When I teach creative writing, especially creative nonfiction, most of my students want to go big, meaning that they are wanting to bring their readers on an emotional journey, pulling out the big stuff: their parents’ devastating divorce, the death of their favorite grandparent, their best friend from elementary school who they no longer speak to, or their first long distance romance that couldn’t bear the miles. These are all worthy topics to pursue, but a pitfall of trying to go big is not being able to cover the landscape of the event, to translate it the same way it happened.             Many of my students look at their lives and think that nothing interesting has happened to them, that they haven’t done much, and so they scan their memories for the moments with the highest peaks, the most drama, and think they’ve found their story there. Author “Story Seminar” creator Robert McKee teaches that a trivial story well told is more powerful than a significant story poorly told. It doesn’t matter, I tell students, if you haven’t trained in the junior Olympics, haven’t fallen into movie-like love yet, or have only lived in Naples, Florida for all of your life—in fact, that’s better. Take your story to the park instead. Look around your hometown, in the antique store that’s always open that you never go in. What’s in there? What stories live there?             To Go Small is to look closely at the practice of running, an old object in an antique store, a seemingly insignificant moment, like the walk you take after dinner around your apartment complex, and to ask those objects, moments, practices or memories questions. Borrowing from Lynda Barry’s book, What It Is, I ask my students to make a list of ten couches they’ve sat on in their lifetimes, then ask them to choose one. With that couch in mind, I ask them guiding questions borrowed from Barry’s book to help orient them in the moment they’ve chosen. Where are you? What are you doing? Who else is there? What time of day is it? How old are you? What does the couch look like? Whose house is it? What’s in front of you? What’s to your left? What’s to your right? What’s behind you? What’s below your feet?             By answering these questions, students engage in pre-writing and are forced to Go Small, looking at the minute details of the memory, picking out carpet patterns, wall decorations, couch fabric, time of day, season, etc. And by picking out these significant, concrete details, their piece becomes much more alive as it’s coming from a real, specific place, and a vivid moment in time. I ask students to then begin writing the moment or the scene with the details they collected in mind.             Haley Morton, a previous student of mine, practiced Going Small in her piece “Early October,” a fiction piece about a narrator who runs:             “Sweat burns through my pores. Catching my blonde skin up in its path. Gathering itself   into lines of pearl and opal across my neck and forehead and heaving chest. It’s hard for me to think about nothing. Especially now. When my legs collide with the ground  without a hint of grace and my thumbs tuck into my balled-up, pumping fists. I try to linger in each step with purpose as I bob past the arching oaks and violent palms with their saw limbs, all rooted in a hostile soil that seems it would be home to nothing but tumbleweed.”             When the students share their post-exercise writing, it’s usually their best piece of writing so far in the semester. When they read out loud in class, it’s clear for the rest of us to see that they are somewhere else, back in time, and we get to see the inside of their childhood house: the fast food bag on the table their dad brought home, their mother’s pearl earrings she got from her grandmother, or the Last Supper picture their older brother found on the side of the street. Their pieces come to life, glowing with sensory details and specific images. From hearing themselves and their peers’ pieces, they start to see the importance, the poignancy, in a broken coffee cup, in a shiny trinket, as opposed to the topics that were just too big to pin down, too big to write well in a first draft.             In Phillip Lopate’s book, To Show and To Tell, he writes that famed novelist Philip Roth would go to bed reminding himself, “Don’t invent, remember.” This is to say that oftentimes, when we imagine, we are actually more distant from accuracy than if we were to pull from what we see in our actual lives. To pull from our lives is to go over the mundane, to collect the seemingly insignificant, and to Go Small, finding a kernel, a part in the work that symbolizes or speaks to the bigger feeling, the bigger moment, we so often seek to convey. ... View more

The students in my technical writing course have just submitted their coursework proposals, which outline the projects that they will complete for the rest of the term. This assignment is a crucial part of my plan to increase the role of choice for students this term. As I discussed last week, one of my goals for the new school year is to give students more choice in their assignments. Two previous activities have built up to the coursework proposals. First, I asked students to conduct an investigation of writing in their field, reporting their findings in a table that listed the kinds of writing and their key characteristics. Based on that investigation, I asked them to choose writing superlatives for their fields. In their coursework proposals, students reflect on the information they have gathered about writing in their fields and propose up to three projects that they will complete during the remainder of the term. Specifically, I have offered them these choices for their three projects: Open Projects Chosen from Your Analysis Table (up to three) Genre Analysis Report (counts as two projects, as it is a longer project) Midterm Exam on Readings The coursework proposal assignment itself follows a customary proposal format, asking students to explain their proposed plan, provide justification for their choices, and suggest a schedule for completing the projects. The proposal gives students the chance to customize the second half of the course to focus on projects that specifically meet the needs of someone in their fields. Let me provide an example. A student in computer science has explored the kinds of writing that she will likely do as an Android developer. While she has completed an internship and three years of coursework, there are kinds of writing in her field that she has had little practice in doing. She has written internal documentation in the code that she has developed, for instance, but she has never tried creating external user documentation. For one of her three projects, she wants to write a short user manual on how to install an Android app and customize its settings. My goal with this course structure is to ask students to focus on projects that will make a difference in their future, rather than random assignments that may not connect to them at all. The projects that are right for the Android developer simply aren’t right for everyone in the class. A student in environmental science, for example, may not need to write user documentation, so that student chooses a different path, proposing to write two reports on an environmental study she has conducted—one for other scientists, and one for the public. As promising as this free-form approach is, there are challenges. In particular, asking students to demonstrate such a high level of agency in their coursework leads to some confusion. Students rarely have much input in what they study in a course, so they have questions about how to proceed. Some students wonder if this structure is some kind of trick on my part, asking me if they can really write what they want to. I realized how much of a challenge this system was for them when about a third emailed me or posted in the course forums for clarification. Now that students have submitted their proposals, I look forward to seeing how they took advantage of the choices that the assignment offered. I know I will find other challenges to address as read students’ submissions, and I am already thinking of changes to make when I teach the course again. I’ll share more on what I find as I read their work in my next post. In the meantime, if you have a question or suggestion, please leave me a comment below. I look forward to hearing from you.     [Photo Credit: Choices by Jason Taellious, on Flickr, used under CC-BY-SA 2.0 license] ... View more

Today's guest blogger is Halle Neiderman‌, a PhD candidate at Kent State University. She teaches College Writing I and II, as well as Writing in the Public Sphere, Writing in Business, and Professional Writing. She previously taught developmental and basic writing, literature and writing, and advanced literature courses. Her scholarly areas of interest include institutional critique, sustainability in composition, and sustainability rhetoric. Her article "Programmatic Perspectives: Weaving the Sustainability and Composition Disciplines" will appear in Decade of Education for Sustainable Development--and Beyond, edited by A. E. J. Wals and P. B. Corcoran. She is also a Bedford New Scholar (2016).  Teaching at a large Midwestern public university, I often struggle to find course themes utilizing radical pedagogies to keep my students critically engaged. For my sophomore level writing course, I stumbled upon a sustainability theme (after picking up the book No Impact Man). While at first my students assumed they had zero knowledge or experiences pertaining to the subject matter, and that I must be crunchy-granola hippy, it became clear that working with the wicked problems of sustainability engages students bored with other radical pedagogy themes.   I use the term “wicked problem” when discussing sustainability because problem solving for sustainable decision-making includes negotiations with the interdependence of other factors. In sustainability pedagogy, this is a constant weaving of people, profit, and prosperity. The goal is to lead students to dynamic thinking through content and well-developed assignments. As such, I attempt to develop multidimensional, multimodal composition assignments fit for a sophomore level writing course.   Just as composing is discursive and dynamic and involves the reciprocity of learning between teacher and student, the assignment I share here uses sustainability as a bridge to examine and produce multiple spaces of composition.   Student Outcomes To understand the negotiations necessary within a sustainability framework of people, planet, and prosperity the post-process nature of composition the changing nature of audience and compositions   Why Sustainability?  Sustainability pedagogy asks learners to consider how (in)actions positively and negatively affect small and large scale social, economic, and environmental situations. The coursework involves ongoing discussions in which students consider the past, present, and future, how they are situated in a given space, and how that space contributes to their behavior, movement, and decisions. These are futures-thinking conversations.    The assignment(s) Like the wicked issues of sustainability, the following assignment is comprised of numerous parts, composers, and audiences. Its goal is to push students to think critically regarding the multiple issues and effects of a topic, to be able to identify and appeal to multiple audiences using multiple compositions, and to see a composition as a dynamic, living work that changes with each audience and reading. Students form groups of three and discuss a local/regional sustainability issue they choose to tackle. Though in a group, they must first tackle it individually, each presenting a different aspect of the problem. Individually, students compose a well-researched argument regarding their individual topic from the group’s decided-upon local sustainability issue. Student groups compose a video that presents their arguments. The video has no parameters, as they should be making their own rhetorical choices based on the various audiences. Students are then asked to make the video go viral using social media. Finally, student groups discuss the material and scaffold in the video in a fifteen to twenty-minute group presentation to the entire class.   Why Go Viral? This part of the assignment has the least constraints on the students. It simply asks them to create a video that “goes viral.”   Asking students to place videos on YouTube and social media outlets changes the stakes of their compositions. Students can no longer assume only the professor will see and evaluate their work, and they can no longer assume it be viewed only once.   They also must consider how to generate an audience. We get to have conversations of click-bait and other online rhetorical conventions, but we also have conversations regarding the evolving nature of Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, and affordances and constraints of the outlets that previous semesters were not able to access.   So What? Both sustainability pedagogy and multimodal composition should be taught in ways that illustrate problems are dynamic and changing. We all know that multimodal assignments should not simply be a “tacking on” after final products. This assignment allows students to consider how their sustainability argument can be successful in written argument, visual argument, and aural/face-to-face argument simultaneously.   Further, by asking students to publish their work in social media outlets, student authors are able to begin to understand how audiences consume and co-opt their own work, which then allows students to see a composition process in a different way. (A way tangential to “write for my professor; receive grade from my professor; start new paper.”) By asking students to not only compose a digital argument, place it (somewhere, everywhere?) on the Web, and have it do something, students begin to think in different ways what a composition does. ... View more

An article on CNN.com last week was entitled “Scott, Castile and the Women Who Filmed Their Final Moments.” Millions have seen the video that Rakeyia Scott took with her phone as police killed her husband, Keith. In July, Diamond Reynolds streamed live on Facebook the moments following the fatal shooting of her fiancé, Philando Castile, at the hands of police. Both of these women, as they watched the man they loved die, turned on their camera phones and took video. According to CNN, “In both cases, the viewers of the videos commented on how unnaturally calm Rakeyia Scott and Diamond Reynolds were  in the midst of the deadly situations.” Why, under the circumstances, would the women turn on their cameras? Why would they even think about doing that? All of the time on television and in movies we see where a strategically-placed surveillance camera helps the police capture criminals. We have seen snapshots and videos lead to the capture in real life of criminals in cases like the Boston Marathon bombings and the recent bombings in New York. I don’t know when the first bystander turned on a camera to film the police, but the 2016 indictment of Michael Slager for the 2015 shooting of Walter Scott in South Carolina, following a stop for a broken taillight, showed that the cameras could be turned not only on, but against the police. "I can tell you that as the result of that video and the bad decision made by our officer, he will be charged with murder," North Charleston Mayor Keith Summey told reporters. Scott’s family and others have expressed hope that the indictment will be a turning point.  Recent history has made us rethink what constitutes convincing evidence in a case of deadly force by police. The officer’s version of what happened is no longer accepted at face value. Verbal testimony has come to be seen as reflective of racial division, and cases of black men killed by white officers have raised a cry for police officers to be equipped with body cameras. The ethos of police officers has been damaged for the many ethical officers by a few unethical or allegedly unethical ones. There is a contemporary backlash against the time when blacks in America could not testify against whites, and a more recent time when the word of a white police officer was taken to have greater value than the word of a black civilian. Videos are not irrefutable evidence of what happened. In the case of Walter Scott, the early moments of the encounter were not filmed, but the image of a white man shooting an unarmed black man in the back five times while he was running away was enough to lead to Slater’s indictment. The video of the shooting of Keith Lamont Scott leaves questions unanswered. What was in his hand? Was it a gun on the ground? Was the gun there throughout the video? It is significant that the outcry for the police video to be made public was so great that the police gave in to that demand. So why did Rakeyia Scott and Diamond Reynolds turn on their cameras? Did they have enough foresight to think that in an American court of law their word would not stand up against that of the police? It is chilling to hear Mrs. Scott scream over and over, “He doesn’t have a gun! He doesn’t have a gun!” When her screams turn to “Don’t do it, Keith! Don’t do it!” did she foresee the shots that killed him seconds later? Neither her video nor that taken by the police car’s dash cam tells the whole story. Ms. Reynolds turned on her camera only after the police asked her fiancé for identification and then shot him four times after he informed him that he had a permit to carry a gun and had one in the car. She felt she had to get what followed on video because it would be her word against that of a policeman. Each woman knew that she needed visual and audio evidence. An attorney could, in all three cases, argue that key seconds of the incident are missing or that the angle does not provide incontrovertible evidence of the sequence of events. I have to wonder if, as white woman, I would have reacted as these women did. The point, however, is whether I, as a white woman, would have needed to. Credit: "Smartphone - Lovebot Toronto" by Joseph Morris on Flickr ... View more

Ann and I like our assignments to have titles that tell students exactly what we expect from them. So, our syllabi don’t say, “Paper #1 due . . . ,” and “Persuasive Essay due . . .”  Who could get excited about anything so formulaic?   Our “Be Interested” assignment, for example, which is the first step in a longer project, asks our students to demonstrate their interest in anything that touches on the world of ideas. Pursuing their interest should ideally involve going someplace that’s new to them: they can attend a scholarly lecture or an artistic event on campus, or they can go to a city planning meeting or sit in on a court trial. What they choose doesn’t matter to us; what does matter is that they are actively interested in what they’ve chosen. Being interested is a habit and we want them to get in the habit of having new experiences and encountering new ideas.   The assignment explains how we want our students to make their interest visible to others: In advance of attending the event you’ve chosen, do preliminary research that puts you in a position to ask a good question once you get there. After the event, write up an intellectually engaging account that introduces the event’s central problem, concern, or question. Write your way to a question that the event raised for you, one that can’t be answered with basic information alone but that requires thought and research beyond the time you put in before the event.   Then begin to do the research required to address the question the event raised for you. We expect you to begin with informational sources and to keep digging until you find two sources that advance your thinking in significant ways. We are interested in the two sources that you find after you’ve moved beyond the basic background information. All the students we’ve had do this assignment have experienced some level of difficulty completing it. Most of our beginning students have never voluntarily attended a lecture or gone to a gallery or attended a civic meeting; most don’t know where the university publicizes events that are free and open to the public. Some students haven’t found any of the available options to be of interest and have asked to be allowed to watch a lecture on the Internet or visit a Web site. And we’ve had more than one student come to class empty-handed, saying they’ve been unable to find anything out there that interests them.   Being interested, it turns out, is a lot harder than it seems at first. To get our students practicing, we begin by teaching them how to exhibit the habits of the interested mind: ask questions, do research that drills down past the first link, ask more questions, follow details, and locate original sources. Being interested is not the same as being entertained; it’s an active endeavor and to get there, you have to work at it.   In one of our classes, we had a graduating senior who declared that she couldn’t do the assignment. This wasn’t an act of resistance; she had spent all of her time at the university preparing for future employment, she explained, and was focused on her internship and building her resume. She had tried her best. She’d gone to a lecture about mass incarceration; she’d poked around on the Web. Nothing clicked.   All those classes, all those credits stacked up, standing at the threshold of her college education’s conclusion, this student was telling us, “Be interested? I don’t have the time . . . or the interest.” There are many ways to respond to such news: as a depressive, despair is my first sensation, but that isn’t pedagogically useful.   A better response is to see that students, in general, struggle with being actively interested in their own educations because their own educations don’t teach them how to be interested. They’ve written research papers; they’ve generated arguments and they’ve tried to be persuasive; they’ve had topics and topic sentences: they’ve produced the outer trappings of interest, but most have never actually had the inner experience of being interested as a habit of mind. This is different from being into rock climbing or being a news junky or being obsessed with gaming: interest as a habit of mind is question-driven; it is the lived practice of being curious. Teaching them that being interested is a practice and getting them to engage in that practice is our job. Then, when they’re faced with a more traditional writing assignment, they’ll be prepared to make themselves interested because they’ll have learned how to use writing as a technology for thinking new thoughts.   Where to begin, then? By looking at how writers show interest on the page.  Our students come to class expecting to discuss the argument in the assigned reading; they attend lectures and seeking out the speaker’s main point. We want them to learn to ask: what is the question that drives this work? Without the animating question, arguments and main points are just context-free factoids. What motivates a research project? A question that nags, that haunts, that refuses to be settled or dismissed.    What’s the question that drives Habits of the Creative Mind? In its most general form: what is creativity and can it be taught? These are questions without definitive answers, but that’s as it should be: the practice of engaging with the unanswerable is the essence of humanistic education.   Next: The follow-up assignment: Be Interesting! ... View more

This week I had the great pleasure of doing an hour-long Google Hangout with fifty 9 th and 11 th grade students at a high school in the Bay Area. They were full of interesting observations and great questions: Did I ever struggle with writing? When and why did I decide I wanted to teach writing? What can I suggest to overcome writer’s block? What tips can I give for doing a good job on timed writing tasks? How do I define good writing? Several students asked about analysis, since they were currently working on rhetorical analyses, first of a passage from an article or memoir and then one of an entire piece. “What is analysis for?” they asked. “What does a good analysis do?” “How is analysis related to our everyday lives?” We spoke the day after the first Presidential Debate, and so that subject came up, and gave me a very good way to talk about what analysis is and why I think it’s so important today. It’s sometimes hard to analyze spoken discourse: you really need to record, to watch over and over, or to take notes. But spoken discourse—and especially discourse associated with presidential aspirations—demands analysis: the results of that discourse will leave the U.S. with one kind of president or another, so the stakes are particularly high. I talked at some length about how to go about analysis: “with so much information coming at us, it can be overwhelming, and we often don’t have time to really pay attention, much less analyze,” I said. So the first thing to know about analysis is that we need to SLOW DOWN for it. We need time to think carefully through whatever we are analyzing. “Look for the major claims,” I urged, “and then break the discourse down into those major claims; then look for support offered for each claim as well as for the way the speaker is appealing to your mind and heart. If you can’t find support for the claims, or if the support is weak, ask what the speaker has in mind in leaving it out.” I didn’t talk specifically about Donald Trump’s or Hillary Clinton’s debate performances, but I pointed out that body language, facial expression, tone, and style have a big impact on listeners/viewers and that those things need to be included in an analysis. And I reiterated that analysis is absolutely necessary if voters are going to make sound choices. I have a lot of fears around this election; it seems to me the most dangerous one in my lifetime, and that’s saying something. What I fear most, however, are voters who seem incapable of analysis, who seem to base their decisions on something as vague as “Trump tells it like it is!” (Really???) or “I feel like he’s got my back” (almost surely not) or “he’s tough and will make us great.” (How, exactly???) What I HOPE is that teachers and students all over the country are analyzing such claims—and that they will know when those claims are without support, or indeed, even without truth. We have never needed analysis more than we do right now! ... View more

I just finished drafting a vocabulary quiz for the co-requisite section of my ALP (Accelerated Learning Program) freshman writing course.  Vocabulary instruction has long been a challenge in developmental English, integrated reading and writing, and basic composition courses. I think we would all agree that contextualized vocabulary instruction is the way to go, but how do we actually make that happen in the classroom? This week I watched my students struggle to paraphrase key points in an assigned text, and a lack of requisite vocabulary appeared to be the source of the problem: words in our target passages were unknown to the students, and they searched, often unsuccessfully, for “their own words” to explain the point. “Use your own words” is the standard advice from texts and websites in explaining paraphrase. “But what if I don’t have the words?” That is the student response which drives me to work on how I teach vocabulary. How do I approach vocabulary instruction? My students’ previous experiences were often limited to word lists and tedious worksheets. Some had to write their own sentences using target words. I have tried that exercise as well, but besides the fact that it is divorced from either a realistic context or audience, it also invites plagiarism (just Google “Use _____ in a sentence”).  Quizzes, flashcards, bonus points for use in essays (which generally results in contorted prose) – I’ve employed all of these at some point. My current strategy begins in context: I select a limited number of words from assigned readings. Our initial introduction, in the context of close reading, focuses on a traditional analysis of meaning and word parts: we talk about definitions, roots, suffixes, pronunciation, spelling, and whatever anecdotes or examples I can think of. Next, I endeavor to make sure students hear and see the words again – in additional close reading exercises, in paraphrase practice, on our Blackboard page, in emails, in course handouts, in discussions. I weave the words in wherever it makes sense to do so, reminding students that these words live outside of the text where we originally encountered them. I also make time to talk about collocations, using frames and editing exercises: Someone succumbs TO something, not FOR something or ON something. And, in traditional fashion, I mention parts of speech. At the outset of the term, honestly, most of the students don’t see any point in learning that “flagrant” is an adjective or “perpetuate” is a verb.  But I will offer sentences such as these for consideration: The left tackle flagrants his illegal blocks. He gave a very perpetuate response. Oh my! That was a flagrant if I've ever seen one. Student responses to these vary at first: some look at definitions only and will mark such sentences as logical and well-formed. Others recognize problems, although they cannot identify the nature of those problems. But gradually, they begin to employ a grammatical metalanguage: “flagrant is an adjective, but this sentence puts it in a noun spot.” I can push them on this: “How do you know it’s a noun slot?” “It has ‘a,’ and that indicates a noun.” We test and we probe; we try different variations and we edit. Students explore questions – is there a noun form of “flagrant”? If not, how could I adjust the sentence? These discussions emphasize that the context of a word includes more than semantics: words have syntactic, lexical, and discourse contexts as well. We also talk about language change: students are very aware of functional shift, although they might not know the term.  We talk about “adulting,” (which my computer just auto-corrected to “adulating”), and they see that –ing suffixes are one piece of evidence that a word has been “verbed.” Most importantly, however, we talk about vocabulary as something they already have and that they can get more of; in fact, they have a right to it. Like most forms of capital, vocabulary as linguistic currency provides a measure of power, and it has not been distributed equally. My instruction should make it accessible to them. And, as proprietors of the language, they too can be instrumental in creating new vocabulary and fostering language change. I would love to hear from other developmental English and basic writing instructors: what’s your approach to vocabulary? ... View more

Yana Mazurkevich, a student from Ithaca College in New York, has created a powerful photo series about sexual assault in the wake of Brock Turner’s release.  It’s Mazurkevich’s second project in relation to Turner; her first was called Dear Brock Turner.  Both are visually powerful, if not in fact disturbing.   I’ve been thinking about how to bring these images into the classroom, and I think the first place that I would start is Torie Rose DeGhett’s “The War Photo No One Would Publish,” which is centered on a similarly powerful and disturbing image and its censored circulation.  I want students to be acutely aware of the power of images, their circulation, and the ways in which they are carefully controlled.  I would pair DeGhett with one of the essays that touch on feminism and sexual assault, probably Julia Serano’s “Why Nice Guys Finish Last,” which most directly addresses rape culture.   I think this would be a productive and potent pairing.  You might want to consider exploring it for your class. ... View more

So far this fall, I have focused on what I am doing to increase participation in my classes. This week, I want to turn to another one of my goals for the new school year: giving students more choice. I have always supported choice in student writing activities, both to increase student engagement in learning and to encourage student ownership and agency in the writing process. This year, I want to make choice the cornerstone of the courses I teach. Students should have the opportunity to choose the best kinds of projects to work on to reach their goals as writers and professionals. I started on the path to this more open approach two years ago when I opened up the job application materials activities in my technical writing course to give students the opportunity to write whatever they needed for their particular situation. This term, I am increasing that kind of choice by asking students to choose several of the projects that they write for the course, based on their investigation of writing in the field. I’ll share more about the assignment I am using next week, after I have had a chance to read students’ related proposals. For now, I’d like to talk a little about the process I have used to set up the activity. After completing their classification tables on writing in their fields, I wanted students to return to that information and reflect on the kinds of writing. Just telling them to reread and reflect didn’t seem adequate. I needed to frame their reflection to have them do the kind of critical thinking that would help them make the best choices for the rest of the course. I decided to ask students to reflect on their classification project and respond to this list of superlative categories: Your intended career field Longest kind of document someone in your field writes Shortest kind of document someone in your field writes Most frequent kind of document someone in your field writes Most important kind of document someone in your field writes (and why) Most difficult/challenging kind of writing in your field (and why) Easiest kind of writing in your field (and why) Biggest surprise about writing in your field Favorite thing about writing in your field Hokiest thing you have done (that you can talk about in class) The answer to the first item helps me understand their decisions, and the final question (focusing on school spirit) is just for fun. I posted the activity in the course discussion board, telling students that their answers should help them decide which kinds of writing to focus on for the remainder of their coursework. The activity felt a little risky. I was afraid students might give short, matter-of-fact responses, but those I have read so far have been marvelous in demonstrating that students thought carefully about their answers. Here’s an example: Favorite thing about writing in your field - Code commenting! It makes me feel much better knowing that the next person who looks at my code won’t be completely lost. Notice that I didn’t ask for anything but the favorite thing, but the student went on to explain why she chose code commenting. Her answer reveals a thorough understanding of how audience and purpose impact the writing she does. With this level of insight into the kinds of writing in her field, I expect this student to make great choices as she proposes her work for the rest of the term. I’ll share more on those choices next week, when I share the assignment for the coursework proposals that students are currently working on. In the meantime, if you have any questions or suggestions, please leave me a comment below.    Credit: Picked up a fat stack of paper from my previous tax person, by Alper Çuğun, on Flickr, used under CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

Young writers often get the advice—and sometimes the assignment—to eavesdrop.  I’ve always found this a little funny, since after all, don’t most of us spend large portions of our lives in conversation?  Why do we need to listen in on somebody else’s conversation in order to learn about conversation?  I wasn’t sure of the particular value of being outside of the conversation.  So I decided to try it. Like many a writer, I often find myself in coffee shops.   But I also happen to live in a town that is a prime destination for people in recovery programs, who also naturally find themselves in coffee shops.  And so one of the first things I heard was one highly caffeinated young guy saying to another, “It was a tell-tale sign when we did free hugs and Ted wouldn’t hug anybody.” A few days later, walking out of the gym behind a young woman and her probably four-year-old son, I heard this exchange: Toddler: I want a snack. Mom: I have something in the car for you. Toddler: What is it? Mom: Juice. Toddler: What kind of juice? Mom: Orange juice. Toddler, with outright exuberance: Hallelujah, baby! Later, sitting in a Barnes and Noble café near the customer service counter, I heard this: Female customer, probably sixty-something, brandishing the bondage bestseller Fifty Shades of Grey:  Do you think this would make a good gift? Customer Service Rep: Well, I wouldn’t give it to someone you didn’t know well. Next customer, a very thin woman around seventy in a denim mini skirt and high-heeled sandals: I need a ride home. Customer Service Rep: But we’re a bookstore. Meanwhile, someone I know posted on Facebook that he heard an old woman on the subway turn to the homeless guy next to her and say, “You smell like my husband.  He’s dead.” The website Overheard in NY is full of such gems.  The truth, I guess, is that we’re a nation of eavesdroppers, whether we mean to be or not, and we find our fellow Americans pretty amusing. There are lessons to be learned from these moments, sure.  The guys in recovery had a very particular vocabulary that they shared and used fluidly.  They were also way more intimate in the way they spoke to each other than most any other group of twenty-something males I have ever seen in conversation. And the child shouting Hallelujah for his juice was surely imitating adults he has heard.  Kid talk is often funny for the way they use words correctly but in slightly inappropriate contexts.  It was a touching scene, too, showing how well the mother knew her child, as well as how much he appreciated her knowledge.  And living here in South Florida, I’ve certainly observed the infinite variety of the elderly (some of the stereotypes are true—the driving is pretty terrifying), but as with any demographic, the individuals are many and they can be found everywhere, saying just about anything. So a student given the assignment to eavesdrop certainly could learn this or that about the ways we speak to each other and who we are.  I might try an exercise where I have students copy down things they overhear over the course of a week, then share the best bits with the class so that the group can collectively determine what lessons can be learned from the snippets.  And I could see creating a writing exercise based on any of the snippets.  Part of what’s interesting about eavesdropping is how the absence of context sparks your imagination.  What kind of kid “Hallellujahs” orange juice rather than a bag of chips?  Who is Ted and why wouldn’t he participate in free hugs?  Did that lady ever get home from Barnes and Noble? (Last I saw she was talking to a very patient cop.)  And is that other lady pulling a “Rose for Emily” thing with her dead husband? Eavesdropping works as an assignment because you can listen without the social obligation of participating in the conversation.  You can sit in on conversations by demographics of people you might not otherwise speak to (assuming those demographics speak to each other in public places).  But really I don’t know that it’s so important to go out and spy. Just now as I sit here writing, the guy fixing my air-conditioning said, “You can go ahead and close up the joint.”  My house has never been called a joint before, but I like it. I suspect the real value in the eavesdropping assignment is not so much that it encourages students to be spies, but that it encourages them to be observant.  Go out into the world in your writerly identity, it says—and pay attention.  The writer’s life is one big eavesdropping exercise, though there are some problems inherent in that, as well. Jane Smiley’s hilarious satire of academia Moo takes down the eavesdropping assignment pretty effectively.  One workshop student listens in on her roommate’s inane conversations and creates inane writing.  Louise Fitzhugh’s children’s novel Harriet the Spy also makes clear the hazards of eavesdropping on your close comrades.  They don’t care for it so much.  Especially not when they are twelve years old. So what is the difference between overzealous, shameful Harriet-the-Spying and being a writer?  I guess in part it’s the dishonesty of it, of pretending not to be listening when you are listening, and it’s how you use the material you get hold of.  It seems safe to take a snippet of conversation from a context you don’t know and make it your own story,  less so to take your roommate’s private life and transcribe it. But then again, I bet Harriet the Spy was a pretty great writer. What do you think? Is all material fair game? [This post first appeared on LitBits on 7/5/12.]  ... 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As I prepared for my fall classes, I grappled with questions that students often ask on the first day of the basic writing course: “Is this course remedial? Is it a review of high school?” In the past, I had always responded with an emphatic “no.” But this year, my hope was to offer sound rhetorical reasons for how and why this basic writing course would be different from high school. I remembered the last basic writing course that I taught in graduate school, in an abbreviated summer session. That summer, back in the 1990s, we were still many years away from federally mandated testing for No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and Common Core. We also did not have widespread access to the internet. All of the students in that course were six weeks out of high school. Many of them were away from home for the first time in their lives, and all of a sudden, the students found themselves in an environment that tested the limits of their knowledge, but had not been part of their high school curriculum, such as national politics and birth control. These subjects, first addressed in their lives outside of basic writing, became the critical materials for their reading and writing that summer. In other words, the course introduced students to academic writing and to rhetoric, to considering their purposes and audiences for writing and for reading. To survive as students in an environment with rigorous educational requirements, and a plethora of social distractions, the students would need to become scholars inside and outside the classroom.  The main challenge of this work was the time-honored prerequisite of learning to “think outside the box.” As I planned for Fall 2016, I wanted to develop a means of tapping into the lessons of that long ago classroom. But it was not nostalgia for a pre-social media world that moved me most, or even nostalgia for milder summer sunshine, or teaching and learning under the apple trees near the agriculture building where we often worked together that summer. Instead, I hoped to offer a course in which students would have opportunities to stretch their own learning as writers and readers, and to process their thinking and writing to shift their learning forward. Such a process can best be described through another commonly used expression. I hoped that students as writers would learn to go outside their “comfort zones.” Leaving the “comfort zone,” moving beyond the familiar, often offers any of us the best opportunity to flourish and grow as writers. But how to explain this concept to students who had come of age in an era shaped through social media? How to translate my twentieth-century students’ risk-taking efforts in twenty-first century terms? Reader, I began with emojis, and at first I drew them by hand on the board in our classroom. Here is the first photo: In the above explanation, I incorporated Facebook emojis because I wanted to illustrate the differences between the deeper thinking of academic writing, and the often more impromptu responses of social media. But in emulating Facebook, I had forgotten to include the “ha-ha” emoji, the symbol for laughter. Additionally, Facebook has no symbol for “questioning.” The emoji I tried to draw in its place, with question marks for eyes and a squiggly mouth, looked more like confusion than inquisitiveness.The information for our textbook, 50 Essays, also was incomplete. In the revision, pictured below, I used Google’s gumdrop-shaped emojis, and found two images of the kind of questioning I had in mind: deep, contemplative, and not frequently uncomfortable. I also demonstrated how to use internal citations from our textbook, and included a Work Cited section. At this moment in the term, we are learning to develop less formulaic approaches to thinking about writing and reading. We read videos as well as non-fiction essays, and experiment with moving from in-class writing to think-pair-shares to class discussions to journals, to still more in-class writing, back to journals, and to developing journals from drafts. The process is slow and not always deliberate, and there are always questions that address the worries of this new and much slower process for creating an essay. I look forward to reporting the results of our work together in a future post. ... View more

This past April, I was fortunate to be able to attend the Writing Across Institutions Conference at Appalachian State University. As part of that conference, I listened to Prof. Allison Harl of Ferrum College remind her audience of writing teachers that we should be sure to consider reading transfer an essential part of the experiences we offer our students, and that reading transfer should be an important part of our discussions and explorations of writing transfer. Prof. Harl’s reminder compelled me to spend time thinking, with a sharpened focus, about the ways I incorporate readings and the functions they serve in my own first-year writing course. I began this consideration of readings in my WID-based first-year writing course by examining where readings are located in my most recent course syllabus, and by outlining the various purposes they serve in my course design: To introduce students to particular disciplinary ways of thinking: My first-year writing course is currently organized into a series of units that focus on the reading and writing that takes place in various academic communities: the humanities, the social sciences, the natural sciences, and the applied fields. I routinely incorporate a scholarly reading or two at the beginning of each of these units to support my introductions to these academic arenas.   For example, at the beginning of my unit on the natural sciences, I ask students to read Marazzitti and Canale’s “Hormonal Changes When Falling In Love” (Psychoneuroendocrinology, 2004; on pp. 356-362 in An Insider’s Guide to Academic Writing). In class, we spend time discussing the reading with a particular focus on the kinds of topics the researchers explore, the kinds of questions that guide the researchers’ inquiry, the kinds of evidence they tend to rely on, as well as the kinds of conclusions they reach. My focus on these broader considerations is designed to allow students an experience of professional research within a particular academic domain. Over the course of the semester, I hope my students are able to develop a more sophisticated ability to identify similarities and differences among the various domains we explore.   To introduce students to some of the conventions of writing specific to particular disciplinary domains: Each of my units of study also includes specific attention to the conventions of writing that characterize particular academic domains, and I use readings to highlight these conventional practices. In my unit on reading and writing in the humanities, for instance, I ask students to read Kish’s “’My FEMA People’: Hip-Hop as Disaster Recovery in the Katrina Diaspora” (American Quarterly, 2009; on pp. 565-579 in An Insider’s Guide to Academic Writing). In addition to considering Kish’s larger argument and its persuasiveness, we spend time in class exploring the text’s structural, reference, and language features—the presentation of a thesis, the means of creating transitions, the strategies for incorporating textual evidence, and the documentation of source material, for example. By examining how professional academics build texts, or the strategies professional writers employ, I hope to offer opportunities for students to see how the rhetorical decisions these writers make reflect--and sometimes complicate--what it means to conduct inquiry in a particular academic community.   As a means of introducing students to conventional features of particular genres: I also assign readings as models of particular genres. One of the major writing projects I assign in the social sciences unit of my class is the literature review. In addition to exploring models by students for both their strengths and weaknesses, I also ask students to read professional models, like Gregorowius, Lindemann-Matthies, and Huppenbauer’s “Ethical Discourse on the Use of Genetically Modified Crops: A Review of Academic Publications in the Fields of Ecology and Environmental Ethics (Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 2012; pp. 478-499 in An Insider’s Guide to Academic Writing).   We spend time in class exploring the strategies the professional writers use to execute the demands of the genre. We consider, for instance, how the writers build topics and subtopics, how they introduce sources, how they organize their review of scholarship, how they engage and present their syntheses of source material, how they document their sources, among others considerations. Whether my students are producing a literature review, a research proposal, or a memo, providing access to and opportunities to analyze professional models of specific genres underscores a writing project’s value to students, even as it offers insight into the strategies professionals use in the construction of such genres. These are the ways, and some of the reasons, I use professional models in my writing course. I’d love to hear how you use readings in your courses. Are there other ways/reasons that you incorporate readings into your course? What specific functions do the readings serve in your own course design? ... View more

The non-objectivity of the nightly news has long been a topic for cultural studies, and it has certainly never been any secret that the Fox News Network, with its Limbaugh-to-Beck-to-O'Reilly-to-Hannity lineup, has long been a poster child of ideologically positioned news broadcasting.  But the recent fall of Roger Ailes—the man who made it all possible—is still a potent topic for classroom analysis, not simply for the purpose of exploring exactly what happened at Fox, but also for the much larger purpose of revealing what Fox effectively did to the news itself.  Because by illustrating the power and profitability of not even pretending to abide by the traditional standards of journalistic objectivity, Murdoch's men have effectively changed not only the way the news is broadcast in America, but also America itself.   This is a particularly important topic today for popular cultural studies, especially because most of your students are highly unlikely to have much contact with any of the traditional news media, getting their news instead from such digital sources as Twitter and Facebook.  Eschewing radio and television news sources, they may think that their own news consumption has been entirely unaffected by the face-off between such unabashedly partisan networks as Fox and MSNBC.  But the fact is that the new news model, centered in social media, has much in common with the model that Ailes created—is, in fact, almost an extension of it.  Let me explain.   As always in a semiotic analysis, we need to begin with a little history.  For the purposes of this blog, that history can begin with the radio, and subsequently television, career of CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow.  While I don't want to give the impression that Murrow was some sort of godlike creature who, alone among mere mortals, was able to present the news with perfect objectivity, he certainly did much to earn his enduring reputation as a man who at least stood for the principle of principled and objective journalism.  This mantle of journalistic integrity was inherited by Walter Cronkite, who, while being no more superhuman than Murrow, at least was believed to be a benevolently neutral purveyor of the news.   All of this began to change (at least noticeably change) with the accession of Dan Rather to the CBS throne.  Widely accused of being a sort of left-wing shill, Rather inaugurated the journalistic era that is taken for granted today: that is, one in which it is assumed that news broadcasters, and the corporations they work for, are politically biased and operate with a palpable agenda.   So when Ailes took over at Fox News and openly crafted the network as an organ for conservative politicking, he was bringing into the open a historical tendency that had already begun.  Going all out in this direction by lining up such conservative luminaries as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, and Sean Hannity, Ailes found that he could not only generate enormous profits for Fox News, but that he could also transform Fox into a major player in American politics, harnessing the allegiance, and votes, of millions of Fox consumers who, in turn, would drive Ailes's Republican party ever further to the right and facilitate the rise, first, of the Tea Party, and then of Donald Trump.   The left responded with comedic ridicule (The Daily Show, The Colbert Report) and ideologically positioned news broadcasting of its own (MSNBC).  The result has been a news landscape that plays out like an unending WFC smackdown: the news as political entertainment.   But there have been more profound results.  The explicit politicization of the news has contributed in a crucial way to the increasingly unbridgeable gap between two Americas, a gap that will remain, and fester, no matter who wins the approaching presidential election.  This gap is only being widened by the echo-chamber effect of what I'll call "the social mediacization" of the news, wherein, just as with the Fox phenomenon, consumers of the news "tune in" only to those sources that tell them what they want to hear.  And while it is fair to say that Fox started it, the condition has now become well nigh universal, with Americans from all over the political spectrum becoming hardened  in both their political positions and in their entire apprehension of reality, because, in effect, they are living in different realities.   And so, as everyone wonders how we ever came to the predicament in which we now find ourselves—both generally and with respect to the presidential campaign— we can see that while Roger Ailes helped get us here, no amount of finger pointing will resolve the problem, because the pointing is now in every direction.  Simply recognizing this dismal fact will not change anything of course, but we can't even begin to address the problem without illuminating its manifold sources.  And that, finally, is what popular cultural semiotics is for. ... View more

Most teachers of writing have no doubt read—or read of—the letter written by University of Chicago Dean Jay Ellison and sent to the incoming class of 2010 telling them that the University is deeply committed to free speech and that they should expect to encounter controversial material in their classes as a matter of course; no trigger warnings necessary. In Ellison’s view, giving such warnings and establishing “safe places” are a threat not only to freedom of speech but to intellectual development. The topic of trigger warnings has been a hot one for some time now on campuses across the country, and it has been exacerbated, in my view, by a rise in the number of colleges and universities that have “open carry” laws: students packing guns to class may, some argue, be in a position to do more than complain if they encounter views with which they disagree or find threatening. I expect that you’ve been engaged in conversations on your own campus. At any rate, the Ellison letter drew quite a bit of response, starting on his own campus with a letter in response, signed by 150 professors, challenging the sweeping condemnation of trigger warnings and safe spaces. While those signing the letter say they hold a wide range of views on these issues, they are in agreement that a more nuanced approach is necessary. What interested me more than this faculty letter, however, was one written by a University of Chicago senior, Sophie Downes, and published in the editorial pages of the New York Times. Downes takes exception to the Dean’s letter, arguing that the Dean’s letter misrepresents both “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces.” In her view, the letter is a “public relations maneuver” that shifts attention away from other pressing issues. As she says, the administration has refused to meet with student groups who have asked to discuss these issues, and it has threatened to discipline students who staged a sit-in protest. The university even hired a provost who specializes in corporate crisis management and dealing with "activist pressure." While the university accuses students of silencing opposing voices, it continues to insulate itself against difficult questions. It seems to me that these letters offer a rich resource for teachers of writing and our students and that they would make for an excellent exercise in analysis: students could bring the lens of Toulmin rhetoric, especially to the Dean’s letter, where the “warrants” carry great weight. Or they could examine the use of personal experience along with ethical and emotional appeals. Such an analysis could lead to deep engagement with the issues raised. It could also lead to strong student writing, in letters to editors, blog or wiki postings, or letters in response to the Dean, the faculty, or to the senior student. As writing teachers, we have a real advantage in terms of getting to know our students: we are likely to know when and if trigger warnings would be beneficial, and we are expert at creating classroom communities that value listening and respect for all as well as freedom to speak truth to power—and to one another. We remember—even if those embroiled in the current discussion do not—the culture wars and Mary Louise Pratt’s important elaboration of what she called the “contact zone” and its corollary, the safe house. In it she provides a description of Guzman Pomo’s 1200 page letter to Phillip III, written in 1613, along with a brilliant analysis of how the writing and illustrations in this letter turn Spanish norms on their heads and establish a very productive “contact zone” between the two cultures. It’s worth looking up Pratt’s original essay just to read about this amazing letter, but after that analysis, Pratt applies the concept to her own courses, showing the ways in which they function as contact zones but also arguing for “safe houses” to balance that contact. Those arguing about trigger warnings today would do well to return to Pratt’s analysis. Or to the long tradition of “hush harbors” where slaves could gather to exercise religious freedom and to practice literate acts. In fact, the civil rights movement in general provides another very good example of the necessity of both contact zones and safe houses. So as this academic year gets under way in earnest, writing teachers across the country have an opportunity to engage students in some exploration of these concepts, to help them trace forerunners of the concepts, and most importantly, to craft their own definitions, ones that can serve as a set of guiding principles for building a strong and effective, a daring and respectful classroom community. ... View more

I was just talking with a colleague about possible new directions for the writing program at our school and one of the things we started thinking about was genre.  As the content and apparatus for Emerging might suggest we’ve traditionally focused on academic expository writing in our classes—the class argument-driven academic paper.  But it occurs to me that Emerging does offer entry points for those interested in exploring some different genres.   Roxane Gay’s “Good Feminist?” is a good starting point and an interesting model for students.  One might call Gay’s work an autobiographical essay, but it’s one that engages the writing of others and makes a strong argument, as well.  But I think it also models for students one way to engage in autobiography that moves from simple narration to a kind of positioning.  After all, Gay is interested in her relationship with feminism (or with what is considered being a “good” feminist) and her essay offers an interesting model for students to positions themselves within and against other markers of identity or political positioning.  Dan Savage’s and Urvashi Vaid’s “It Gets Better” and “Action Makes It Better” are also useful for thinking about genres that bridge the personal and the political.   For something that moves towards the multimodal, Tomas van Houtryve’s “From the Eyes of a Drone” is a good bridge for thinking about the visual essay.  Throughout his essay, the images and the text work together to form an argument.  That use of text in conjunction with image might be particularly useful in getting students to think about the visual essay or in working in the visual essay to a more traditional writing classroom.   Finally, there are some essays that are, classically, essays.  David Foster Wallace’s “Consider the Lobster” is probably the stand out example, but you might also consider Michael Pollan’s contribution.  I think Yo Yo Ma’s essay is a particularly good example of the genre, especially as it is written from someone not only outside academics but within the music profession, as well.   Ultimately, of course, if your class is all about genre-based writing, then this probably isn’t the text for you.  But it’s interesting to think about the small moments of flexibility allowed by this reader and interesting as well to imagine where one might go with it. ... View more