Essayist Dinty Moore says “the hand is connected to the arm which is connected to the heart” in an attempt to explain why writing by hand is instrumental in sewing the seedlings of great ideas that form and grow under the act of further writing and revision. When I first bring up hand-writing to my students, they often look skeptical, or wary to say the least. Some of them groan. Some of them say they will definitely handwrite at home. Most of them, though, do ask: “Why should we write by hand if we can type on a laptop?” And I have a few answers for them.   For one, writing by hand slows the writer down. While this may sound like a counter-intuitive hindrance to the writing process, it’s actually an element that makes for better writing, and a higher quality first draft. By sitting at the laptop or desktop computer, typing 40 words per minute allows you to write too quickly, moving forward and backward linearly, erasing any sign or record of your process, any change that you would be able to look over when writing with a pen on the page. By being forced to slow down, your brain has slightly more time to think about what it decides to pen. This allows for more real decision making compared to the writer at the computer whose hands type too quickly, perhaps glossing over a better idea that may have needed a few seconds more to percolate.   Another reason why hand-writing is paramount is that this approach creates room for risk and play, for less constraint. This is to say that there is something about a sprawling page and a pre-writing mindset that alleviates pressure for the writer, allowing them the space to try things on, to “just get the ideas down,” and worry about the meticulous details later. In Phillip Lopate’s To Show and To Tell, he emphasizes the importance of a writer’s journal, another arena where hand-writing takes place, arguing that it allows for the “freedom to try out things, to write clumsy sentences when no one is looking, to be prejudiced, even stupid. No one can expect to write well who will not first take the risk of writing badly. The writer’s notebook is a safe place for such experiments.” Cartoonist Lynda Barry also supports hand-writing, explaining that students should write from their centers instead of their heads. Author and writing instructor Heather Sellers agrees that writing is a physical act, just like football, and so should be practiced physically with the same dedication and reverence that players hold for their sport.   As a writer who hand-writes herself, I can attest to a feeling that comes from the practice. It’s a feeling that comes after I’ve warmed up, after I’ve gotten a few paragraph down, and it comes when I’m hitting a stride, when I can feel my heart rate quickening, my writing becoming somewhat faster, when I know I’m on to something important. Though what I pen by hand is always a start and far from a finished, final draft, the ideas that come forward in the hand-writing stage I’ve come to realize are my better ones—the seedlings of greater things to come, planted by the pen in my hand. ... View more

What can we learn by exploring peer feedback practices in other disciplines? That’s the central question driving this series of posts. I started close to home in my last few posts by considering workshop practices in creative writing, but the truth is that this project was inspired by the art critique.   Before stepping into the role of Interim Chair for Visual Arts and Art History last year, I sat down with each of the department’s faculty members to get to know them and their work. I learned a lot about art—how it functions as a research practice, the considerable costs involved in producing it, and the serious safety risks involved in teaching it—and I was truly impressed by the work my colleagues were doing. I’m blessed to work with such amazing people. I was also immediately intrigued by critique, since it seemed so much like my own use of peer review in the writing classroom. And so I was only too happy to spend more time learning about critique for this series of posts.   My two informants in this case were Andy Brown and Sharon Hart. Andy is the Foundations Instructor for the department. He’s super-duper smart, very easy-going, and just fun to hang around and chat with (we grab coffee on occasion for just that purpose). He’s also an awesome painter. Sharon is an Assistant Professor and the area head for Photography. She’s committed, passionate, and a wonderful photographer and a strong advocate for her area. I sat down with each of them and asked them about critique in the studio art classroom. The conversations were animated and wide-ranging—we just had so much to discuss! But to start I’ll share a little about what I learned from discussing the mechanics and logistics of critique.   For starters, as Andy informed me, there are two basic forms of critique: group and individual. Group critique is analogous to peer review. Individual critique is a one-on-one session between instructor and student and reminded me most of a student coming to my office hours to discuss a paper. In a group critique, students place their work up around the studio, a piece is selected, and the class responds to it. As with workshop in creative writing, generally the artist doesn’t speak until after the critique. Discussion proceeds apace with the goal of getting to as many pieces as possible during the class time. Sharon indicated that in the course of a semester, there will be 5-6 group critiques, which is about how often peer revision happens in my writing classes. There are many variations to this basic formula. Sharon shared that she likes to try out new methods so that she doesn’t get bored; she likes to get excited by the process too. For example, one variation she shared with me involved having students put photos on the wall “salon style” (all next to each other with no space between) and then having students vote for the six images they would want to live with for a year, marking their votes by placing a sticky note on the photo. Then the class talked about the ones with the highest votes and why.   Both of them stressed that in all ways critique is a learning process, which is to say that through critique students learn more about their individual works, studio technique, and the practices of art but which is also to say that students need to learn how to critique. As Andy observed, “A lot of critiquing is about figuring out how to look at things.” To that end, both also referenced readings they use or have used that talk about critique and how to do it. That reminded me of the worksheets I create for peer review but it also made me wonder why we don’t have more readings about peer review for our students. Students in my classes often don’t understand why they’re doing peer review, let alone how. Sharon’s approach was particularly resonant for me in this respect. She has a handout that’s collaboratively generated with her students and that goes over the goals of the critique and offered some practical guidelines. The one I’m most likely to steal for the writing classroom is “Remove the word ‘like’ from your vocabulary during critique,” going on to suggest that instead of saying “I like _____” students should instead say “I think this is successful because _____.” I can definitely see myself bringing that into the writing classroom, as well as more generally generating guidelines on peer revision based on conversations in the classroom.   As with workshops in creative writing, I walk away from this discussion of the mechanics of the art critique with a desire to do more large-scale, class-level peer reviews of student writing—more than a sample paper. I also want to find some readings about peer revision and use those to generate a discussion and a set of guidelines for the class. And I want students to reframe what they like about writing into what they find successful about writing.   In the next post, I’ll talk about the emotive charge of critique and consider its implications for the writing classroom. In the meantime, I welcome your comments. ... View more

Gene Melton‌'s Classical Argument Assignment Sheet. See Classical Argument Sequence in a WID-Based Academic Writing and Research Course. ... View more

Amanda Gaddam‌'s Genre Analysis Handout. See Multimodal Mondays: A Low-Stakes Assignment for Understanding Blogs as Genre or https://community.macmillan.com/community/the-english-community/bedford-bits/blog/2016/11/01/multimodal-tuesday-a-choose-your-own-adventure-multimodal-profile-project  ... View more

Six or seven years ago, I threw in the towel on academic publishing. The precipitating event was a ridiculous argument I had with an editor over an article I had been invited to write that I ended up withdrawing from consideration. This debacle happened to coincide with equally ridiculous developments in my home department. It wasn’t a particularly well thought out decision. I was tired of all the emptiness and I needed to head in a different direction if I was going to keep on writing at all.   What I didn’t realize at the time I made this decision was that I was also tired of me—the author-function me, the me who thought X, argued X, wrote about X, could be counted on to say X. If I found the academic arguments I got predictably pulled into boring, I had to admit it was because I already knew what I was going to say and what the critique of what I was going to say was. I didn’t want to give up writing, but I also didn’t want to keep on writing the same thing, making the same argument, pounding my head against the same wall. Moving to writing exclusively for the screen solved this problem for me, but not in the ways I had expected.   I wanted to move beyond what I can now call the paper-based world, its institutions, its commonplaces, and to see what writing full-time in the screen-centric world entailed. When I would speak about this decision publicly, invariably someone would say, “Fine for you—with the luxury of tenure. But what about for everyone else?” And, like that, the conversation would move back into its familiar ruts. For me, this wasn’t a question of getting published or going on a busman’s holiday; it was a question of survival. I had always written about issues that were vitally important to me—trendiness or tenure be damned. And then I found myself feeling that none of it mattered very much. If you’re just publishing so as not to perish, my feeling was you’d been conned into sacrificing what is most important about having a job with writing at its center: the opportunity to think new thoughts.   I knew nothing about how to begin writing online: how to get a web address; how to get a hosting service (or what that service did); how to code in html (or whether that was even necessary); or pretty much anything else about the technical side of writing in and for the screen-centric world. I figured, though, that these things had to be learnable. After all, by the time I was entering the game, there were already a gazillion websites in existence, a fact that suggested to me that the learning curve couldn’t be that steep.   I stumbled along, starting a Google blog with the address critical_optimist. Back then, though, a Google blog couldn’t accommodate more than text and images and all the blogs looked pretty much the same on the screen, so I graduated to getting my own address and committed myself to learning how to think outside the template. As I was coming to understand it, as I sat at the keyboard, I didn’t just have the alphabet to compose with anymore; I had everything that was available on the web: music, videos, interviews, lectures, libraries around the world, image banks, maps. It was more like sitting at a giant pipe organ than at a typewriter; and more like producing an illuminated manuscript than typing out my thoughts as they made their way into language.   It turned out, though, that for me the most momentous part of changing venues really had nothing to do with the shift from paper to screen; it had to do with assuming a new writing personae, an option that had been available all along in the paper-centered world. In my previous writing life, I was Richard E. Miller; in my new writing life, I was text2cloud. Putting some distance between myself and my history, text2cloud became a way for me to think new thoughts, to try on new sentences, to call on a different vocabulary, to explore a world of concerns that fell outside the frame of my other writing life. And text2cloud gave rise to Professor Pawn, the central figure in a graphic narrative I composed about the absurdities of working in a world where the university had become an afterthought of the athletic program. The pseudonyms proliferated: Hieronymous Paunch, a big data humanist and founder of Sadness Studies; and most recently, the anonymous voice for the Tales of the White Knight, a Facebook page diary about the three presidential debates that ended up being a mashup of Don Quixote, King Arthur, King Lear, Monty Python, and the Marx Brothers.   Somewhere along the line, the liberating effect of writing pseudonymously also led to writing a book, with Ann Jurecic, on how to make creativity a habit. In that book, there’s a collaborative pseudonym that made it possible for us both to re-think our futures as teachers of writing: “we” became a way of allowing the sentences’ authors to write not as a unified, coherent entity, but as dialogic energy, animated by the desire to get beyond the template, the formula, the step-by-step approach to making sense of the world. Currently, I’m rerouting the screen-centered writing I did as text2cloud on the end of privacy to a text-only manuscript that I hope to get into print. And I see myself returning to the classroom after my sabbatical is over with an open invitation to students to write under a pseudonym, one that allows them to escape, for a moment, writing and thinking as they always have, writing as if—as if they could be passionate about ideas without embarrassment; as if they could follow their thoughts wherever they might lead, instead of guiding them ever safely back home; as if their very lives depended on it. ... View more

Stasis theory has become popular in recent years as a way of exploring controversial issues and arriving at claims about them.  In the age of classical Greek and Roman rhetoric, stasis theory provided citizens preparing a legal case a means of exploring the case and of achieving stasis, or arriving at agreement as to the point at issue. Consider first how a series of questions could provide a structured way of thinking about an alleged crime:         Questions of Fact or Conjecture: What happened? Did the accused do it?         Questions of Definition: What crime was it?         Questions of Quality: Was it right or wrong? Was it justified? What was the motivation?         Questions of Procedure: What should be done about it? What is the proper court to hear the case? These questions have been recast into more general questions that can be applied to any issue about which there is disagreement. It is important to achieve stasis in order to argue effectively because you have to know precisely what is at issue. For example, the term “gun control” is so broad that it is necessary to define the term before trying to argue for or against it. If one party is arguing in favor of taking all guns away from all American citizens, that party will not agree with someone who is arguing that “controlling” guns means enforcing stricter laws about the types of guns that can be sold or about the waiting period for buying a gun. There is a difference between which guns are controlled and how gun ownership is controlled that will make formal debate about the issue pointless until some definitions are clarified. A starting point could be to decide, for example, whether or not American citizens should be allowed to own semiautomatic weapons, but even then, the definition of “semiautomatic” would have to be agreed upon. The stasis questions are frequently used in writing courses as a means of exploring a subject. Used as a means of invention, the stasis questions can generate a wealth of information. You will most likely use only a portion of the ideas generated by the invention exercise, but you may also discover ideas that you might not have thought about otherwise.           The American Electoral College is a critical part of the election process and may receive increased scrutiny in light of the upcoming election.  See what ideas might come to mind in applying four typical stasis questions to the Electoral College: Questions of Fact: What are the facts about the Electoral College? How did the Electoral College come into being? On September 6, 1878, the Constitutional Convention approved a proposal to create a group of Electors to select the President and Vice-President of the new United States. Each of the fifty states has a number of Electors equal to its number of members of Congress, and the District of Columbia has the same number of Electors as the least populous state. There are now 538 Electors. Since the 1880s, all states except Maine and Nebraska pledge all of their Electors to the presidential candidate who wins the most popular votes in that state. A majority of 270 electoral votes is needed to elect the President. When Americans cast their votes every four years, they are actually voting not for a candidate but for Electors representing that candidate. Questions of Definition: What is the meaning or nature of the Electoral College? What is the Electoral College? It is not a place but a process—the process by which the President and Vice-President of the United State are chosen. The Constitution refers to Electors, but not to a college of Electors. The concept was written into federal law in 1845 as a “college of Electors.” The Electoral College was originally a compromise between the election of a President by a vote in Congress and election by a popular vote of qualified citizens. The question of what constituted qualified citizens was complicated in the eighteenth century by the existence of slavery in some states. Questions of Quality: What is the seriousness or value of the Electoral College? Some question whether in the twentieth century the Electoral College is preferable to popular vote as the method of choosing President and Vice-President. Is a procedure fair if it is possible for a candidate to win the popular vote but not win the election because of Electoral College votes? The writers of the Constitution felt that a small group of Electors would make a wiser political decision than the general public. Small states also feared the power of larger states. Would states with a small number of popular votes be largely ignored if popular vote were used? Are some states currently disadvantaged by the winner-take-all system in 48 states that can make almost fifty percent of voters feel that their votes are wasted because all of that state’s electoral votes go to the candidate who wins the majority of the popular vote? Questions of Policy: What is the plan of action about the issue? Should the Electoral College be abolished? Should it be replaced by popular vote? Should the Electoral College continue to exist, but the winner-take-all method of distributing electoral votes be abolished? The stasis questions can help lead to decisions regarding what to say about a topic. Each of the four questions leads most directly to a certain type of claim, or thesis statement, and a certain type of argument. Questions of Fact           lead to       Claims of Fact             and              Analysis. Questions of Definition  lead to       Claims of Definition    or                Definition Arguments. Questions of Quality      lead to       Claims of Value            or               Evaluation Arguments. Questions of Policy        lead to       Claims of Policy         or               Proposal Arguments.   Keep in mind that many arguments are not a pure form of any of these types of argument. Establishing facts and definitions is often a part of building a sound evaluation or proposal argument. Evaluation is often a part of establishing the need for a proposed change.   ... View more

Drew Cameron joined the Army in 2000, right out of high school, and served as a Sergeant in Iraq. In an interview, he says he realized fairly early on that what was happening in Iraq was all wrong and that “we shouldn’t be here,” but he served his tour of duty anyway. When he came home in 2006, he sought ways to express his experiences, without success, until one day, he said, he put on his uniform and then began cutting it off his body. Thus was born his Combat Paper Project. As Cameron puts it, “Language to articulate the complex associations and memories wrapped up in military service can be a mountainous task. Starting with a non-verbal activity, with the intention of exploring those places, is a phenomenally empowering act.” An artist and paper maker, Cameron took his cut up uniform and began transforming it into handmade paper, which he then painted or drew or wrote on. Slowly, he began to contact other veterans who wanted to take part in this process, who were interested in fiber art and in how “we might transform [materials] into a narrative that illustrates our collective stories.” I first met Cameron a year or so ago in Chicago, where he was exhibiting his work in connection with the world premiere of composer Jonathan Berger’s “My Lai,” which tells the story of Hugh Thompson, the helicopter pilot who tried to stop the My Lai Massacre, who was reviled and ostracized for his actions and only 30 years after the fact recognized with a Soldier’s Medal for bravery. Sung by Rinde Eckert (with lush and moving libretto by Harriet Chessman) and performed by The Kronos Quartet, “My Lai” is one of the most gripping and memorable musical works I have ever heard. It was after the haunting performance that I met Cameron, along with one of the two 18-year-old crew members who was with him during March 16, 1968 (the second young soldier died in battle three weeks later). I believe that this work will be touring the country for the 50 th anniversary of this tragedy: if you and your students can possibly see it, do so. Recently I encountered Cameron again, this time at UCLA where he was leading papermaking workshops with first-year undergraduates (and others). Students were bringing in all kinds of materials: some, of course, were veterans themselves, with uniforms and other materials from their service; others had relatives who had given them articles, like the young woman whose grandfather had given her parachute cloth. Together, they were learning to create a remix, a mashup, as they turned the cloth into pulpy fiber and then learned to make sheets of handmade paper with it. What struck me during this encounter was how Cameron spoke about the stories that these artifacts tell, and about the stories that they elicit from the people who work with them. Somehow, he says, this process of unmaking and remaking seems to release the words necessary to share experiences further, as a visual art leads to a verbal one and back again. Some of the paper makers have gone on to write blogs, articles, essays, even books. And continue to make visual art as well. I left wishing that every college in the country could have a visit from Drew Cameron and his Combat Paper Project. He has conducted them from coast to coast and is currently engaged in teaching others to carry out similar projects. The college frosh who either drop in or sign up for these workshops may never have heard of My Lai, may have thought very little about war, about the way war is inscribed on the bodies of those who are caught in its vice. But they leave with new knowledge, as well as with the experience of having made something good and strong and real out of the materials of war. You can read more about Combat Paper on PBS News hour’s “The Rundown” from April 30, 2012.  ... View more

Today's guest blogger is Mark Blaauw-Hara‌, a Professor of English and the Writing Program Coordinator at North Central Michigan College in Petoskey, Michigan, where he has taught for seventeen years. His interests include transfer theory, threshold concepts, developmental education, student retention, and adult learning pedagogy. See more of Mark's biography at the end of this post.    Not a lot is being said about how the writing-about-writing approach might play out at a community college, so in this post I hope to provide a window into the experiences of using Writing about Writing at a two-year school.   For the past year, we’ve been scaling up the use of a writing-about-writing curriculum at my school (a rural Midwestern community college, where I teach English and coordinate the writing program). We started in F15, when a part-time faculty member with an MFA in poetry looked through the three textbook options I’d provided and settled on Wardle and Downs’s Writing about Writing. She liked the book’s focus on writing as a subject matter, not just a skill, which, she said, meshed well with how she had learned to approach writing in her MFA.   She ended up being thrilled with it. The reading was challenging, she said, but the book inspired better discussions about writing than she’d ever experienced. Encouraged, one of our full-time faculty adopted the book for S16 and had a similar experience: the book supported a deeper level of engagement with writing, more thoughtful discussions, and more interesting papers. Three more of our faculty—including me—tried it over the summer in face-to-face and online sections and were equally impressed.   As a department, we decided to make Writing about Writing the default text for our FYW sequence, which meant that new instructors (and those who didn’t submit their book adoptions on time) would have to use the text. We developed sample syllabi, including sequences of readings and assignment prompts, and advocated for the book’s widespread adoption during departmental meetings. This semester, about half of our writing instructors have been using the text.   To be fair, the book can be challenging for both teachers and students. Its organization is quite different from that of most other FYW texts, and frankly, the readings can be challenging to instructors without a background in rhetoric and composition. Much of the concern about the book that has been voiced in department meetings is tied to the idea that the book assumes a certain familiarity with scholarship in rhet/comp—a familiarity that many two-year college English faculty do not have. But out of our first five instructors who used the book, only two had degrees in rhet/comp: one had a MFA, one had a MA in lit, and one had a MA in English education. To us, that indicated that the book would work for teachers of different backgrounds.   Additional concerns about writing-about-writing pedagogy have centered on the fact that many students at the two-year college are academically unprepared. Around 60% of our incoming students end up placed in developmental coursework, a number that is common at community colleges across the country. Over the past few years, our writing program has brought an accelerated-learning program (based on the national ALP model begun by the Community College of Baltimore County) to full scale, and we retired the lowest level of developmental writing. This means that every incoming student takes our college-level writing sequence right off the bat; those who place into developmental writing have an additional co-requisite course that is designed to support their success in the college-level writing course, but all students work through exactly the same curriculum. Some instructors were still concerned that even with co-requisite support the material in Writing about Writingwould be too difficult for our developmental students.   Time will tell how these concerns play out. However, those of us teaching in ALP have been pleased so far. Certainly, my developmental-level students have needed some extra support with the readings, but our co-requisite course structure allows time for just such support. And they have grabbed hold of the concepts in the readings and responded better than most of the courses I’ve taught in the past. This reinforces the contention that while some students may be “pre-college” in their writing or reading skills, they are still adults who respond well to weighty ideas. Many books that are written for a developmental audience feature readings that tend to be simplistic; I have found that developmental writers are eager to discuss big ideas. This may seem obvious—again, we are talking about adult learners, after all—but many developmental courses are not very intellectually challenging and focus instead on skill-building. To be sure, developmental writers can improve their skills, but they need a rich intellectual environment in which to do so. Mark Blaauw-Hara earned his Doctorate in English from Old Dominion University, with specializations in writing-program administration and pedagogy. His dissertation focused on supporting military veterans in their transition to the community college. He received his Master’s in rhetoric and composition from Arizona State University, and his Bachelor’s from Michigan State University. Mark currently serves on the Executive Board of the Council of Writing Program Administrators, he is the Reviews Co-editor for Teaching English in the Two-Year College, and he is a manuscript peer-reviewer for the Journal of Veterans Studies. Mark’s writing has appeared in the Community College Journal of Research and Practice, Teaching English in the Two-Year College,Community College Week, and Writing Center Journal, and is forthcoming in Composition Forum and the edited collection WPA Transitions. ... View more

Joseph Teller recently authored a provocative piece titled “Are We Teaching Composition All Wrong?” in the Chronicle of Higher Education.  The article criticizes trends in composition pedagogy which focus on process (as opposed to product), engage students in the exploration of complex social issues, and integrate reading and writing instruction.  The article generated a number of comments and (occasionally snarky) exchanges about what it is we do as composition instructors, and a number of bloggers from the composition world have responded in detail (see, for example, this post from P.L. Thomas). One line in Teller’s piece, in particular, stood out to me: “How can students make effective rhetorical choices if they do not know what choices exist?” Yes, indeed. And I would add this: How can they make effective rhetorical choices if they do not know that there are choices to be made, and that they have both the right and the obligation to make them? In short, rhetorical choice is a threshold concept in composition, one which many students—convinced that there is a single, right way to write—struggle to understand and internalize. And while Teller rightly points out that background knowledge and context are critically important for reading comprehension, I would argue that fact does not diminish the importance of teaching reading in a writing classroom: close reading trains students to recognize the existence and range of rhetorical choices available to writers, as well as understand the impact those choices make on a reader. Moreover, instruction and practice in close reading make students better readers of their own work. (One wonders if the lack of student revision witnessed by Teller stems from poor rhetorical reading ability; it’s certainly a possibility worth investigating).  Finally, readings (and reading instruction) supply a context for lexical and grammatical development (and situates both vocabulary and grammar as rhetorical choices to be made). Teller also criticizes theme-based composition courses, suggesting that the content in such courses swallows instruction in “writing at the nuts-and-bolts” level, and that most composition instructors are “not academically qualified to be teaching disciplinary content…with any semblance of expertise.” This objection to theme-based reading is also addressed in a seminal article in the Writing about Writing movement, “Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions: (Re)Envisioning ‘First-Year Composition’ as ‘Introduction to Writing Studies’” by Douglas Downs and Elizabeth Wardle. The answer for Downs and Wardle is to make writing itself the disciplinary focus of the course, an answer which addresses both of Teller’s concerns. In a Writing about Writing approach, course readings address scholarship in composition, reading, and language, reinforcing concepts (such as rhetorical choice) while providing multiple opportunities for practice. Several commenters took issue with Teller’s rhetorical choices, which included derogatory and sarcastic words to describe certain composition pedagogies. The title, for example, while including the author in its first person “we,” nonetheless hints that an entire field may be ineffective—and in fact, wrong. The paper ends with the author’s “manifesto,” a term that suggests the need for a paradigm shift. There is much for compositionists to discuss in Teller’s article, and I suspect we will do so by making a variety of rhetorical choices of our own. But I think we also need to make some room for “pedagogical choice” as a foundational concept in the composition classroom: just as there are multiple possible rhetorical choices, some more effective than others, there are also multiple pedagogical choices we can make, some more effective than others—in our specific pedagogical/rhetorical situations.  Perhaps rather than suggesting that those whose choices are different from our own are doing it “all wrong,” we can analyze the effectiveness of our various pedagogical choices in the specific contexts in which they occur. I suspect most of us aren’t convinced our pedagogies are right all the time; after all, we are constantly revising and editing what we do in the classroom. The fact that we make such changes suggests to me that we do in fact know what we are doing—and while we may not be “all right,” surely we are far from being “all wrong.” ... View more

One of the things that humanizes the classroom is storytelling. In their reviews of my teaching, my students have often mentioned that our drama classes were enlivened by some of the stories I told of my own experiences in the theater seeing plays. That surprised me, but on reflection I realize they were right. For example, when I taught John Millington Synge’s Riders to the Sea I told my students about the first time I saw the play. It was 1957 in tiny Theater East when the Abbey Theatre brought its company to the United States for the first time since the war. Siobhan McKenna played Maurya. I was brought there with a group from my undergraduate class, taught by the late David Krause, who was an Irish Studies expert and my drama teacher. I had no idea what to expect. We had not read the play in advance. It followed the performance of Synge’s one-act In the Shadow of the Glen and seemed to us a riveting drama. But another drama intensified the experience for me. In the last moments of the play one of the actresses came onstage with her apron filled with glass milk bottles – Bartley’s body had been brought in and laid out and the women came in to mourn. The actress dropped her apron and the bottles broke on the floor. Everyone was barefoot, yet as the actresses came into the scene none looked down. Most of the glass was broomed into a pan. They walked across the remaining glass and seemed unhurt and unaware. At that moment they kneeled and began keening in what can only be described to someone who has not heard it as an unearthly wail of loss, pain, and sadness. Amazingly, no one was hurt. The keening stopped when the play ended. There was total silence in the theater. The lights went down, the actors left the stage, the lights went up again and finally when the actors returned the audience—141 souls—broke into incredible applause.  Everyone knew this was a completely unforgettable experience in the theatre. Have you had a similar experience? Have your students? How do you discuss performance and use storytelling in your classroom? [[This post originally appeared on LitBits on October 26, 2011.) ... View more

I imagine that I’ve made things seem pretty sunshine-and-rainbows in these last few posts, as I have shared my discoveries from discussing peer commenting practices in FYC and creative writing with my colleagues.  And while I may have noted some logistical challenges in adapting creative writing workshop practices to the FYC classroom, the truth is that there may be a far more fundamental challenge: student creative writers care about their writing in a way that student FYC writers generally don’t.   I discussed this challenge with both Becka and Papatya.  Both suggested that perhaps a piece of personal writing early in the semester might move towards solving the problem in the FYC classroom.  My experience as a teacher of writing makes me dubious, although Papatya did note that’s precisely how FYC was taught at one of her previous institutions.  I suspect, though, that the required nature of FYC would be the fundamental challenge.  I often feel like students walk into my classroom wanting to be anywhere but there, wanting to take a course that they do care about (which generally means something within their majors).  I work hard at making my classroom fun to counter these feelings and, generally, I think I am successful.  But I don’t know that I can resolve that core issue.   Becka, I think, put it best: “Creative writing students are more invested in their writing because they think it comes out of their souls.”   Of course, I usually want students to produce writing that comes out of their thinking and not out of their souls.  After all, one of the basic things I feel I need to teach in my FYC class is critical thinking.  But surely there is a way to bridge this gap, to help students invest in their critical thinking and the writing that comes from it.   Honestly, though, I don't have an answer today.  But it’s a question I will carry forward as I continue these explorations of peer practices in different disciplines, so you can expect we will be discussing it again.  In the meantime, if you have a way of getting students to care about their writing in your FYC class, please share it in the comments here. ... View more

Every week this term, students in my Writing and Digital Media course have turned in short Digital Design Journals that share a multimodal text and provide an analysis of how it works. Students have turned in things like commercials, ads, Twitter updates, documentaries, and public service announcements. Some of the texts are recent and born digital, and some are older and simply shared digitally, like the cigarette ad on the right. Dànielle Nicole DeVoss’s Visual Rhetoric & Document Design syllabus provided the inspiration for the activity. DeVoss asks students to build a document design collection of texts, good and bad, and that they refer to in-class discussion as they work on projects in the course. As I have customized the assignment, it is essentially like a reading response journal, but the readings are student-selected texts of any genre that are shared on digital sites. The assignment in our LMS is straightforward: Provide a link or an upload of a digital design that connects to what we have been talking about in class. This week find a still design, like an image or photo (not a video or audio). You have lots of options: ad images, catalog photos, magazine/news images, charts or graphs, and more! You can use the embedding tools on the toolbar to embed images. Your design can relate to the topic for your major projects, but it doesn't have to. After you give the link, explain how the design demonstrates or violates one of the design principles we have talked about in class, and then provide some analytical commentary. I added the assignment primarily because I wanted a regular activity in the course outside of the major projects students work on. I didn’t want to develop reading quizzes for this course since that kind of testing clashes with the kind of creativity and student-centered, self-paced learning that I foreground in the course. In past semesters when I have taught the course, I relied on in-class writing activities. Students typically provided status updates or commented on class activities or readings. While those in-class writing activities were okay, they didn’t stand out. They felt more and more like busy work, and less and less like a useful learning strategy. Weekly design journal entries have given students the chance to talk regularly about rhetorical choices and document design. The student who shared the cigarette ad discussed the audience for the ad, the choice of the model, and the spatial arrangement of the ad. She discussed how the font use distracted from the appearance, and she questioned the claim that cigarettes would help you lose weight. Analyses like this are a far better choice for these students than the in-class writings that I was using in the past. In addition to these weekly entries, every student gives a presentation on one design journal, another idea borrowed from DeVoss. At the beginning of every class session, a student shares her digital document, describing it, pointing out rhetorical strategies, and discussing its design. During the presentations, they engage the class in discussion by asking questions and encouraging classmates to share observations and reactions. Not only are they writing about these digital documents every week then, but students are also talking about at least one digital text every class session. This journal strategy is definitely a keeper. I have worried for some time that while students created wonderful projects for the course in the past, they still had difficulty at the end of the term talking about rhetoric and design. They were aware of the concepts and they seemed to apply them; however, they couldn’t talk about them comfortably. We are just past midterm in the semester, and I would say students have gone beyond just talking comfortably about the concepts to discussing them fluently. I’m so pleased with the way these journals have worked that I am now thinking of how I might use similar design journals in the technical writing and business writing classes that I’ll be teaching in the Spring Semester. I could ask students to share various texts that matter to professional writing and to analyze how they demonstrate (or don’t) concepts like clarity, readability, accuracy, and accessibility. If I ask students to look for kinds of writing that they will ultimately write in their careers, they can build a collection of models that they can use in the class and beyond. I’m still considering logistics, especially since these classes are 100% online, but I think they could be far more useful than the quizzes I have been using. Have you used design journals of this kind in your classes? Do you have suggestions to help me succeed with them in an online course? I would love to hear from you in the comments.  ... View more

This post is dedicated to all of us who, at midterm, amid a wide variety of distractions, grapple with catching up on grading and class prep, keeping track of meetings and  social media (including email), and research and writing for forthcoming presentations. My memory tracks back to a Free Empathy sign I saw at Occupy Wall Street five years ago. Yes, I think, free unconditional empathy would be most helpful for all of us at this particular moment. So—with this particular rhetorical situation in mind, I offer fragments of recent teaching and learning experiences for anyone in need of free empathy—teachers and students alike! At Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Park (October 2011), a white sign with large black font reads: Free Empathy. Photo by S.N. Bernstein First Meditation: On Growing as Writers and Human Beings originally posted on Council on Basic Writing Facebook page This is my quilt, completed yesterday: "2016—In Hope and Sorrow." While it's not specifically basic writing content, it is basic writing related. Many of the students I've taught over the years (as well as this year) are artists and musicians. At one institution, these students were not allowed to take art or music courses because their test scores placed them in "remedial" courses. My own ACT scores would undoubtedly have placed me in "remediation," if it had existed in the time and place of my undergraduate education, and my GRE scores could have kept me out of graduate school if those scores had mattered as much then as they do now. In other words, we need to eliminate the label "basic writer." It essentializes students, and it limits how institutions understand the potential of students enrolled in BW classes. Many of us would not be where we are now if we had been called "Basic STEMmers" — including me. Even my English ACT score was below average, because the ACT did not measure my quirkiness, my proclivity for "thinking outside the box"—what is now called "innovation." Apologies for the length of this, and for sharing what doesn't conventionally fit the category of basic writing, but which, for me, is deeply connected to the continued efforts of students and teachers working hard toward growing as writers and as human beings. To be continued... ... View more

I’ll never forget how I felt the first time I had to write a paper on the results of an empirical study in graduate school. Even though it was a small-scale study, I had never written anything like that before. I had all kinds of questions: What is a “lit review”? What do they mean when they say to “write a methods section”? Am I really supposed to talk about limitations of the study?   Take a moment to think about a time when you had to write something in a genre that was new to you or unfamiliar to you: How did you feel? What did you do? How did you figure out what was expected? Our students often experience this unfamiliarity, too. My goal as a writing teacher is to find ways to help them successfully respond.   One of the best tools I’ve found to help students ask the right questions as they enter new writing situations in school and beyond is to help them explore the writing of different disciplines and professions. And if students are learning about writing in the disciplines and asking questions about the rhetorical context of their writing, this helps them develop critical literacy.   Critical literacy encourages students to analyze and question what they read and write, consider multiple perspectives, and understand how an author’s values, subject, position, and purpose shape a text. When students understand how to analyze the rhetorical situation of a text, they begin to ask questions that develop critical literacy.   From its roots in the work of Horace Mann, John Dewey, and Paulo Freire, a major component in critical literacy has been to create more access to education. The work of teacher-scholars in community colleges and open admissions institutions—exemplified by Mina Shaughnessy’s ground-breaking work in the CUNY system in the 1970’s—has shown us that we not only have to consider how to increase access to education, but we must also consider what we do in the classroom once students have access. The traditional model of teaching writing as a way to help students fit into the status quo and become more “cultured,” which emerged at Harvard in the 1800's, is inadequate. It grew from an elitist view of education.   But as Ira Shor (1999) reminds us: “Standard usage, rhetorical forms and academic discourse make democratic sense only when taught in a critical curriculum explicitly posing problems about the status quo based on themes from the students’ lives (and experiences).”   If we are to teach students about the rhetorical situations of their writing (and the writing of others) and to embrace writing as socially situated, we should examine in depth with them the academic literacies we are asking them to practice and master. We don’t do them justice if we only ask them to challenge the status quo (culturally) while writing within a status quo (academically). I’ve become increasingly convinced that this is what we do when we teach a politically or culturally themed course that asks students to question power dynamics and political processes but requires them to do so in “standard” academic forms without asking them to question and analyze the ways they are writing and the choices they make as writers.   Teaching a WID-based approach can take many forms, however. Two popular ones are to either have students write about and analyze writing in a range of academic disciplines and professions, or to have students practice writing in varying disciplinary genres. I generally focus more on the first approach but mix in a little of the latter.   Of course, no pedagogy is neutral. And in my years of teaching a WID-based approach, I’ve seen WID become a bit authoritarian by treating disciplinary writing as fixed and genres as templates for writing. In many ways, this isn’t any different from formulaic current-traditional approaches to writing. By contrast, when teachers use a critical approach to WID, they ask students to: Explore their own experiences and make connections to the writing they are analyzing Investigate disciplinary conventions and values, including how they change, how people learn them, and how to identify expectations Question expected academic norms, understanding where they come from and why they exist   So, what might this look like? What are some assignment ideas you have for helping students develop this kind of critical literacy through WID? What are the biggest questions and concerns that you have about trying a WID approach? If you’ve tried it already, what are some of the strategies you have found to be most effective? ... View more

So now it has come to this:  Ronald McDonald is on administrative leave.  And the funny thing is that I can assume that you already know exactly what I am talking about.  Yes, the creepy clown invasion: the next best thing since zombies.   Because that's really what it's all about: people, as Halloween approaches, looking for the latest in camped-out pop cultural horror.  Not that creepy clowns are going to have anything like the staying power of zombies (this is a fad, not a trend), but the clowns bear a family resemblance to these popular humanoid monsters (vampires belong to the clan, as well) and appear to be part of a larger fascination with the macabre in contemporary American culture.  Except that there's a lot more to it than that.   Because unlike zombie walks and costume vampire fangs, the creepy clown phenomenon does not have its origins in pre-existing stories and entertainments.  Vampires are an ancient part of our lore, and even zombies (of the walking dead variety) have a lengthy genealogy.  Creepy clowns, by contrast, are a newly minted product of the instant-fad-creating potential of the Internet.  And more importantly, unlike vampires and zombies, they're real.  Zombie walks shouldn't frighten anyone.  Vampire events are pure camp.  But frighted-up clowns coming at you in the dark with real knives are quite something else.  A certain amount of not-so-make-believe terrorism is going on here, so the semiotic question must be: what on earth does this signify?   It's best to begin at the beginning with such a question.  So, the whole business apparently started in August, down in South Carolina, when someone in some sort of clown suit was spotted trying to lure children into the woods.  This may have been a "prank," or a real case of predatory pedophilia, but the key to the matter is that it got reported, and the report went viral.  In no time, it seems, doing oneself up as a maniac clown became the prank of the town.   Creepy clowns, then, are signifiers, at least in part, of the enormous power of virtual technology to stimulate actual behavior—a kind of postmodern case of "monkey see, monkey do" on a truly mass scale.  You know, "I saw it on the Internet so it must be cool."   Not that faddish behavior itself  is anything new, of course, especially in a mass consumer society.  Hula hoops, Cabbage Patch dolls, pogs, the original Pokemons, mutant ninja turtles - all of these instances of what I shall call "sudden mass hysteria syndrome" percolated throughout America (and the world) without benefit of social media.  The Internet just makes the process a lot faster, generating an endless stream of ice bucket challenges, twerking events, flash mobs, and, yes, creepy clowns.   But, as in any semiotic analysis, we must look at the crucial (one might say diacritical) difference that sets the creepy clown fad apart from other such fads, in order to arrive at its most profound significance.  And this difference can be found in the really sinister nature of the thing.  Confident in the anonymity that a mask provides (there is a compelling connection here to the phenomenon of anonymous online trolling), the prankster-clown is genuinely frightening people.  In an era of daily terroristic threats, and when parents (alas, for good reason) no longer allow their children to go trick-or-treating unaccompanied, this is no joke.  The fact that a growing number of "clowns" think that it is only a joke, or do not even stop to think of the effects that their "fun" may be having on other people, is what is really significant here.  A lot of otherwise ordinary people in the digital era are apparently losing their capacity to empathize with the feelings of other people.  Traditionally, this has been the hallmark of the psychopath, but there is a growing body of evidence that the Net is behind this new expression of social anomie, fostering what might be called "mass psychopathology."   Happy Halloween. Source: Why Are You Laughing? by davocano on Flickr, used under CC-BY 2.0 license  ... View more