejection is just part of the process.  You read the nicely-phrased note, sigh to yourself, then get back on your laptop and find the next contest or university press to send the thing to.  You nod to yourself, silently wish the editors who rejected you good luck with their future endeavors, and then get back to work. At least, that’s how I think it’s supposed to happen.  The truth is, that’s not how it works for me.  Instead, I give out this little gasp.  Then I pace around the room a little bit.  Then I announce—either to my wife or, if she’s not home, one of the cats—“I don’t know why I continue to operate under the delusion that I’m a writer.”  My wife, for her part, knows to let me say this out loud, to get it out of my system.  And the cats seem to know the same thing—they seldom interrupt my pity parties. Keep in mind, I’m a fairly successful writer (“For the type of loser who doesn’t even have a book,” Mopey Me adds with a frown).  I’ve published over two dozen essays, reviews, and interviews in some of the best magazines and journals in my field.  I say this not to brag, but to point out that I have no reason to feel like a loser when something I write—from the shortest essay to the book manuscript itself—is not accepted for publication.  But I do. Inevitably, I get over it.  I take a couple of days, but then return to the manuscript in order to decide, “Was it them, or is it me?”  Sometimes, I make changes.  Sometimes—like this most recent time—I conclude, “You know, I think this is ready as it is.”  And I send the thing back out again.  Sometimes I’m successful, sometimes I’m not.  The point is, I essay. But the larger point is that I understand personally the frustration and disappointment when a piece of writing is received less enthusiastically than its author might like.  My students’ sadness (or anger) at a workshop discussion may not be exactly the same as my own response to a rejection, but it’s darn close, I think.  That’s important to keep in mind—too often I get frustrated by my students’ frustration.  “I’m trying to help you!” I think to myself.  But it’s useful to remember that they’ve poured as much as themselves into their assignments as I have into my book. Lately, I’ve taken to telling my students what I’m working on, and when the work gets rejected—or accepted.  I want them to understand that the occasional disappointment is inevitably part of this process, but that if they persevere, they might know the joy that comes with realizing they have succeeded in reaching—and moving—their audience. Any other tips on how to deal with student frustrations in the writing workshop?  For that matter, any advice for me on how to deal with my own bouts of self-loathing that inevitably accompany rejection? [[This post originally appeared on LitBits on 8/28/12]] ... View more