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

Last week, I wrote about my goal to increase participation by having students track their contributions to discussions and in small group work. My hope is that by making the participation assessment more transparent, students will be more likely to engage in class discussions and activities. Another of my goals for the new school year is to improve students’ communication with me. Too often on our campus, we hear stories from students in online courses who are surprised that there are real people behind the courses. They’re so used to automated modules and robograding that they are shocked when a real person responds to their questions. I decided to try something that would let them know that I’m real from the first days of the course. I had already emailed them a “welcome to the course” message, and I included biographical details on the course website to tell them about myself. I’m not sure any of them ever read that information, though. I wanted something catchier, something more engaging. I decided to add an AMA discussion forum in the CMS. AMA stands for “Ask Me Anything,” a kind of discussion popular on Reddit. Typically a celebrity or an unusual or interesting person hosts the AMA session. Readers post questions, and the host replies. It’s something like a personal interview conducted by the public. To introduce the discussion on our course CMS, I shared this list of ten things about myself with the basic instructions for the discussion: Inspired by the AMAs on Reddit, I'm here to answer any questions you have. Since we are in Canvas instead of Reddit, this discussion forum will be open through Monday, August 29. If you see a question from someone else that you want me to answer, click on the Like button. I'll answer your questions (within reason, of course). This forum isn't graded, but it counts toward your participation grade. To get started, let me tell you a bit about myself. I graduated from Virginia Tech with a B.A. and an M.A. in English. I worked at a small educational software company in Austin, Texas, doing documentation, tech support, and software design. I next worked as a website manager, coding and writing content for sites used by English teachers. I blog about teaching and writing on my own sites and in a textbook publisher's online community. The first computer programs I wrote used punch cards.  When I was in high school, we had a computer in the math classroom with a telephone modem, and when we finished our work we could log on and play 21 against the computer. I like to make handmade cards and study how technical writing works among cardmakers and scrapbookers. I am a life-long Girl Scout and have been working locally with the nut and candy sale in the fall and the cookie sale in the winter/spring. Since I was 7 years old, my family has always had at least one poodle. We currently have three. I love stickers and washi tape. I chose the facts that I shared purposefully. I wanted to share details from my work experience that demonstrate my qualifications to teach technical writing, as well as my experience with technology. The idea was to create some shared experiences with the class. I ended the list with some personal information unrelated to the class or technical writing. About a third of my students asked me a question in the forum. Some questions were meant to clarify or expand upon the information I had shared. For instance, I was asked how many poodles we had had overall and what technical writing had to do with scrapbooking. I was also asked questions about what I like to read, restaurants I like, and how campus had changed since I was a student. By the end of the discussion, I felt that I had engaged students in a way that I hadn’t in previous courses, and I knew I had found a strategy that I would use again. How do you connect with students so that they see beyond their stereotypes and assumptions about English teachers? How do you demonstrate that you are more than a robograder? I would love to hear your strategies. Please leave me a comment below!   Credit: Question Mark Sign by Colin Kinner, on Flickr, used under CC-BY 2.0 license ... View more

Several years ago, a student of mine (we’ll call him James) stuck around after my introductory fiction-writing class because something was on his mind. This was around week three of the semester. He’d seemed highly engaged in the course so far, but today he was being quiet. We waited while everyone else cleared out. I smiled reassuringly. He cleared his throat and looked at his shoes. When the room was empty except for us, I asked, “So what’s up?” He told me that he would never be able to complete the exercise I’d assigned that day. I had asked students to brainstorm some interesting details from their pasts, and to incorporate these details into a scene of fiction. The idea was to get students to use pre-existing knowledge as a way to give their work more authority. I asked James what the trouble was. He shrugged. “There’s nothing remotely interesting about any part of my life,” he said. Then, so I’d understand his dilemma, he elaborated. “I grew up on a farm, in a town of fifteen people, where everybody is related. The next largest town was ten miles away and there were only fifty or sixty people there.” I told him that to me, a guy who grew up in densely populated New Jersey, his life sounded completely fascinating. “No, it isn’t,” he said. And to prove his point, he started telling me about the various cows that his family owned. “I’ve always wanted to milk a cow,” I told him. He shook his head and tried not to laugh at me. “They weren’t milk cows.” Clearly, I should have known better, but my knowledge of cows is limited to Far Side cartoons and Chick-fil-A commercials. It won’t surprise you to learn that James was able to use his knowledge of a) farming, and b) living in a very remote area, to create a scene that was fascinating and sophisticated. Each of our students is an expert at something. Their knowledge and experience runs deep; often the trouble is that they believe their knowledge to be universal and their experience to be common or uninteresting—until told otherwise. I’m not advocating that students only “write what they know.” I regularly steer students away from writing slightly fictionalized accounts of events in their own lives. Still, I’ve found that it can be very useful for them to put some of what they know—particularly, unusual things that they know really well—into the stories and poems they write. Doing so gives them confidence and their work a startling amount of authority. [[This post originally appeared on Litbits on October 3, 2011.]]  ... View more

Today's guest blogger is Amanda Gaddam‌ (see end of post for bio). This election season, though at times seemingly interminable, is nearing its end, and for most of us, Election Day falls in the middle or near the end of our terms.  While “election fatigue” is a very real phenomenon, it’s difficult for me to imagine an Autumn Quarter composition course that doesn’t address the unique and sometimes shocking rhetoric spilled on the political battlefield each day.  In my WRD 103 Composition & Rhetoric I course at DePaul University, weekly readings from the New York Times and the current political climate fuel class discussions about audience, context, and purpose, as well as genre and visual rhetoric.   This term, I’m spending a good deal of time talking with my students about the ways in which social media are employed in political campaigns and how such social networks have changed how politicians reach their target audiences, as well as how audiences react and respond to these communications.  Twitter has been an especially important, if sometimes fraught, medium for politicians during this election cycle, and as such, it makes for an especially relevant and rich area for discussion and exploration for composition and rhetoric students.    Background readings The St. Martin’s Handbook, Ch. 2: Rhetorical Situations, and take the opportunity to point students to the Index:     Assignment The following assignment and associated in-class activity have been developed to work with Twitter, but there are certainly other social media networks that could be used instead, e.g. Facebook or Instagram.  I have this assignment scheduled after students have completed a rhetorical analysis of a candidate’s stump speech, so they are already somewhat familiar with audience analysis and strategies of political rhetoric.    1. Provide examples of famous and infamous tweets from presidential candidates and ask students to perform rhetorical analyses in pairs or groups. Ask students to think about the characteristics of each tweet’s intended audience, the use of media (gifs, memes, images, links, etc.), the language, and the tone. Students should think about the rhetorical strategies employed in crafting and publishing each tweet, determine the purpose and context for the tweets, and they could evaluate the rhetorical effectiveness of each one, as well.  This makes for an excellent in-class activity, but it could be adapted as a homework exercise for instructors trying to conserve class time. The tweets below are just a few of the many interesting tweets ready to be unpacked in class discussions.      Clinton’s tweet provides for interesting discussion about the adoption of social media jargon and whether or not it’s effective or appropriate for a presidential candidate.   This Trump tweet came under fire for the multiple misspelled words. Students might debate how the tweet itself and the following scrutiny and criticism affected his target demographic.   Jeb Bush’s social media team tweeted this image in a “meme war” between Clinton and himself.  Students could analyze this image and others in the exchange to evaluate their rhetorical effectiveness. 2. Students select a candidate to represent on social media and become the Deputy Digital Director for their chosen campaign. In this new role, they will create actual Twitter accounts for their candidates and publish five tweets using a variety of complementary media. In order to prepare for this role, they should spend time reading and analyzing how their predecessors (the real-life campaign digital directors) use Twitter to sell their candidates to their followers. Students may choose to continue or diverge from the current social media strategy when they create their own tweets, but they should be prepared to explain and defend their choices in a reflection essay, to be completed after the creation of the Twitter account. Tweets should reveal consideration for audience and purpose through the careful selection of language, tone, and content, and students should take advantage of the opportunities that Twitter provides for adding video, images, and gifs to help communicate their messages.   I have built in class time for students to workshop their tweets with their peers before submitting their final five with their reflective essay, which gives students a chance to see how their tweets are resonating with real voters. Students submit their Twitter handle to a class list so that I and other students can view their works in progress.  Instructors may also require that students use a specific hashtag for each tweet, but that requirement will use up characters that students may need.       3. Students complete a short reflective essay explaining the rhetorical choices they made and defending their approaches for each tweet. In this piece, students should discuss the purpose of each message and the ways in which they employed ethos, pathos, and logos through text and media to achieve those purposes. Each essay should also offer students an opportunity to evaluate Twitter as a medium for political campaigning—in what ways did the social media platform complement and/or complicate the message and ethos that the student was trying to communicate to the intended audience? The entire project, including the tweets and reflective essay, is evaluated based on students’ clear consideration of their rhetorical situations, application of textual and visual rhetorical strategies, and demonstration of their commitment to the process, including peer review.     Reflection The character limits and genre conventions of Twitter provide unique challenges to students as they attempt to think through the most effective ways of reaching followers across the country and the world for a specially defined purpose, but the real appeal of this assignment to me as an instructor is the way it asks students to identify and reach out to actual audiences. Though instructors try, to the best of our abilities, to create real and meaningful exigences for writing assignments, we’re often challenged by the fact that we are the primary, and often only, audience for these assignments.  First-year composition students are part of the audience for politicians’ social media posts and are part of the voting public, in many cases for the first time, and this assignment allows them to explore the ways in which they are targeted by political campaigns and how textual and visual rhetoric play into campaign strategy, and it asks students to employ those rhetorical principles to reach out to real audiences, as well.    Guest blogger Amanda Gaddam is an adjunct instructor in the First-Year Writing Program and the School for New Learning at DePaul University. She holds a B.A. in English with a concentration in Literary Studies and a M.A. in Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse with a concentration in Teaching Writing and Language from DePaul, and her research interests include first-year composition, adult and non-traditional students, and writing center pedagogies. Want to be a guest blogger on Multimodal Mondays? Message Leah Rang‌ for more information. ... View more

The elements of argument can be applied to issues we read or hear about daily in the news. Although the term warrant is not a familiar one, the concept of the warrant, or the assumption underlying a claim, can help to explain why a writer or speaker believes in that claim.   Consider the heated controversy surrounding gun control. Many in the United States would like to see more government control of gun ownership. Why? What is the assumption on which they base that claim? They believe that stricter control would lower the number of shooting deaths in America. As support for their claim, they offer statistics about the lower rate of homicides in countries where gun ownership is not so widespread. The assumption is that if there were fewer guns around, fewer people would get shot.   What about those who disagree? They do not argue that lowering the number of guns on America’s streets would lower the number of gun deaths. They hold that having guns to protect themselves and their families gives them a fighting chance against those who threaten them. They offer anecdotal evidence of individuals or families who protected themselves successfully against criminals with guns because they themselves were armed. They argue that if owning guns were made illegal, only criminals would have guns and law-abiding citizens who gave up their guns would be at their mercy. They see a slippery slope, however, toward something they fear even more: They fear that if government took away their guns, there would be nothing left to protect them from their government. They bring up the specter of Hitler’s Germany, where unarmed citizens were helpless against the armed military. Those who favor gun control question why it has to be legal to own guns that seem designed more for the military or for criminals than, say, for hunting, but gun advocates see taking away any of their rights where guns are concerned as the first step toward losing them completely. Both sides in this bitter debate are guided by their fears. Those fears are just different. The assumptions behind each side’s stand on the issue determine what claim they support. The Second Amendment is brief, but complicated by the fact that the wording suggests that Americans have the right to bear arms in order to be a part of the nation’s militia. Ironically, those who most strongly support the Second Amendment do so because they fear the modern form of America’s militia.   Source: Jon S, Newspaper colour, on Flickr ... View more

When Ann and I started writing Habits of the Creative Mind, we were motivated by a desire to represent writing as creative engagement with the world. There’s no best place to start and there’s no predetermined end point when it comes to making sense of the world; you just dive in. But, it’s in the nature of textbooks to impose linear order on their contents: any subject is made to appear to have a beginning, middle, and an end. This isn’t a problem when the subject at hand is best taught in a linear fashion. But the thing about creativity is that it’s not the result of a linear process. There’s no equation A+B+C that, when followed in order, produces creative output.   When we say creativity is a habit of mind, we mean that it only comes about through regular, deliberate practice. And that practice has many different forms, such as paying attention, exploring, connecting, revising, and so on. One doesn’t practice paying attention exclusively; nor does paying attention always precede exploring, despite what the layout of our Table of Contents suggests. Even beginning doesn’t necessarily come first! All the habits wrap around one another; they refer to one another recursively; each one pulls, dialectically, towards a sense of a coherent whole, on the one hand, and a focus on the smallest of details, on the other.   Imagine, instead, a circular book where you could enter at any point.       You start somewhere. You keep moving. You return and start again. You practice and practice, but you are never done. (Ann has written at length about how she started one course using Habits. That essay starts on page 4 of a pdf that may be found here.)   A course syllabus reproduces the linear distortion of what creative engagement with the world (i.e., writing) entails.  Before our students are even seated, before we have any idea who they are, university policy requires that we have a document for them with deadlines and peer review days, a document that makes it look like all that lies ahead for them is the drafting and revising of papers.   But a syllabus, like a pre-draft outline, is best understood as a provisional itinerary.   SO, if a course is a journey, what do we put on our syllabi? Requirements In our classes, attendance is required. You can’t practice if you’re not there. You have to bring the book and the required readings to class with you. Every class.   You have to check the class website and your email regularly: plans change, assignments get revised, alternate routes emerge. Class meets twice a week, but your education takes place 24/7.   We have our students hand in their papers in digital form in folders that are shared with all the other members of the class. (You can do this pretty easily with Dropbox or Google Docs.)   Grading Policy Our essay, “On Evaluating Student Writing,” is devoted to the discussing how to assess the work students produce in response to assignments drawn from Habits. We recommend making the grading criteria explicit on the syllabus. We tell our students that we are looking for work that: asks genuine questions or poses genuine problems; works with thought-provoking sources; shows the writer’s mind at work making compelling connections and developing ideas, arguments, or thoughts that are new to the writer; explores complications (perhaps by using words like: “but,” “and,” “or”); is presented and organized to engage bright, attentive readers; and makes each word count.   Grading Percentages We think that it’s important to have the syllabus convey the fact that the achievement of intellectual creativity requires steady, sustained practice and that progress in this realm is not necessarily uniform or linear.   So, we take into account: Attendance and participation in class discussion; Timely submission of drafts and revisions.   And, for each student, we weigh these with: The best work each student has submitted.   This means that all assignments are recorded and that the final grade for the course represents an assessment of each student’s sustained level of achievement.   Paper Assignments You’re likely to have these prescribed by your program or department. So, you can say that there will be X number of papers required and produce a calendar with dates. But we recommend describing this work in relation to the overarching goal of Habits: by the end of the semester, we want our students to have produced their best writing to date and for them to leave the class with evidence that they can ask a real question and that they can follow that question wherever it leads.   Plagiarism We think that the idea of plagiarism is best handled as an object of inquiry so, in our syllabi, we direct our students to our essay, “On Working with the Words of Others,” which considers citation and creativity together.   And then, as the semester unfolds, we spend our time together exploring what is entailed in using writing as a technology for thinking new thoughts. ... View more

I’ve written several times in the last few months about style and especially about the crucial importance of style to effective communication today (see “Writing as performance”). In an age of instant and constant information bombardment, what we attend to—what we can even try to attend to—is that which gets and holds our attention. So far from being the forgotten canon of rhetoric that style (along with delivery) became in the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, it is now front and center of what it means to be able to “get a point across.” I was thinking about style a week or so ago when I was in Eisenstadt, Austria, to attend a Kronos Quartet concert at the Esterhazy Palace, home to many of Haydn’s compositions. In this truly magnificent setting, one so ornate and gilded that its beauty could easily have drawn attention away from the music, I watched and listened as Kronos made the space their own. Their eclectic and deeply international program, which included works by artists from Serbia, Mali, Canada and the high arctic, Scotland, China, and Azerbaijan, brought together rhythmic traditions from around the world: in one piece, the cellist stomped her foot at irregular intervals; in another, the violist tapped an ankle wrapped in bells; in yet another, the rhythms were punctuated by drumming. Like the rest of the audience, I was caught up in these rhythms, so much so that I felt I was drifting above the palace floor, keeping time with the quartet. I came back to earth with a rhythmic bang during the two encores: Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” and the iconic bluegrass “Orange Blossom Special.” Talk about rhythm: I could not keep my feet from tapping along. Reflecting back on the concert, I remembered a statement made by Eric Havelock, a great historian and theorist of ancient Greece: rhythm, he said in one of his works, is at the base of all human pleasure. I have often asked students to think about that claim and to see how it applies in their own lives. We talk about the rhythms of the year, of the day, of our lives; we talk about music as a universal language of rhythms; we talk about sexual pleasures – and much else. Usually, students begin skeptical of Havelock’s comment but end up thinking he has at least an arguable point. And rhythm, of course, is at the basis of writing as well, as a UC Irvine student surely intuited when he asked me, “How can I make my sentences sing?” Writers make sentences sing through word choice, of course, through images and strong verbs. But beyond those characteristics lie the structure of the sentences, the rhythm that they establish, break, re-establish. Students today have a strong sense of rhythm’s importance: rap, hip hop, spoken word poetry—all deal in rhythms that make the poetry “sing” and make us remember it. Some have clearly perfected the rhythmically effective Tweet (though many have NOT). It’s up to teachers of writing, I think, to help students see and understand the importance of rhythm—and reading everything they write is one good way to begin. And once they start playing around with rhythms, trying out various “beats” to their sentences, I think they will love it. My bet is that their writing will get stronger as well! [Photo: Kronos Quartet by Radek Oliwa on Flickr] ... View more

Frenetic.  That was the word I taught my ESL and co-requisite freshman writers during the second week of our 15-week term.  The pace of the first two weeks had left them frazzled.  In nine hours of face-to-face class time, we completed diagnostic writing, learned how to log in to the online program that accompanies the text, practiced creating and sharing Google Docs, and figured out how to access course materials in Blackboard.  In the midst of those technical preliminaries, students selected a general writing-about-writing focus for a course-long research project, and we began the hunt for source material, learning to evaluate potential sources, summarize a strong source, and reflect on the reading and writing process. I have arrived in the classroom for each session harried, distracted by combination locks on a laptop cabinet, and ready to “get it done”; at the same time,  I’ve been working on two book revisions, a review of  dual enrollment syllabi for my department, a draft of our spring schedule, and our QEP. Frenetic, indeed.  In the last class, I glanced at a student from West Africa, who sat staring at the screen (where we had sorted some new vocabulary) with a look of befuddled consternation.  There was lively conversation in groups throughout the rest of the room, yet this young man was silent.  After class, he spoke to me about the pace of the course.  It was just too fast for him; he wanted to read and write more slowly, not because he lacked skill, but because he wanted to think.   “But,” I protested, “we don’t have time…there is a schedule we must keep.”  Perhaps, I thought, the student is operating from a culturally-constrained pace or conception of time.  He will have to adapt to our understanding, I reasoned – and perhaps my class could help him do that.  But then I came across two articles that made me re-think that hasty assessment.  One article, which addresses William James and his notion of attention, appeared in my Facebook newsfeed. I was struck by this quote from James:  “My experience is what I agree to attend to.”  The second article was Mulhouser, Blouke, and Schafer’s fascinating look at #kairos through the lens of Star Wars.  The opening section of that article, aptly titled “Episode 1,” refers to Richard Lanham’s work on the “attention economy,” where value is determined by the degree of attention given – and to one’s ability to catch and hold the attention of others.  Perhaps the crux of the issue is not so much time (or the lack of it), but attention.  The student from Cameroon had chosen to attend to our vocabulary study, thoughtfully, but I pushed students to turn their attention to a group activity instead.  My goal was to retain the attention of the native speakers in the class, who (I assumed) were socially conditioned to demand constant shifting of attention.   Ironically, my efforts to make the class engaging may have thwarted the dynamics of attention that engendered learning for this student—and others.  In some languages, there is no root verb meaning “teach.”  Rather, teach is a causative variant of the verb “learn.”  So teaching is crafting the context or experience that allows for learning, and while attention cannot be forced, it can be impeded.   In other words, our classroom practice should encourage—not obstruct—attention, so that students experience threshold concepts of our field.   My frenetic pace works against this goal. Later that same day, a student from the Dominican Republic knocked at my office door.  “I know you are so busy,” he said, “but tell me when you might have a little time for me.” This student needed my attention, not just my time.  His deference shows respect, but it also suggests an underlying reality that I see in many of my students:  as members of an “attention economy,” they value my attention, and yet they don’t perceive themselves in a position to ask for it.   Marginalization exists in troublesome ways in this economy of attention. Even in my own speech I may enforce such marginalization:  I often ask students to pay attention to various things:  parts of the text, details of the assignment, my instructions.  “Pay” – this is what we do for things that have value.  And yet my word choice sometimes changes when I am approached by students:  “I will see if I can give this a little attention.”  “Give,” not “pay.”  I may be overthinking this, but I sense an implied arrogance here:   I give attention, but I demand that students pay.  To affirm their value in this economy of attention, I must pay attention to them, not just my syllabus; they are relevant and worth the price of my attention.  Frenetic is derived from the Greek; it suggests insanity, a mind that is out of control.  Attention, in contrast, comes from a Latin root; it suggests extending, stretching towards something.  After a frenetic two weeks, it’s time to attend more thoughtfully to the pace of my class.  I need to slow down and pay attention to the students and their learning – trusting, in turn, that they will stretch themselves towards the learning that is before them. ... 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The presidential election offers any number of opportunities for writing students to practice critical thinking while examining the ways in which rhetoric, argument, and evidence circulate (sometimes loosely) in the world.  One opportunity I’d like to think about this week is the “Taco Trucks on Every Corner” meme.  In case you missed it, the meme comes from an interview on MSNBC’s All in with Chris Hayes in which Marco Gutierrez of Latinos for Trump made the comment while talking about the problems his culture can bring to the country.  Twitter, in turn, had a field day and “taco trucks on every corner” quickly become an Internet meme.   As a meme, it represents a complex intersection of teachable moments, with elements of politics, race ethnicity, social media, viral media, and more.  In this post I wanted to discuss some of the essays in Emerging that you can use to help student unpack that intersection.  Given the nature of memes, “Taco Trucks on Every Corner” may be dead and gone by the time we’re able to post this, but these same readings can be used for similar memes which will no doubt still spring from what promises to be a contentious election year.   For starters, any discussion of memes is most usefully framed by Daniel Gilbert’s “Reporting Live from Tomorrow.” Gilbert discusses memes in the context of super-replicating beliefs; his discussion of surrogates is also useful given the increasing use of campaign surrogates in this election (Gutierrez, for example, is considered a surrogate).  Students might find it useful to apply Gilbert’s definition of the term to the rather different deployment of it within the political arena.   But of course this meme from this surrogate is centrally concerned with stereotypes around race ethnicity.  Jennifer Pozner’s “Ghetto Bitches, China Dolls, and Cha Cha Divas” is a great essay for getting students to examine the ways in which media use stereotypes; Maureen O’Connor’s “Race, Ethnicity, Surgery” and Steve Olson’s “The End of Race: Hawaii and the Mixing of Peoples” can both be used to deepen discussions around race and ethnicity.   ... View more

The undergraduate classroom might seem like the last place to introduce students to archival materials. We have so many other commitments—to coverage of historical periods, to literary interpretation and theory, to improving student writing—that it might seem like an extra activity that might simply take up too much class time. However, students can and should learn about the cultural conventions that affect the transmission of texts, and I would argue that their close readings of these texts is actually central to their understanding of what poems, plays, and short stories are and how they work. Reading various versions of a text can actually get undergraduates—and teachers—to work toward a clearer and more effective definition of close reading. The results of my students’ research consistently demonstrate that textual studies can actually inspire close reading and help students generate the questions that they can use in a variety of literature courses. Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” is one of the most famous poems of the twentieth century. It also provides us with a short, easy way into discussing archival materials. This is how the poem appears in most literature: In a Station of the Metro The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. Immediately, students are engaged with the poem. The title locates us in Paris in the early 1900s, when the Metro system was still a wonderful and terrifying new symbol of modernity. The students are haunted by the “apparition” of the faces, stuck underground like the ghosts of the dead. And they like the surprising comparison between these ghostly faces and the petals on a bough. They see the commentary on the alienation of the modern metropolis. Formally, they can recognize Ezra Pound’s debt to the Japanese haiku tradition (and, as Ezra Pound wrote in his essay titled “Vorticism,” this poem is indebted to the haiku tradition), and the poems mathematical precision: the equation between faces and petals, the loose iambic pentameter of each line. In fact, this poem is so accessible—or at least it seems to be—that it’s easy to forget that it is the result of a variety of editorial decisions, and that the transmission of the text across time actually transformed the poem. This is how the poem looked when it was first published in 1913, in Poetrymagazine (To see the original 1913 publication of Pound’s poem, you can go to this link on the Poetry Foundation website: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse/2/1#20569747😞 IN A STATION OF THE METRO The apparition       of these faces       in the crowd  : Petals       on a wet, black    bough  . Ezra Pound In this version, the title is boldly announced in all caps, the poet’s name appears just beneath the text, and the poem itself seems to be deeply concerned with innovations in typography and design. In this context, the words are transformed by the use of white space between them; and by the change from a semicolon to a colon. With a semicolon, Pound joins two independent ideas, but with this use of the colon, Pound suggests that the second line is an appositive, or description, of the first. In class, we discuss the tiny differences between these two versions, and I ask students which version they like best—not which is best—and I don’t tell them which version has actually become the standard version that appears in literature anthologies until the very end of the class period. As they work through each version, they have to pay attention to the tiny, seemingly superficial choices in layout and punctuation that they might overlook in a reading of just one version in our anthology. In doing so, they are engaging in a critical discussion, even if they don’t know it yet. In recent years, bibliographical scholars have shown how such “accidentals” as punctuation, capitalization, spelling, and overall typographical design contribute to meaning in significant ways. In this example from Ezra Pound, students see that these choices in appearance are indeed substantive, even emotional. [This post originally appeared on LitBits on November 2, 2011.]]   ... View more

My goals for the new school year include both increasing participation and asking students to track their own work. I’m hoping that putting those two goals together will help me succeed in checking them off on my list. I have always had trouble with grading student participation. I like the elementary school options for kidwatching with sticky notes or forms, where you have a place to take notes about each student’s participation and work. The strategy doesn’t seem practical at the college level however, so I need to find something that works for me. Part of the challenge is that students rarely understand what counts as participation, and, as a result, they don’t know when they need to step up their efforts. I found some tips in David Gooblar’s post, “ISO: A Better Way to Evaluate Student Participation.” My favorite strategy is Tony Docan-Morgan’s “participation logs.” I immediately knew I wanted to try them out in all the classes I am teaching. Based on Docan-Morgan’s model, I created my own spreadsheet templates, using Google Sheets,  with details on what students needed to log. In my fully online Technical Writing course, I created tabs in the spreadsheet for each of the following: Class Discussion Small Group Other Participation Self-assessment & Reflection On the Participation Log page on the course website, I provided an overview of the goal, details on how to make a copy of the template, and suggested how to log the work that students had done in the course so far. My Writing and Digital Media class meets face-to-face, so I explained and demonstrated the template for their course in class. It includes the same tabs as the technical writing template, with the questions rephrased to fit the classroom and the course. I’ll add an explanation page to their site before midterm so that they have everything they need for a midterm self-assessment. In addition to giving students the templates, I tell them what the work they are assigned would count for. For the Technical Writing course, I added a simple table, which had links (removed here) to the discussion activities to date in our CMS: If you posted in this Discussion List it on this sheet of your log Questions about the Syllabus and/or Course Logistics Class Discussion I am Traci — AMA (short for "Ask Me Anything") Class Discussion Introduce Yourself with a Short Professional Bio Small Group Ethical Poster Discussion Class Discussion For the assignments that I have given since we went over the logs in my Writing and Digital Media course, I have been including a note that tells them how their work counts with the assignment. The multimodal dig assignment, for example, ended with a note about the end of the grace period and this sentence: “This activity is graded Pass/Fail and counts as part of your participation grade as a class discussion.” So is it working? It’s still too early to tell. The Technical Writing students have only had their logs for a week, and the Writing and Digital Media students for a few days beyond a week. Their response in the face-to-face class to the logs seemed positive. The most positive sign for me, however, happened after a small group discussion of students’ design journals in the Writing and Digital Media class. As I was circulating among the groups, I overheard one of the students reminding the others in her group: “Don’t forget to add this to your log.” I’ll take that as enough of a success for now. How do you encourage participation in your classes? What strategies do you use to track how students participate? I would love to hear from you in a comment!     Source: Cropped from Soulforce at Gordon College - PDR by Zach Alexander, on Flickr, used under CC-BY 2.0 license ... View more

Think about a time—maybe as a student, a teacher, or another environment—when you had to write something in a genre that was new or unfamiliar to you. What did you do? How did you figure out what was expected?   I’ll never forget how out of place I felt in my first graduate seminar in applied linguistics. I had done my undergraduate work in literature, and I didn’t have the first clue about how to structure a graduate seminar paper that reported data I had collected. I tried to write something that looked like the thesis-driven essays I had learned to write as an undergrad, and I was stunned by the grade on my paper and the comments about cryptic things like “a literature review,” “a methods section,” and “limitations of the current study.” I was a fish out of water.   Many of our students will experience this feeling at some point in their undergraduate careers, or perhaps in their professional lives after they leave our classes. Yet, as Yancey, Robertson, and Taczak point out in their book Writing Across Contexts: Transfer, Composition, and Sites of Writing (Utah State UP, 2014), students who have been successful writers in school are reticent to change up what they’ve been doing. If it’s worked well thus far, why change course?   My goal as a writing teacher is to make sure that my students have a set of effective tools to help them figure out what to do when they find themselves in unfamiliar writing territory. But if they haven’t yet realized that they will be called upon at some point in the near future to write things that don’t look much like five-paragraph essays, my first job is to help them discover what professionals write in their areas of interest.   When I taught a first-year writing course this summer using An Insider’s Guide to Academic Writing, I asked students to do a couple of assignments at the very beginning of the course that introduced them to writing in their majors and future professions: An interview. I ask students to interview an upper-level undergraduate or graduate student in their field of study to ask them about the kinds of writing they do and how they learned what was expected. I used to ask students to interview a faculty member, but sending dozens of first-year students out to interview faculty across campus can make you unpopular quickly, even though you have the best of intentions. Students learn a great deal from speaking with others in their field of study, and their interviewees have an ethos that you, as a writing teacher, don’t necessarily have. A rhetorical analysis of an article. One of the major projects in my course is always a rhetorical analysis of an article written by someone in their field of study. I ask students to try to find a piece written by one of their professors. I encountered an interesting challenge this summer with a student of dance, who couldn’t find a scholarly article by one of his faculty members. We found several reviews and other pieces they had written, though, and so he was able to think about the various kinds of writing his faculty members do. He also made exciting connections between dance and the composing process. A rhetorical analysis of other writing assignments. I also like to have students analyze writing assignments they are completing in other classes. They can learn a lot by looking at the expectations of assignments in different fields of study and by comparing what they bring to class with the assignments from their classmates. I wrote more about this activity, introduced to me by Rachel Buck, in “Low Stakes Writing in a WID-Based Curriculum.”   Giving students the opportunity to hear about writing from professionals in their fields of study is invaluable. Of course, hearing from faculty members on their own campus is very effective, but it can be time-consuming to build partnerships with colleagues across campus. The videos that accompany An Insider’s Guide to Academic Writing in LaunchPad Solo give you the opportunity to introduce students to writing in different fields from professionals who do that writing on a regular basis.   What are some other ideas you have about helping students understand the different contexts in which they will be asked to write in college and beyond? 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

It's a bit amusing to read the reviews of Britney Spears' performance at the recent VMA awards ceremony.  As far as I can tell, the two main complaints appear to be that Spears is not Beyoncé,  and that she is stuck in a 1990s time warp.  Well, it's a relief to hear that the event wasn't a twerk-fest this time around.    The particular details of Spears' not-very-overwhelming comeback attempt are not of especial semiotic interest, of course, but they do get me thinking about some things that are.  And one of these is what it means to live in a youth culture.   American culture—especially its popular culture—is so grounded in youth worship that it is very easy to take it all for granted, but the whole thing probably began just under a century ago in the Roaring Twenties, when Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald were the self-appointed idols of a youth movement that swept America for a delirious decade—complete with a reverence for the latest in popular music, daring women's clothing fashions, and (in spite of Prohibition,) lots and lots of alcohol—until the Great Depression and the Second World War ended the party.  Not until the 1950s would America's march towards a fully-evolved youth culture be recommenced.   Of course, with a good deal of help from such outliers of their parents' generation like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, it was the Baby Boomers who completed our evolution into an all-out youth culture in the 1960s.  "Don't trust anyone over thirty" was a popular slogan for a generation that is now in its sixties and seventies.  "Will you still need me/Will you still feed me/When I'm sixty-four," sang a man who is now seventy-three.  "Hope I die before I get old," the surviving members of The Who still declare.    This is something worth remembering for Boomers as we see ourselves castigated by Millennials for ruining their world.  I mean, we started it.  And since we started it, it is probably only well, you know, our karma that now that we aren't young any longer in a culture that patronizes old age (at best), or sneers at it, or neglects it, no one really cares about what lessons we may be able to share about what life holds for the young.  If every generation in traditional societies that have reverence for old age has managed to repeat the errors of their parents, why should our youth culture be any different?   But as I watch all the tittering at poor 34-year-old Britney from the vantage point of sixty-two, I can think of a few things that never get said in a youth culture that I rather wish had been said to me—not that I would have really listened, probably.  The first is that, believe it or not, though your body changes with the years, you don't—at least not all that much.  Others may not recognize you, but you do, and if, as Wordsworth said, "the child is father to the man," there is a remarkable amount of that child still around, even as the years go by. But time is not the same, no matter how much of the child remains.  I recall very well what time was like when I was young.  Though it passed very slowly compared to the way it passes for me now, it also was packed with change.  I look back on my late youth and young adult years and am amazed at all that happened.  It seems to be squeezed together in some way.  The flow of time now, though faster in its way, is also more regular, steadier, more evenly paced.    The change in one's experience of time is something a youth culture doesn't prepare you for, because, in effect, a youth culture has no past or future tense.  Grounded in an eternal present in which youth is expected to last forever (or until thirty, the age at which a twenty-something Scott Fitzgerald pledged he would commit suicide by .  .  . until he reached it), a youth culture ignores not only the fact that you get old, but that being old is a far longer stretch of life than is being young.  The popular culture that a youth culture creates only exacerbates this by insisting that one's life should be a constant series of excitements and diversions, "burning with a hard gemlike flame" (as Pater put it), or insisting that "it is better to burn out than to fade away" (as Neil Young put it when he was still young).   But no one is "Nineteen Forever," as Joe Jackson's rather remarkable song warns.  Perhaps someone should tell that to Britney Spears, or to whoever is running her life these days.  There are some rather interesting life stages that we go through past the early ones, but you won't hear much about them in a popular culture wherein now is somehow always forever—literally the last word.    But it never is.  After all, believe it or not, someday even Beyoncé will get old. ... View more

Work has always been a significant factor in my life, and I have counted my blessings every day for the work of teaching. Growing up, I watched members of my extended family engaged in hard physical labor—working in the fields, caring for animals, making clothes, cooking, cleaning. On it went from early morning until sundown. Now our society tends to think of “leisure activity” as involving some kind of physical activity: for my grandparents, aunts, and uncles, “leisure” meant getting away from physical activity for a while; it meant sitting on the porch in a rocking chair telling a story or two before bedtime.    This week I’ve been trying to observe all the work and workers around me, taking note of all those who make others’ lives easier through their labors. I watched closely as the post office clerk climbed a tall ladder to retrieve packages; I listened in as a young waiter took orders with a smile; I observed workers on a wayside cleaning crew scouring the area for litter and trash. I marveled at the teachers pouring back into their classrooms, ready for another year with their young charges.   Work, as we know, comes in all colors and flavors: Mike Rose has written eloquently on the dignity of work in The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker (which includes a chapter on Mike’s mother, who waited tables.) We also know that work can be grinding – beating people down to exhaustion and beyond.    Still, at least in this culture, we seem drawn to work, in part perhaps to help give our lives meaning. I think it’s worth taking time to talk with students about their conceptions (and preconceptions) of work—what they think it is and what they think it is for.  I often introduce such discussions with a favorite poem, like this one by Marge Piercy:   To be of use The people I love the best jump into work head first without dallying in the shallows and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight. They seem to become natives of that element, the black sleek heads of seals bouncing like half-submerged balls.   I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart, who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience, who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward, who do what has to be done, again and again.   I want to be with people who submerge in the task, who go into the fields to harvest and work in a row and pass the bags along, who are not parlor generals and field deserters but move in a common rhythm when the food must come in or the fire be put out.   The work of the world is common as mud. Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust. But the thing worth doing well done has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident. Greek amphoras for wine or oil, Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums but you know they were made to be used. The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.   On this Labor Day week,  I’m grateful for work that is real – and for all those who labor. ... View more

I’m just barely getting over a cold as I write this post on this the day that my next batch of posts are due.  It’s my third (fourth?) cold of the year and it has me thinking a lot about the complex nexus (what I am sillily calling the “complexus”) between health and the classroom.   For starters, consider the problem of presenteeism in the classroom.  Presenteeism, or working while sick, only spreads sickness and keeps you sicker longer.  I speak from experience.  I am pretty sure I got this cold from my boss, the Dean, (who came to work while sick) and the last time I had a cold I am also pretty sure it lasted over two weeks because I insisted on continuing to come into the office.  This time I decided to just be home and be sick, except when it came to teaching my class.  Certainly we have a local culture that believes you should never ever ever cancel class and getting sick at the end of the week with a class on Monday gave me little time to work out a substitute teacher and lesson plan.  But I am also wondering to what extent teachers of writing, particularly perhaps more vulnerable populations like contingent faculty, are pressured to continue teaching when sick with something like a head cold.  I’m institutionally positioned in such a way that I could have missed my class (maybe should have missed it) but I’m curious about the climate in your local writing programs or your own experience as a teacher.  What are the implicit or explicit expectations for teaching when you have something like a head cold?   I guess it just struck me that while I felt it not just OK to cancel all my work meetings, but, in fact, good for my health and the health of others in my workplace. Something about the classroom setting felt too pressing.  The lack of time in a semester?  The fragile bond with students so early in the semester?  The uniqueness of my curriculum?  I’m not sure, but it got me thinking.   I’m also thinking about my own reactions when students are sick.  Our program has a strict attendance policy that we call predictive rather than prescriptive.  Based on our experience, students who miss a lot of class don’t pass.  All of my personal experience in the writing classroom affirms this as a general truth: what students learn they often learn in the classroom, through discussion and group work and writing practice—none of which is work easy to replace.  To what extent, then, am I fostering a culture of presenteeism?  To what extent do I have to, given the necessity of attendance to progress?   I’ve never really questioned my attendance policy before, but being completely sick of getting sick from sick people who are sick at work, I am ready to rethink it.  I imagine there must be a compromise that allows students to be absent when they’re down with a head cold (saving the health of everyone else), that allows that to be verified (and wow, a whole other issue that I wouldn’t believe a student, right?), and that then allows some way to make up the work that was missed.  Supplemental instruction, maybe?  Office hours? Writing Center?   It’s probably the cold meds, but I feel like I am being dense, like there’s an obvious solution that I just can’t see.  If you have it, please share it.  I’m really curious how people deal with presenteeism both as a worker and with their students.   ... View more