I thought I had the dry erase marker in my bookbag, but it wasn’t there. Other sources for markers weren’t accessible. The department’s supply closet was in another building, and the rooms on my floor were filled with classes in session. We were discussing the possibilities for organizing essays, specifically alternatives to the five paragraph format of introduction with 3-part thesis, 3 body paragraphs (a paragraph for each part of the thesis), and a conclusion that summarized the main points of the essay.  For several generations now, I’ve watched students learn how to expand on this template as their ideas expand beyond the constraints they have been practicing since middle school, and probably earlier. The five-paragraph format has served them well for exams, college application essays, and other rhetorical situations. But in College Writing and other courses, students are learning material and encountering assignments that don’t fit neatly within the five-paragraph model.  It is a challenging moment, made even more challenging this semester by my lack of a marker for the dry erase board. Teaching from my gut, I thought to use my hands to show how an essay could be organized: Introduction, opening body paragraphs, transition between opening and closing body paragraphs, closing body paragraphs, and a conclusion. My hands were framed somewhat like in this photo: Photo of Susan’s Hands by S. Cormany September 20, 2023 For the purposes of keeping a visual record, I asked my partner to take that picture of my hands in the same formation that I had shown the students. Once I saw the photo, I wondered if I could do something with it. Many of my students are visual learners, and I am a kinesthetic learner. Movement is important to me as a learner, and I talk with my hands, as the photo documents. I thought that I might be able to deconstruct the photo in a way that might be helpful for switching up the writing process, or at least for beginning to envision or move toward a frame for essays beyond the five-paragraph model.  Or at least that is what I tried to do at first. Then I thought about how we were approaching form and content in class. This semester, I spent time modeling how to NOT do drafts in a linear format (introduction, body, conclusion). Instead, students were assigned journal entries that asked for unpacking and translating sections of James Baldwin’s work to twenty-first century Englishes. Baldwin’s sentences are very long, so we broke the sentences into component parts to try to find the independent clause– the kernel of meaning that helps make long sentences more understandable. I explained that Baldwin spoke French as well as English, and how his knowledge of multiple languages informed the form and content of his writing.  In other words, we discussed translanguaging. Most of us in class speak multiple languages, and many of us, myself included, have experience knowing what we’re thinking and feeling, but discovering that English doesn’t have the words we need to speak and write what we need to say. We struggle with writing. Baldwin struggled with writing. This is why we read “Artist’s Struggle” as a model. This is probably another reason why I talk with my hands. Words alone aren’t enough to make meaning. As a kinesthetic learner, I often need my whole body to say what I mean and mean what I say. With that in mind, I set out to make a diagram with the photo of my hands. At first I thought I could show an alternate form of organization. Then, I thought to frame the photo of my hands as a nonlinear form of drafting, but a form that would have discrete and recognizable parts, with thumbs representing the introduction and the conclusion, and the rest of the fingers representing opening body paragraphs, closing body paragraphs, and the transitions between opening and closing body paragraphs. That diagram looks like this: Drafting Process Diagram by Susan Bernstein Different components of the essay could be drafted at different points in the process, and not necessarily in the same order the audience would find in a revision. To illustrate a possibility for reassembling the component parts of the draft, I created a more linear diagram: Revising Diagram by Susan Bernstein   The main purpose of the diagrams, in a sense, fits the theme of our class, Creativity: Think Outside the Box. There is, I suppose, an irony in using boxes to frame the drafting and revising processes; nevertheless, the most important goal is to offer students practice with learning additional strategies for approaching a writing project, whether in English, the social sciences, or, as is very common for my students, assignments for courses in STEM majors.  In other words, a ten-page researched essay in a marketing or finance course won’t fit within the frame of a five-paragraph essay. The frame has to be reassembled, and students will need to figure out the best way to reassemble and expand on their thoughts, as well as find patterns of organization that fit the meaning of their words and that their audience can productively understand. This isn’t easy work for any of us, but experimenting with variations of form and content is worthwhile work in College Writing. For me, talking with my hands, learning kinesthetically, remains critical to the practices and process of learning to write beyond the five-paragraph frame. ... View more

I’ve been following University of Pennsylvania Professor Ethan Mollick’s blog, One Useful Thing, and find his thinking and reporting about recent AI developments particularly informative. One recent post, “Centaurs and Cyborgs on the Jagged Frontier,” summarizes results from a study of professional work in what he calls “our AI-haunted age" in an effort to answer the question of whether AI is “really a big deal for the future of work.” The answer to this question: a resounding YES. This particular research project was multidisciplinary and included scores of interviews and a number of studies designed to test the impact of AI on knowledge work. To do so, they randomized a large group of consultants and asked them to do a variety of creative, analytical, writing, and “persuasiveness” tasks for a made-up shoe company—and checked with a real-life shoe company exec to make sure the tasks were realistic.  So what did they find? In a nutshell, “for 18 different tasks, consultants using ChatGPT-4 outperformed those who did not by a lot. On every dimension. Every way we measured performance.” I’d say that’s a pretty significant finding! Moreover, the consultants did better whether or not they were familiar with the AI tool or not—as judged by both real people as well as AI graders (who agreed). This image was generated by OpenAI's DALL-E    A second finding that I found especially interesting is that the AI tool works as a skill leveler. That is, the consultants who tested lowest at the start of the study improved their performance the most (up 43% when they used AI). Those who tested highest also performed better with AI but did not experience such a significant jump.  Finally, a third finding that jumped out at me concerns a task the team designed that was “outside the AI’s frontier, where humans with high human capital doing their job would consistently outperform AI.” Mollick says that designing such a task was very difficult but that they finally were able to use “the blind spots of AI” to make sure it would give a wrong (though convincing) answer to the problem. The surprising finding, however, was that “human consultants got the problem right 84% of the time without AI help, but [. . . ] with AI, they did worse.” Investigators think that this is an example of how over-reliance on AI can backfire, and they cite another experiment that showed those who used AI often “became lazy, careless, and less skilled in their own judgment.” Such over-reliance, which the researcher referred to as “falling asleep at the wheel” gets poor results and actually harms human learning and productivity.  Mollick concludes that “people really can go on autopilot when using AI” and that “AI outputs, while of higher quality than that of humans, were also a bit homogenous and same-y in aggregate.” He urges all of us to “use AI enough for work tasks” so we can “start to understand where AI is scarily good . . . and where it falls short.” The bottom line, he says, is not about whether AI is going to remake our work world but what we will make of that. We get to make choices about how we want to use AI help to make work more productive, interesting, and meaningful. But we have to make those choices soon, so that we can begin to actively use AI in ethical and valuable ways rather than merely reacting to technological change. And that’s a pretty tall order for teachers and students of writing. We have no time to waste! ... View more

This is my second post focusing on the work being done by two-year college teacher-scholars who contributed to Teaching Accelerated and Corequisite Composition, a collection I edited for Utah State University Press, which will be published in November. This month, I spoke with Charlee Sterling. Charlee earned her Ph.D. in English and American literature from New York University in 2003 and currently teaches writing and literature at Goucher College in Baltimore. Charlee’s scholarly focus includes twentieth-century and contemporary American literature and Anglo-American modernism. She has previously written on the work of Edith Wharton and William Faulkner and on the ups and downs of teaching online; her current work focuses on composition pedagogy and comics, specifically the important role comics, multimodality, and popular literature and culture can play in the writing studies classroom. Charlee’s contribution to Teaching Accelerated and Corequisite Composition is “Revisiting Dweck’s Growth Mindset in the First-Year Classroom.” As its title suggests, the chapter takes another look at Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck’s concept of growth and fixed mindsets. One of the bedrocks of accelerated composition instruction, growth mindset maintains “that intelligence, talent, and ability can be learned; growth and improvement can happen through sustained effort: persistence, practice and help from others allow us to improve.” Charlee’s chapter begins with a problem: her college’s corequisite writing class is not coming together, and talk of a growth mindset seems to be especially lost on three student athletes who are loudly disruptive and openly mocking of her class. The trio is not alone in their discontent. Across the college, corequisite students often report “feeling demeaned by the class or by their professors,” which results in “a lack of engagement and, often, outright resentment.” However, after revisiting Dweck’s ideas, Charlee reconfigures her classroom so that she is able “to create opportunities for students to experience success in real time, bringing about a growth mindset by providing students with an effective strategy and praising them for using it successfully.” For Charlee, “The most important section of the chapter for current teachers of accelerated composition is the latter half, in which I discuss specific, hands-on strategies for fostering a growth mindset in the classroom.” She argues that it is essential to think deeply about “how we design our activities and assignments, how we assess them, how we encourage our students to collaborate and reflect on their own learning.” She adds that “even the most experienced teacher amongst us might have a class that we struggle with: you are not alone! Thinking about and acknowledging our own fixed or growth mindsets when it comes to teaching praxis is crucial: does what I am doing work? What could I improve upon? Where can I get the help I need to make that happen?” When I asked about any additional insights she’s had since writing her chapter, she remarked: “If you teach first-year students, then you are seeing the effects of Covid-era learning directly; we need to create inclusive classrooms with even more opportunities for growth-mindset ‘wins’ in real time so that students can see how effort can lead to improvement.” Inevitably, the specter of AI entered our conversation, with Charlee emphasizing the importance of ensuring that “students are learning to write while also learning to use AI in appropriate ways that maintain rather than undermine academic integrity.” In the current semester, she is looking to “create even more ‘metacognitive moments’ in my schedule, so that I’m not merely praising effort, but giving students the space to reflect on what they’ve learned by making the effort in the first place, which is another way to challenge the ubiquitous nature of AI writing applications.” Charlee ended our conversation on positive note, saying that one of the students she describes in her chapter as “problematic” has become “a writing major, and is now taking upper-level courses with me. There is something so powerful about this narrative, and I can’t wait to share it with my accelerated composition students!” ... View more

Earlier this year, I wrote about a disconnect between my expectations and those of my students for their final FYC portfolio.  My students seemed to think the culminating project of the course was “no big deal” and might require “an hour or two” to put together, while I anticipated 8 to 10 hours of work, at a minimum.  My students were not unwilling to engage with difficulty; rather, they did not seem to recognize the difficulty I had embedded into the final project. In my piece, I quoted a blog post from Cheryl Hogue Smith, who described the challenges of the post-pandemic classrooms as the “academic version of the Matrix.” This fall, in conversations with colleagues teaching corequisite sections of FYC, I hear a similar and deep-rooted frustration: “I don’t know how to reach them;” “I really don’t know how to motivate them;” “I don’t know what I’m doing anymore;” “I’m at a loss.  I don’t think assignment tweaks will make a difference;” “I have never seen anything like this before.” Photo by Yustinus Tjiuwanda via UnsplashMy students come in, sit down, and open laptops, but they seem fundamentally disconnected.  One of my colleagues said that her students seem to want to “fly under the radar” and just get out of the course without being noticed.   I know what she means:  at the start of this term, I noticed that my students appeared to minimize the amount of physical space they occupied in our classrooms, a narrow box including the chair and the table with the laptop.  They stayed rigidly oriented towards the front of the room, with their heads down. There is no simple answer to these realities.  (If someone says to me, “If you just…,” I typically tune them out.) Still, I spent the latter part of my summer reviewing, imagining, and re-imagining my FYC course.  Among other adjustments, I decided to re-introduce Mariolina Salvatori’s paper on difficulty this fall—something I have not assigned in over five years.   For this semester’s iteration, I have asked students to explore their challenges in reading an extended excerpt from James Gee’s older article, “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction,” with the ultimate aim of applying that article as a framework for analysis later in the term.   In our first session with the text—and the difficulty paper concept—I invited students to consider not only difficulties intrinsic to the text or those arising from within themselves and their lack of experience.  We also considered material realities—our windowless basement classroom, fatigue, ADHD, distraction, light, sound, temperature, anxiety, boredom, smells from the coffee shop upstairs—even the 8:00 am start time for the course.   We talked about the appearance of the article on screen, the stark red of the reading notes I had added to the PDF, and the layout of the printed copy I had provided for note-taking in class.  I assured them that any honest response to the reading experience could be explored—and any response could be connected back to the literacy narrative they had just completed.   Granted, the students must ground the difficulty draft in the text itself, but they could step away from the text and return as needed, mirroring their own reading experience as they developed the difficulty paper draft.  I will receive the first drafts of this paper next week.  But since having assigned it—and having worked through initial group and pair discussions—I have noticed a subtle shift in the classroom, specifically in the way students create and occupy space for their writing.  As before, most of my students are using laptops or tablets, but instead of orienting themselves directly towards the front of the room (and their devices), their screens are angled, and their bodies oriented slightly away from the screens—towards the hard copy of the Gee article, their handwritten three-column notes, and even each other.  Phones are visible, still, but they are on the tables with other resources, not always in hand. Drafting has been more active; students move frequently between screen and paper, typing and hand-writing, silence and chatter.   Iced coffees, water bottles, granola bars, and pastries are also spread across the small seminar tables in our room, and the chairs have shifted multiple times. As I said, this is a subtle shift.  But I suspect it signals a deeper sense of belonging in our classroom space, a level of comfort in being in the space.  Did our discussions of difficulty perhaps contribute to this shift?  I cannot say.  Does this shift imply that challenges in motivation or engagement are resolved?  Hardly.   Should I expect flashes of brilliance from previously reluctant students when I read the difficulty paper drafts this week?  Maybe, but probably not. Still, the discussions of difficulty and the material realities that contribute to those difficulties seem to have opened up new space—physically and perhaps intellectually—in my FYC corequisite.  I’ll take that—and I’ll keep you posted on our progress.  ... View more

Elizabeth Catanese is an Associate Professor of English and Humanities at Community College of Philadelphia. Trained in mindfulness-based stress reduction, Elizabeth has enjoyed incorporating mindfulness activities into her college classroom for over ten years. Elizabeth works to deepen her mindful awareness through writing children's books, cartooning and parenting her energetic twin preschoolers, Dylan and Escher   As professors, we often reflect about establishing class routines, developing syllabi, getting to know students, designing our online modules well and even, at times, thinking about work life balance. However, accommodating students with disabilities seems to get less reflective airtime than these other topics, at least in my experience as a community college professor. It’s our legal responsibility to provide students with accommodations. It’s also our ethical duty. Given these truths, some may feel that the conversation about accommodating students with disabilities should end here; I feel that we can serve ourselves and our students best by further reflection.  I’ve learned a lot from working with students with disabilities over the years, and these days I’m excited to get accommodation letters from students and energized by it; it means that I have the honor and privilege of having additional diversity in the classroom, and I get to collaborate with students to make sure their learning experience is optimal. However, I will confess that when I got that first accommodation letter, almost 16 years ago as a part-time instructor, struggling to make ends meet while working a full-time and part-time teaching gig, I felt very anxious about whether I was going to be able to provide reasonable accommodations. The student needed notes in advance of classes, and I was planning classes on the train between jobs. Luckily, the student and I figured it out. He had a note-taker in class and got his notes from me later in the week. The accommodation was reasonable, and the student did exceptionally well. I relaxed a bit. But years of experience with accommodation letters and helping students with disabilities have taught me something about professor attitude toward these letters: it really matters—not just to the student who needs to be accommodated, but to the classroom dynamic and the professor as well. It can be the difference between a safe and welcoming class environment and a student failing, the difference between facilitating meaningful learning and just teaching to the test. It can be the difference between a happy professor and a grumpy one. Given the importance of the issue, I have begun to reflect on some strategies for working with students who have disabilities (and working with all students and their unique needs and identities). The first is to focus on what I have learned and what I can learn. The second is to focus on what support I need. The first idea I have learned from working with students with disabilities is that universal design in the classroom is important. It’s the same principal at play when a bathroom is designed so that every stall has enough space, not just the stall for handicapped people. One example of a move toward more universal design in my classes is that I no longer have timed tests. Everyone gets as much time as they need to complete the test, and this has decreased anxiety across the board. I realized that how quickly students can recall information was less important to me than their ability to recall information, or to look it up when they needed to. I also no longer write on the board with a vast array of fancy colors thanks to a student with low vision who asked that I write only in black marker on the white board. I write more slowly on the board thanks to another student with low vision. I believe these changes benefit almost all students. I also learned that it can be very helpful and kind to group students during group work rather than letting them select groups—this can allow for diverse groupings and facilitate connections. Conversely, giving space for students to work independently if they want or need to seems to help create a positive environment for students. An idea that I learned from having a deaf student and a sign language interpreter in the classroom was how chaotic multiple activities in a given class can be for students. There is nothing like having an interpreter trying to interpret five people in a fish-bowl style conversation in the middle of the classroom while also interpreting my instructions. It made me realize that sometimes there was chaos in my lesson plans. My classroom activities got more structured after this. I learned from another class with an interpreter how to work through my own anxiety about being the possibility of being judged by the interpreter. I dealt with this by journaling after class about the experience. What was my insecurity about? What, if anything, might I shift about my perceptions? How could I make that shift? Getting curious about my feelings helped a great deal, and I wrote my way through the experience. It was very important for me not to project anything negative onto the student or the interpreter, and written reflection helped with this goal. Whenever there is growth or learning to be had, there is support needed, so I ask myself what support I will need for any task that may feel hard. It’s fine to start with the support one desires. I would like Community College of Philadelphia to have triple the staff members in the Center on Disability, an affinity group for students with disabilities to connect, and more paid professional development to educate teachers about how to work with students who have disabilities. Fortunately, we at CCP seem to be headed in that direction (at least toward some of these goals). However, it is not always the case that the ideal structures are in place for more systemic changes. In this case, it may be helpful to think about the supports that are attainable for us as individuals. We may have to seek out people we trust to talk through challenges, journal, like I did one of the semesters that I had an interpreter, seek therapy, or (if we have the freedom to do so) eliminate that assignment we thought was absolutely essential (and that required 20 hours of grading) to have bandwidth to really be present for all students in the classroom and to be present for our own learning as well. As with other professions that involve compassionate interaction, it is very important for professors to acknowledge ways to grow and feelings that may emerge along the way. Acknowledging feelings and figuring out needed support opens space for more dialogue and more joy. Focusing one what we can learn from the uniqueness of our students can create more energy as we journey with them. ... View more

“[Becoming an artist] is a total risk of everything, of you and who you think you are, who you think you’d like to be, where you think you’d like to go—everything, and this forever.” -James Baldwin, “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity,” 1962    Last week was Union Week on our campus, one of 25 colleges in the City University of New York (CUNY) system, a large urban university system. Our union, the Professional Staff Congress (PFC), representing full-time and part-time faculty and staff at the 25 colleges, is negotiating for a new contract amid the many challenges faced by higher education. The Union Week Embroidery Project, an individual artistic project aiming to take a stand, is intended to highlight the needs of our campus with the understanding that all students deserve the right to a fully funded higher education, in clean and sustainable facilities.  Some of the 25 campuses are housed in former office buildings surrounded by highrises, concrete, and glass. They are close to the subway and in some ways indistinguishable from the surrounding city. In contrast, the campus where I teach is almost bucolic, with many trees and open green lawns where students gather on warm days. Geographically, the campus remains part of the city, but is located close to the suburbs and two miles from the subway.  Nevertheless, the physical plants at many of the campuses, including where I work, suffer from years of underfunding and subsequent neglect. Signs of disrepair are hiding in plain sight, with one instance late last year, of interruption to in-person classes. In spring semester 2023 and again this fall, returning to in-person teaching in the continued wake of the Coronavirus pandemic, I could not help but notice the worsening conditions on campus. The Union Week Embroidery Project finds inspiration from James Baldwin’s writing on the risks and responsibilities of becoming an artist, which are akin to the risks and responsibilities of the work of higher education. As the union works to negotiate a new contract, together we draw attention to the need to bear witness to the consequences of the deteriorating conditions around us–there is too much at stake to ignore.  In becoming aware of the consequences and intervening in the current situation, perhaps we can bring into being a hope that is so often absent these days, hope that our students and future generations of students can pursue a meaningful education, and, as a result, give back to a world that must continue to offer opportunities to flourish and grow.   Embroidered banner for Union Week: NO CUTS PSC CUNY   Danger Keep Out   No Trespassing   Yellow Post with Rusted Chain   Untended Air Conditioner with Dandelion     Timeworn Classroom Baseboard   Bulletin Board with Staples, Paper Scraps, and Graffiti. Graffiti Text: "Cliche➡ You go to my head, [you linger like a haunting refrain] ⬅ that’s good"   Portrait of the artist with glasses, black hoodie and black mask against blue skies and green trees   “I support the union because all of us must have opportunities to grow and flourish together in solidarity.” Sign by S. Bernstein black letters on rainbow-colored background   Notes and Credits The Union Week Embroidery Project was made for City University of New York's PSC CUNY (Professional Staff Congress) Union Week, which can be found on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/psc_qc/    The banner and sign are provided by PSC CUNY. The embroidery and other multimedia work is my own. A video for the Union Week Embroidery Project is available here: https://youtu.be/-vkWVmBTPEo  ... View more

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

Ann Charters edits The Story and its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. The new Compact Tenth Edition is now available.   The topic of poets writing short stories is nothing new, but what makes them do it? The difference between poetry and prose “has to do with music,” the New York poet Ted Berrigan said, as quoted in the anthology Beats at Naropa (2009). If Edgar Allen Poe had been alive when I was creating The Story and Its Writer, I would have asked him to comment on my topic, since he is the greatest American poet to have written prose tales. What makes Poe’s stories different from the work of other contemporary prose writers, such as Hawthorne and Melville, also known for their brilliant way with words? In “The Philosophy of Composition," Poe asserted his belief, shared by most readers during his lifetime, that poetry is the highest literary achievement. He followed this statement by ranking the prose tale as the next best, probably because his own talents did not include writing novels. We know what made Poe write his short prose tales – he made his living as a journalist, and his stories were so popular that he could sell them easily to earn his daily bread. Music can be found in both of Poe’s tales included in The Story and Its Writer. In “The Cask of Amontillado,” the last sound Montresor hears in the final paragraph of the story is “a jingling of the bells” from the carnival cap that Fortunato wears on his head. The reader has heard them three times earlier, while Montresor slowly leads his intoxicated victim through “the damp ground of the catacombs” in his family’s burial vault. In ”The Fall of the House of Usher,” music is pushed to its limit – which is silence. At the start of the story, Usher’s psychological condition is so “morbid” that he can listen only to string instruments, as he strums “the wild improvisations of his speaking guitar.” The narrator tells us that his friend’s “long improvised dirges will ring forever in my ears,” while including six stanzas of his ballad “The Haunted Palace” that linger forever on the page. Midway in the story, sounds replace music to signal the deteriorating circumstances. The last sound Usher hears is his sister’s “low moaning cry” just before his own death, and only the final words of the story bring a welcome silence. More than a century after Poe, Sandra Cisneros, the author featured in a new Casebook in the new Compact Tenth Edition, wanted to write stories “like poems, compact and lyrical and ending with reverberation.” The four stories from The House on Mango Street are each as short as a poem, and in them Cisneros’ language is as fluid as music. Not for her is Poe’s morbid, death-obsessed fantasies. Her short fiction is rooted in the here-and-now, as she explores the emotional world of a young, vulnerable Chicana girl finding her way in an unfriendly American landscape. Cisneros’ voice is her instrument in The House on Mango Street. Memory is her material. Her family’s ethnic background and poverty contribute to her emotional distress. Her lyrical voice courageously rises in song as she expresses her triumph as a gifted storyteller over her low position on the social totem pole. Her vocabulary – and her music – is as strong and as supple as the lyrics of a folksong. Recently I found a slender volume of short stories on the shelf of a local bookstore by another poet, the Nobel Prize winner Louise Gluck. On the cover of her book, Gluck calls Marigold and Rose (2022) “A Fiction.” It brilliantly exemplifies another way that poets write short stories. It isn’t a fantasy tale or a story based on the author’s memory of her feelings. Gluck’s way is to dramatize the thoughts of her imagined characters, not their actions or their emotions. Marigold and Rose are the two characters in her stories; they are fraternal twin girl babies less than a year old. Like Esperanza, Cisneros’ narrator, they are nurtured by a supportive family. Gluck is interested both in their instinctive closeness to each other as twin sisters, and in their marked differences as personalities, even as young as they are. Her short fiction sings a different tune, expressing subtle harmonics more than flowing melodies (as in Poe and Cisneros's stories). Get hold of a copy of Marigold and Rose, and enjoy. ... View more

Over the summer, I collaborated on a project to analyze reflection papers submitted by pre-service teachers, writing tutors, and English majors in advanced syntax.  The winding and messy analysis process of our research team pointed us to the students’ linguistic choices, examined through the lens of positioning theory (Davies & Harré, 1990), particularly the ways in which students seem to assume or distance themselves from agency (Duranti, 2004) in new professional or academic spaces. As I assigned the reflective pieces that would become the basis of our study (in the fall of 2022), I talked to the students about reflection as a component of both personal and professional practice—a discipline to be cultivated.  These students seemed familiar enough with reflection assignments, whether from high school or their first college English courses.  After all, reflection is considered a best practice in composition studies (just search for “reflection” on the WAC Clearinghouse site) and a defining trait in many high impact educational practices, or HIPs.  I have presented conference workshops on reflection in corequisite and FYC courses. Some of the student reflections we reviewed seemed perfunctory, superficial—simply performative.  And I have wondered if deep reflection can be accomplished when it is assigned; perhaps deep reflection arises only out of need, frustration, desire, passion, or even joy.  I suspect many of my students already practice reflection—but not in ways they can easily connect with my reflection assignments.  Photo by Marcos Paulo Prado via UnsplashSo here is what I want to know from you all, my colleagues:  how do you practice reflection?  Do you have preferred tools for reflection—journals, note apps, sticky notes, voice recorders?  Do you gather data for reflection in the classroom, perhaps anonymous surveys or regular check-ins?  Or, do your reflections arise more spontaneously?  Do you set aside time to muse, read, and think about what you are doing?  Or perhaps your reflection is more collaborative, arising naturally from the rhythm of joint research projects?  Do you share reflections with your students?  Do you reflect together?  If so, how? I am reminded that I, too, must complete assigned reflections:  each year I complete a narrative section for my annual review.  In that document, I am required to draw conclusions about my teaching, research, and service—connecting those conclusions to evidence, goals, scholarship, and my role in the university.   Sometimes that narrative also feels perfunctory and performative, and certainly not an adequate representation of a full year’s worth of thinking (and thinking about my thinking).  But I submit it nonetheless, as my students do—and think about how I might do it differently next time. If you have a favorite resource on reflection, please share.  I would love to hear how you practice reflection inside and outside of the classroom. ... View more

Fall term is just getting underway at my home university, and I’ve been talking with teachers of writing there—and across the country—about changes they are seeing in the new frosh class. Of course it is difficult and dangerous to generalize, since students’ experiences of the last few years have been extremely varied, but some patterns do seem to be emerging. What seems most noticeable as a new school year gets underway is a gap between the expectations of students and those of their teachers. I’ve written before about growing student resistance to reading, and particularly reading long texts: the TL;DR response from students seems widespread. But many students also seem more resistant to coming to class consistently or to adhering to deadlines. You could probably add to this list. These behaviors do not match teacher expectations, to say the least. As college writing classes increasingly go back to pre-pandemic norms of face-to-face meetings, it’s important to articulate these changes and then to engage our student partners in discussing them and in ways that invite students to think about and explore their own expectations and probe where they are coming from. To me, this means spending time up front in the term on such activities, taking time to write about what seems to have changed in terms of attitudes and expectations and to explore causes of those changes as well as their short-term and long-term consequences.  I have always thought of the first few days of any term as the time for establishing our classroom ethos, norms that we develop and describe together and that we return to throughout the term as we need to. Now I am thinking that I would want to devote perhaps more time at the beginning of the term on such activities, asking students to do small group work and some writing about what they expect a college writing class to be like, what they think its guidelines or requirements should be, and how they would describe the kind of classroom ethos that would be most productive for them. I would read these carefully, responding to each individually and using them as the basis for a whole class discussion. And I will probably refer to them during the course of the term, especially if we are struggling with that expectation “gap” I mentioned earlier. But I would wait until near the end of the term to return them to students and ask them to read what they wrote during the first week of class again, annotating that document and talking with it and back to it, reflecting on what they still hold to, what they might change, and why.  The Irving K. Barber Learning Centre of the University of British Columbia   Just thinking about such an activity takes me down memory lane to my first post-PhD job, teaching first-year writing at the University of British Columbia in the late seventies. At that time, UBC courses still followed some British traditions, and one of them was that my first-year writing classes were year-long; that is, these classes met for the first semester and then took a winter holiday during which the students received a “preliminary” grade—and then reconvened after the break for another semester of work together. This was the most luxurious and fruitful teaching situation I had during my 50 years of teaching: what an opportunity to watch writing develop over the course of an entire school year; what a delight to get to know the students and their work in fine detail. And what a chance to build a classroom ethos together, and to work together, for growth not just in writing and speaking ability but in depth of thinking and breadth of points of view.  What a shock it was for me to move from that system to what I have always called “the dreaded quarter system.” But I learned that growth and change are possible even in ten-week increments, and I learned to adjust. If we are anything, writing teachers are flexible, “reading” our students and our classroom contexts as carefully and clearly as we possibly can and asking students to do the same. The challenges we face today are surely different than they were five years ago, much less fifty, and I believe these challenges are more daunting than ever. But as this new school year begins, my faith in teachers of writing, and our students, still holds.   Image credit: CjayD via Wikimedia Commons ... View more

  Elizabeth Catanese is an Associate Professor of English and Humanities at Community College of Philadelphia. Trained in mindfulness-based stress reduction, Elizabeth has enjoyed incorporating mindfulness activities into her college classroom for over ten years. Elizabeth works to deepen her mindful awareness through writing children's books, cartooning and parenting her energetic twin preschoolers, Dylan and Escher.   The other day, my four-year-old son asked me how many years he would be in school. I calculated that the answer was anywhere from thirteen to twenty-one. Taken aback, he asked when I was finally allowed to stop going to school. For me, and many of us who are professors, the answer is, of course, never (or until retirement). “Why would you never leave?” he asked. “Because I love it,” I replied, and I do. Simply put, the positives of the teaching and learning experience far outweigh the negatives. The classroom is a productive and joyful space for me. This is true for many of my students as well. But classrooms in many students’ pasts have been spaces where learning was at best minimal and at worst traumatic. I’ve had many students express to me that their teachers were just trying to manage behavioral issues or they were good kids who were passed along from grade to grade without having achieved the learning outcomes. Students have shared that they were forced to read aloud in class despite having a learning disability, or they had a bladder disorder and were only allowed to go to the bathroom once a day; their friends bullied them and a teacher didn’t care; a teacher belittled them because of their race. The list goes on. Yet, I’ve spent much of my career pretty focused on the positive. The past is the past. What can I do now? What strengths do students have? What do they already bring to the table? How can I create community and connection right now? One day I decided to consider what would happen if I took a moment to focus on the negative. Let me explain: In a therapy session, I learned about Eric Berne's concept of reparenting. Rooted in Transactional Analysis, this approach is a psychological framework aimed at helping a client change unhealthy internal scripts formed in relation to their parents or caregivers. The therapist can help a client by “reparenting” them, and ultimately give them the tools needed to be a positive and strong parent to themselves. I wondered if it would be possible to see my job as a professor not just as a teacher, but one who reteachers. Rather than brushing over all of the negatives that occurred in students’ pasts and starting the class as a blank slate, I reminded myself of the challenging and traumatic experiences students shared with me and wrote them down in a notebook. Refocusing on these stories made me shift my perspective from “what am I doing for students?” to “what am I undoing for them?” and later “what am I helping them undo for themselves?” Calling to mind the bad experiences, it turns out, has allowed me to do more good. More than anything, it has opened up my lesson plans to give more space to student story and voice. I ask students about their negative educational encounters on their contact forms, and we now talk about their best and worst classroom experiences while setting our classroom community. When a student describes an example of the latter during this activity, I often use the word “deserve.” For example, if a student was in a class where their learning goals were not being met, I say “you deserved to have your needs met; how might that inform what we do here?” and then “how might that inform what you do here?” It’s not about blaming the bad experiences, but about validating the needs of the individual perceiving them that way. The second question reminds student that they have more power over their experience in the classroom than they might have felt they did in the past. Metacognitive activities also work well for reteachering. After an activity, students can reflect on how they feel it helped them to grow, or what might have been better about the activity or their engagement with it. These can be questions at the end of a quiz or questions to talk to their peers about. Thinking about being a professor from the lens of reteachering doesn’t mean categorically labeling some things good and others bad. After all, one student’s unfortunate classroom experience can be the next student’s positive one. It is simply about creating space to hear about the past since the past is often creating a script for the present, and that script may not be a script anyone wants to follow. Using this lens has created a subtle shift in my pedagogy, at times affirming what I already do and at times leading me to larger changes in my teaching; it has truly has helped me to become a more caring and compassionate teacher. I hope for my students (and my son) that anything less than joy in the classroom is given space to transform into story and then into inner strength. I truly believe that it is inner strength that opens the door for the greatest amount of compassion and growth within in our communities. ... View more

“It seems to me that the artist’s struggle for his integrity must be considered as a kind of metaphor for the struggle, which is universal and daily, of all human beings on the face of this globe to get to become human beings.”  -James Baldwin, “The Artist’s Struggle with Integrity,” A lecture presented in New York City, November 1962. “Whether or not we like it, we have reached a point, black and white in this country, where all of the previous systems of communication, negotiation, [and] accommodation, have become unusable.” -James Baldwin, “On the Murder of Six Children from Birmingham, Alabama. A talk given in New York City on September 25, 1963, ten days after the murders.   In 1963, news flashed from incomprehensible (the assassination of Medgar Evers in June) to astounding (the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which included Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream,” and the speech, given by John Lewis, National Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in August), to catastrophic (the murders of six children, as cited by the PostArchive, four little girls in a church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, and two young boys shot, one by a police officer, during civil unrest in the streets of Birmingham). Those despairing, hopeful, and devastating days are, unfortunately, absent from my memory, and I have spent years trying to fill in the gaps of my early childhood. I was a white five-year-old in the fall of 1963, and my memories center on insular moments of home, and community. The adults in my life believed, to the detriment of everyone in our community and beyond, that what happened in the larger world had nothing to do with us. Yet, as Baldwin so cogently reminds his audience, that mindset of “accommodation” was and had always been “unusable.” Indeed, as Baldwin suggested in 1962, as human beings we must struggle with our integrity. Sometime between the March on Washington and the murders of the Birmingham children, I started kindergarten. What I remember most remains the excitement of that transition, and the joy of new experiences. That is one of my first memories of school. But now that memory is forever transformed by learning the historical contexts of my early schooling.  In planning a first-year college writing course sixty years later, I reflected on and struggled with the memories of the redlined communities where I grew up, and the segregated classrooms that constituted some of my first encounters with academic literacy and formal education. I considered the unconscious biases that remain from those encounters and how I would need to reframe the curriculum for students coming of age six decades later. And so I return to James Baldwin’s “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity” as a grounding text, while considering how to rethink the assignment sequence in College Writing. Below are thumbnail sketches of the three writing projects that will constitute the new semester. A journal, not described here, is also part of the required coursework. In the coming weeks I will offer updates of the work in our face-to-face classroom. The course theme is “Creativity: Think Outside the Box.”   College Writing Assignment Sequence Fall 2023 Writing Project 1 Analysis/Manifesto: In your own opinion and in your own words, find and discuss the most important points in “Artist’s Struggle.” Then, update “Artist’s Struggle” for 2023. You can address questions such as: What issues should be added to “Artist’s Struggle” in 2023? In your opinion, what issues are important to your generation as Civil Rights struggles were to Baldwin? Why? What does it mean to be an artist in 2023? What are the struggles? What can and should artists do?  In ideal conditions, what should be done to create a better world?  How could mental health? Climate change? Access to fair and equitable education K-12 schools or college? Something else?   Writing Project 2  Application/Multimedia:  Find a passage from “Artist’s Struggle” and translate the passage in your own words, and discuss how this passage relates to the message of “Artist’ Struggle.” Then, create a multimedia project based on your ideas, and describe how the process and product of your multimedia work connects to “Artist’s Struggle.”  To inspire the multimedia project, our  class will have an opportunity to visit the campus art museum and to create your own work of art based on the visit and “Artist’s Struggle.” More information forthcoming. Writing Project 3: Revision/Research:  Make a multimedia catalog of works connected to your earlier writing on “Artist’s Struggle.” Include at least one other source by James  Baldwin, and 3-5 additional sources of your own choosing.  In your own words, and using quotes and evidence from “Artist’s Struggle” and your additional sources, explain the relationships that you find between “Artist’s Struggle” and each piece of multimedia collected in your catalog. You can include revised sections of WP 1 and WP 2 if they are relevant to your catalog. More information forthcoming. Graphic: Word Web Illustration of the work of College Writing by Susan Naomi Bernstein     ... View more

My current and upcoming blog posts will focus on the work being done by two-year college teacher-scholars who have contributed to Teaching Accelerated and Corequisite Composition, a collection I edited that will be published by Utah State University Press in November 2023. The posts will feature a brief description of the author’s chapter, with the professor describing what they most hope readers will take from their chapter. I’ll also be asking contributors how their thoughts on their chapter have changed in the two years between its composition and publication, as well as any goals they have for the current semester.   This month, I talked with Lesley Broder, who joined the English Department at CUNY’s Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn in 2008, shortly before receiving her doctorate in English from Stony Brook University. Lesley began her career teaching middle and high school; she later taught at Suffolk County Community College and Stony Brook University, where she also served as assistant director of the writing center. At Kingsborough, she coordinated the accelerated learning program for nearly a decade. Lesley’s research focuses on gender and sexuality, popular theater trends in New York City, and writing placement and assessment.   Lesley’s chapter in Teaching Accelerated and Corequisite Composition, “Inching Toward Equity: Graduated Choice in the Corequisite Classroom,” outlines how to use choice boards to organize assignments in the small group section of a corequisite class. The chapter begins with a history of corequisite instruction at Kingsborough, which, not surprisingly, began with a visit from the Community College of Baltimore County’s Peter Adams. Though the Kingsborough program has been successful overall, recent disaggregated data indicates that while 65.6% of white students pass the corequisite, only 41.8% of Black students and 41.2% of Hispanic students are passing. As a result, Lesley began developing equity-forward course materials that offered students more flexibility in how they interacted with their instructor and completed their assignments. Lesley describes in detail the use of choice boards, which “present students with a grid with a number of tasks to complete within a designated period,” and shows why this option is especially effective in online classes.   However, the chapter’s larger point, Lesley notes, “is not to advocate for choice boards as the way to teach but rather to be open to differentiating instruction in the ALP section. In its various formats, the ALP group is typically small; this allows for flexibility in ways that aren’t feasible for larger student groupings. Providing even a few options for approaching the material might make a difference for some students.”   When I asked Lesley about any additional insights she might have gained over time about her chapter’s subject matter, she pointed out that the pandemic was waning as she composed her piece: We were at that transition moment between operating fully remote and re-entering the campus with strict testing, social distancing, and mask protocols. Now that those pandemic restrictions are largely lifted, many professors I talk with notice that students have come to expect extreme flexibility. I hope we can find ways to help students succeed as well as adjust to responsibilities as members of a classroom community. Not surprisingly, the need to balance flexibility with responsibility is a theme touched on by many of the contributors to Teaching Accelerated and Corequisite Composition.   Our conversation turned to the potentially overwhelming challenges our profession faces with the widespread use of generative artificial intelligence as a tool—and substitute—for student writing.  Lesley admitted she was “curious” to see how AI will alter writing instruction. She acknowledged that while “Students have long used resources to ‘help’ complete their work, whether it is a willing family member, information from Wikipedia, or an online essay writing service, ChatGPT works so quickly that it can promote a mindless approach to composing.”   Lesley conceded that she was of two minds when it comes to dealing with AI this term. She concludes, “For a low-tech approach, I hope to use more in-class, handwritten assignments for low stakes writing. I also want to evaluate ChatGPT’s responses when we are at the end of a unit to help students avoid an uncritical mindset. We are moving into a new time in writing instruction for sure!” ... View more

Ann Charters edits The Story and its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. The new Compact Tenth Edition is now available.   It’s always good news when a major work of literature becomes “P.D.” (in the public domain). Almost forty years ago, when I compiled the first edition of The Story and Its Writer, Hemingway’s reputation was such that the amount of money it cost to obtain permission to include one of his short stories in an anthology was determined by the number of words in the story. The lengthy “Big Two-Hearted River” was rarely anthologized. Now that it has entered the public domain, I predict that we will see it included in many short story collections as an example of his finest writing. Hemingway’s story became so well-known since its initial publication in 1925 that, thirty-five years later, it inspired the San Francisco writer Richard Brautigan to write his spoof “The Cleveland Wrecking Yard,” reimagining the idyllic landscape of “The Big Two-Hearted River” despoiled in a junk yard in Brautigan’s own city. More than a half-century later, we can still find Brautigan’s yard as he described it. I know that whenever I want, I can pay a visit to something like it in a so-called “antique store” close to where I live in rural Connecticut. Why was Nature in such a serious state of decline during the years between Hemingway and Brautigan’s time? An alert reader of “Big Two-Hearted River” can spot the compulsive and ecologically destructive behavior in Nick Adams’ actions after he jumps off the train to fish the trout-teeming stream. In the story, Nick, of course, is Hemingway’s persona. In A Moveable Feast, he wrote that “the story was about coming back from the war [World War One] but there was no mention of the war in it.” The critic Jackson Benson wrote that like much of Hemingway’s fiction at that time, the narrative was dream-like, “a compulsive nightmare,” steaming from the author’s experience of trauma after being wounded on the Italian front at the age of nineteen when a mortar exploded between his legs. As I read “Big Two-Hearted River,” I recognized that an aspect of Nick’s traumatized behavior is his addiction to canned comfort food. He has filled his backpack with canned goods. He carries a can opener as one of his essential tools. His eyes and his stomach delight in the sight of his red-hot frying pan over the campfire, and in the smell of its bubbling, sizzling mixture of cooked macaroni and beans dumped from two of these cans.  Nick may be a scrupulously disciplined trout fisherman, but he has a fatal flaw as a human being. His emotional dependence on his immediate gratification from the carbohydrate-rich, heavily salted, sugar loaded, prepared food produced by factories operating in his over-industrialized society eventually will contribute, in the following centuries, to the ecological disaster mankind has made of our forests and trout streams and our entire planet. Probably Nick has responsibly disposed of his empty tin cans when he left his camp, but how many eons must pass before they bio-degrade? Does the later creation of the National Wildlife Refuge in Seney, Michigan – the location of Hemingway’s story – compensate for his ecological damage? Zora Neale Hurston’s story “The Country in the Woman” is also a comparatively early American story that is new to this edition of The Story and Its Writer. Published nearly a century ago and rescued from oblivion by a Hurston scholar after its initial appearance in 1927 in the Pittsburgh Courier, it is far less troubling than Hemingway’s long story. Hurston is at her finest when championing the underdog. Without spoiling this resurrected story for the reader by describing it, I merely say that we find the author at her best here.      ... View more

Commencement season is in full swing across the country: in my little village on the northern California coast, a friend’s son gave the valedictory speech for his middle school with all of his admirers, including me, cheering him on. The next day, I attended the graduation ceremony for the five graduates of our local charter school, three of whom delivered “valedictories.” We were outdoors, looking through redwood trees out to the Pacific Ocean, and the young graduates had a theme: gratitude for the families and friends who had supported them to this point. Commencement at Stanford isn’t for another few days when graduate and legendary tennis star John McEnroe will address the graduating class. I won’t be there in person to hear McEnroe, though I will tune in to see/hear the address later. In the meantime, I have been tuning in to some of this year’s commencement speeches, as I always do this time of year, and I’ve noted some recurring themes. Credit: Williams College via Wikimedia Commons   One of these is the importance of listening—to yourself as well as others—that came up in speeches by host, producer, and author Oprah Winfrey (Tennessee State); actor Sterling K. Brown (Washington University); former Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker (Bentley University); and former Senator Liz Cheney. Here's Winfrey: “When you get yourself quiet enough to listen, I mean really listen, you can begin to distill the still, small voice, which is always representing the truth of you from the noise of the world.” And Brown: “For me, the goal of higher education is the same overriding goal I have for my life. And that is to become the best next version of myself. And you’re the only one who can know what that is—if you give yourself the time and the space to listen to what is already inside of you.” Winfrey and Brown are urging grads to listen—really listen—to their best inner selves, but Baker reminds them that it’s important to listen to other people as well: “This whole thing about listening . . . it’s real. My mom was a Democrat, and my dad, who is now 94, is a Republican . . . Growing up, the dinner table at our house was a constant conversation. I had friends who lobbied to come by just to watch. Nobody’s motives were questioned when my mom and dad went back and forth on the issues of the day. Nobody threw anything. But people had plenty of opinions. There was only one rule. You had to listen more than you spoke. And when you spoke, you had to demonstrate some appreciation for what the other person was saying.” And finally, Senator Liz Cheney: “America cannot remain a free nation if we abandon the truth. So as you go out to change the world, resolve that you will stand in truth. Those who are trying to unravel the foundations of our republic. . . know they can’t succeed if you vote. So, Class of 2023: get out and vote. This means listening and learning, including—especially, from those with whom we disagree. Of course, many other themes are being sounded as well, from Academy Award-winning actor Michelle Yeoh’s advice to Harvard Law grads to value collaboration over competition: (“For every winner, there doesn’t have to be a loser. In fact, most success stories are less about competition and more about collaboration . . . The truth is, I could not have done any of this alone.”) to Senator Raphael Warnock’s challenge to Bard College grads to “find your passion” and then to speak out about it (“I challenge you to find that thing in the world that feels like such a deep moral contradiction that you cannot be silent. You have to express yourself; you have to stand up and try to make the world better.”) As I have read and listened to these speeches, I’ve thought they would make an excellent basis for an analytic writing assignment. Students could learn a lot by reading and/or listening to, say, ten or twelve of this year’s commencement addresses and then looking for patterns and themes, for similarities and differences in content, in style, in delivery. Such an assignment would work well done in pairs or small groups. Or students could emulate Bill Gates’s 2023 address to the graduates of Northern Arizona University, in which he writes the commencement address he wishes he had heard. The results of such assignments might come in many genres, from a traditional print analytic essay to multimodal presentations, from spoken word or hip hop to visual and verbal collages—all ways to explore their own futures. Congratulations to all this year’s grads, whose college careers have been marked by pandemic pressures and so much more. And congratulations to all the teachers of writing who have stood by them. ... View more