An important New York Times article circulated a couple of years ago that focused on questions of persistence in college. The lessons of the new lines of research as represented in this article are important for those of us who teach writing to first year students (and the link still works). Many years back, Stephen Brookfield in The Skillful Teacher identified what he called “the imposter syndrome,” the belief held by many students that they don’t belong, that others are smarter or better suited to a particular school or program. I used the imposter book chapter to great effect with new grad students at New Mexico State U when I was teaching in the PhD program in Rhetoric and Professional Communication. Everyone related to the feeling that others were better prepared and more likely to be successful. Crassly, others were just naturally smarter. The reading allowed us to talk together about such concerns, to focus on what was under our own control, and to develop both the self-confidence and scholarly habits that would lead to excellent performance. I’ve seen the imposter syndrome invoked in many settings; it garners continuing attention in psychology, learning theory, and elsewhere. It’s obviously a concept with resonance. The news as represented in the studies cited in the Times piece suggest that feelings of inadequacy strongly affect performance and persistence, and such feelings disproportionately affect lower-income students. Students may fit the institution’s admissions profile—they are smart enough and sufficiently prepared to do well. But they are often confused about how to be successful and afflicted with self-doubt. The good news is that schools can take action to improve persistence and success for low-income students. The Times article details University of Texas programs that treat the target group of students as high achievers and leaders, providing challenging intellectual enrichment experiences. The program has had great success. But we don’t need to think only about big programs and initiatives. The article also calls attention to the research of David Yeager. From the abstract of his article on interventions, we learn that “Seemingly ‘small’ social-psychological interventions in education—that is, brief exercises that target students' thoughts, feelings, and beliefs in and about school—can lead to large gains in student achievement and sharply reduce achievement gaps even months and years later.” I don’t think there is a better place for such interventions—where students begin to affirm their identities as successful college students—than introductory composition. We have the interpersonal closeness, the small class setting, and the focus on writing that make our classrooms a natural fit for such brief interventions. Peer interaction and class discussion can bring out the shared feelings—the fears, uncertainties, and doubts—that affect many college students, allowing them to see that what they feel is widely shared. Yeager’s work is exciting in part because he demonstrates that very brief exercises of 25 minutes or so can have lasting effects on performance. What might some brief writings or activities focus on? I’d suggest such topics as these: Can you improve your thinking? Can you become smarter? How? Talk to a successful junior or senior. What have they done to be successful at college? Suppose you get a bad grade on a writing assignment. What’s your next step? Write an email to a friend who is still in high school. Based on what you’ve learned since coming to college, offer your friend advice on how to be successful. What are some common stereotypes that might affect how you or your classmates perform in college? Are you smart? Write about a situation where you behaved in a really intelligent way. I would not make these huge assignments, just brief writings. Depending on the class climate, students might post in the class forum or exchange writings in small groups. Yeager’s findings suggest it is simply the process of engaging in these types of thinking that leads to changes in behavior, so it is not necessary to spend a lot of time drawing out all the complications. Some of these writings might lead to more extended pieces, perhaps drawing on primary or secondary research. If real interest surfaces, for instance, on getting smarter through brain training, there are plenty of recent articles out there in brain science that show just how malleable an organ it is. But that is not essential. What’s essential is helping students develop the self-confidence and sense of identity that lead to success in college. ... View more

Today’s guest blogger is Jeanne Law Bohannon (see end of post for bio).   I know the semester has started when my Twitter feed fills with colleagues sharing innovative assignments alongside anxious reports of other conversations, mainly about "what counts as writing?"  Just last week Andrea responded to a tweet about one such interaction: There are so many of us who flinch when we read tweets like this one, and my voice is but one among those many; but, I would like to use my space this week to offer a mini-bibliography of the important multimodal work folks are doing with their classes and posting in the Macmillan Community.  I also want to introduce other voices into this conversation: students.  After all, their growth as professional writers is why we do this, right?   What do Writing Students Say about Composing Multi-Modally? When we design and implement multimodal writing assignments in our classes, we understand that we are also trying to measure students' learning and rhetorical growth.  But do students understand this impetus, and more importantly, do they agree that multimodal composing prepares them for that growth just as well or even better than traditional essay writing?  Last year I conducted a couple of IRB-approved case studies in multimodal-writing driven courses with upper division students (in-major) as well as with first-year writers (STEM majors) at my large public, state university.  Here are snapshots of their attitudes towards multimodal writing and why they think it's an important skillset to practice in college and beyond.   Upper-Division Students: Six out of eight (75%) students preferred digital writing (blogs, wikis, social media, videos, podcasts) to print writing.  The two who reported as neutral cited lack of exposure to multimodal writing in their responses.    Students reflected on their responses:   " In today's world we [are] destined to write in digital spaces.  There are so many different places in our field dealing with digital spaces that [it] is very important to be able to access and utilize these places."   "Writing in digital spaces is growing to be the main way to communicate both professionally and socially. To be heard properly, you need to know how to communicate in a digital space. I want to be the best I can be and get my message across as clearly as possible."   " I recognize the trend and appreciate the practical necessity of adapting the art of writing for digital spaces."   Seven out of eight (88%) students answered that they believe multimodal writing prepares them for careers after they leave college.   Seven out of eight students agreed or strongly agreed that they would enter into a job market where multimodal writing skills were valued. Six out of eight students agreed or strongly agreed that they would enter into a job market where multimodal writing skills were necessary.   Students' overall reflections on the practicality of multimodal writing assignments:   " I think is it necessary to include multimodal writing in college courses.  Print used to be the main guideline for writing, but in today's world it is essential to be able to communicate through multimodal elements."   " I think is it necessary to include multimodal writing in college courses.  Print used to be the main guideline for writing, but in today's world it is essential to be able to communicate through multimodal elements."   First-Year Writers: Responding specifically to vlogs as writing assignments, 15 students answered as follows:   100% of students reported that producing vlogs met the same learning outcomes as writing traditional essays   87% believed that vlogging made them interrogate their writing practices more intently.   Across three overarching questions about learning in a writing course focused on multimodal writing, students answered: My Reflections These reported student voices just add to the plethora of empirical and anecdotal research that instructors have done over many years of encouraging multimodal composing in writing courses.  I hope that the student voices from my studies do encourage colleagues to try-on multimodal writing opportunities and develop their own to share in our community. Together, we can continue to make the case for the value of multimodal writing across courses, grade levels, and workplaces.    Get Involved! Inspired by Carolyn Lengel's post, How We Write Now, that recounts Andrea's literacy and writing research spanning decades, as well as Traci Gardner's post on Social Media Re/Mix, I want to re/share posts with measurable writing assignments from this blog and invite community members to try them out, then get a conversation going about what worked and what didn't to make them better.  I want us together to be able to argue  "what counts as writing" using evidence from these outcomes-based assignments.  One of my favorites is Amanda Gaddam's Visual Rhetorics Analysis, where she invites students to develop visual writing skills through political discourse.  Caitlin Kelly's post on Listicles for Information Literacy provides students with opportunities to demonstrate critical source-finding skills using a trending genre in new media writing.  I have also shared composition assignments from my classes on this blog since 2014, many of them crowd-sourced with students.  Some of the most-read posts include: Twitter as Writing Invention; Re/Mixing Academic Essays as Youtube Videos; and Student's Choice Multimodal Writing Drop-in. You can find countless more robust assignments by searching the Macmillan Community or even just Googling "Multimodal Mondays." Please try out these assignments and tag me back to talk about them.  Or send me your own and lets talk about those! For more information on the two cases studies I mentioned, tag me in the Community, via Twitter @drbohannon_ksu, or email jeanne_bohannon@kennesaw.edu.   Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Join the Macmilan Community to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)!   Jeanne Law Bohannon is an Assistant Professor of English in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Kennesaw State University. She believes in creating democratic learning spaces, where students become stakeholders in their own rhetorical growth though authentic engagement in class communities. Her research interests include evaluating digital literacies and critical engagement pedagogies; performing feminist rhetorical recoveries; and growing informed and empowered student scholars. Reach Jeanne at: mailto:jeanne_bohannon@kennesaw.eduand www.rhetoricmatters.org ... View more

Aristotle defined a rhetor as a good man skilled in speaking. What we are teaching and you are learning when you study argumentation is rhetoric—the use of words to move listeners—or, in this course, to move readers. Aristotle taught the concepts of logos, pathos, and ethos, and we still do. Campaign season is usually a good time to look for timely examples of speeches that illustrate logos, pathos, and ethos. The presidential campaign of 2016, however, has rewritten the rules about balancing the three appeals—logical, emotional, and ethical.   Few would deny that Trump has won supporters through the power of personality, or ethos. In classical times, a speaker won over an audience in part through the ethos he projected, convincing his listeners through his demeanor and his words that he was a good man and thus should be believed. Ironically, Donald Trump has stood that idea on its head by winning supporters by being brash, rude, and crude. His supporters are sending a message that the relative decorum of past campaigns is a part of the political system that they would like to see dismantled. The fact that Trump has gone from being entertainment to being the nominee of his party shows just how effective his unorthodox tactics have been. His most recent campaign manager has clearly tried to get him to use a teleprompter rather than talking extemporaneously, but the jury is still out as to whether coming across as more reasonable and thoughtful will lose more supporters than it will gain. (And as to whether Trump can change that much.)   Analysts covering the two political conventions this summer were quick to point out the difference in tone between the two, and what they were discussing was pathos. Pathos is appeal to the emotions. It was quite noticeable that Trump was using fear tactics, painting a dark picture of all that is wrong with America. In order to sell the slogan “Make America Great Again,” you have to prove that it is not great now. He played on his audience’s fear of terrorism, crime, and illegal aliens. Clinton took the opposite approach and had an upbeat convention, stressing what is already great abou t America.   Trump has been criticized for lack of substance in his speeches. Before, during, and since the convention, he has depended on fear to replace detailed plans. One of the most specific proposals he has offered is the wall he would build between the United States and Mexico. The promise of a wall to block the arrival of illegal aliens and the crime that he attributes to them is enough to make his supporters forget to ask how he is going to make Mexico pay for this wall, which he has consistently said that he will do. He plays on the fear of terrorist attacks when he proposes to deport hundreds of thousands of “bad dudes,” even if these “bad dudes” are American citizens. The harshest criticism he has received the whole campaign came when he criticized the parents of a Muslim soldier who died in battle. Even then he tried to turn the attention away from what many saw as disrespect for a dead soldier and his Gold Star parents (and the threat of taking away rights of immigrant groups) to say that what he was fighting was the type of people who killed the son.   There is no denying that Trump’s tactics have worked amazingly well. Back when more than a dozen candidates were competing for the Republican nomination, few took him seriously. Hillary Clinton has had to take him very seriously because many Americans find what he has to offer appealing. Some tried-and-true means of predicting political success just haven’t worked this time because Trump has broken from what is expected—and it has worked. Source:  Anthony Majanlahti, Cicero, on Flickr  ... View more

When offered the opportunity to have a sustained encounter with the limits of one’s own understanding, most people would politely decline. But, if you think about it, that’s what the act of writing really is—an open invitation to be dragged off into the thicket of the unknown, where hours disappear in a haze, the blank screen concealing sentences half-started, half-revised, then abandoned. Experienced writers learn how to keep at it and even come to enjoy the struggle that precedes any new insight. Most other folks run screaming in the other direction.   When Ann and I set out to write Habits of the Creative Mind, we were motivated, in part, by the desire to help our students unlearn their fear of the thicket. We wanted to give them the chance to see writing not as a tool for keeping the unknown at bay, but rather as a technology for thinking new thoughts.   Why do our students fear the thicket? Our students—and yours—are the most tested generation in human history. They have spent over a decade filling in bubbles, providing short factual answers, and writing formulaic “arguments” that prove that doing A is better than doing B. In such a world, one doesn’t say, “I don’t know” or “I don’t think doing A or B really addresses the root of the problem.” One learns, instead, to avoid questions and ideas that resist conversion to readily-understood bullet points. So trained, our students stick to clichés and allow their thoughts to be contained by the sluicegates of the commonplace.   We see ourselves working against this test-driven vision of learning and the incurious culture of checklists and clickbait it leaves in its wake. And we propose, instead, that it is the teacher’s job to model a version of intellectual curiosity that delights in questions and complex problems.  The rallying cry for our pedagogy could well be, “To the thicket!”   For beginning students, the thicket is never far off.  So, they don’t so much need help getting there as they need help learning how to stay there, so they can develop a greater tolerance for the encounter with the unknown, the unfamiliar, the ambiguous.   Take a simple problem: you assign an online reading and the students come to class saying they couldn’t do the reading because they couldn’t find it on the web. They’ve “tried” and failed and now they look to you for guidance. What to do?   We understand that the natural response in such a situation is to revert to what is familiar and manageable—to print out copies of the reading in advance, say, or to stick with assigning the readings included at the back of the book. But teaching Habits is about teaching students how to improvise in a world overrun with information and teeming with possibilities. And we believe that the only way to do this is for the teacher to model, in matters big and small, an openness to the inevitability of having to revise, rethink, redirect, and refocus all semester long.   If your students say they can’t do a Google search to find the reading online, what are they telling you about their creative resources? If this hurdle is too high for them, how well has their past education prepared them to survive in our information-rich economy? Curiosity is a habit and it’s acquired through practice; so, too, is learned-helplessness.   And this, to our way of thinking, is precisely what makes teaching writing so intellectually stimulating and emotionally rewarding: you get to help students come to see thinking and writing as lifelong activities whose value extends well beyond the walls of the classroom and the confines of a college transcript. To get our students to make thinking creatively a habit, to make being curious a habit, to make improvising a habit, we self-consciously design our classrooms to be learning environments that promote creativity, curiosity, and improvisation.  So, while our goals as writing teachers remain constant, the details of our syllabi are always implicitly provisional; they’re just sketches of how the course might go and are subject to revision as soon as the journey into the thicket begins. ... View more

Teaching students to understand genres and how they work has become a central goal for many writing teachers. For those of us who teach writing about writing, it is difficult to imagine explaining key concepts like rhetoric and discourse community without explaining genre. However, Doug and I (and the teachers we’ve worked with) have had a hard time finding readings about genre that are both comprehensible and accessible to students. While scholars like John Swales mention genre in passing, that has not been enough for our students. Other scholars, like Carolyn Miller, explain genre in a way that can be difficult for first-year students to grasp.   Of course, looking to other textbooks for examples about how to talk about genre has been historically pretty frustrating. Even though our field generally agrees on a view of genres as flexible responses to recurring rhetorical situations, textbooks often take the most formulaic view of genre possible. Students like rules and instructions, and first-year writing textbooks are often all too happy to provide them, even if the result is teaching students inaccurate concepts about how genres work—concepts that are not usefully transferable to new and complex writing situations.   In my own classroom, I have always spent a lot of time on genre, but have produced my own definitions and examples for students to work with. In the third edition of Writing about Writing, available this November, we decided it was time to explain genre ourselves, in the way that we explain it to our own students.   In a new first chapter, we talk about conceptions of writing and introduce students to both the idea of threshold concepts as well as some particular threshold concepts about writing that are important to all writers. We then introduce students to two threshold concepts that will help them use the book most effectively. One of these is about genres (that writing responds to repeating situations through recognizable forms) and the other is about rhetorical reading (that texts are people talking), which Doug will describe in Bedford Bits in September. In the genre discussion, we introduce students to the idea of genres as “recurring text-types, which are ‘typified rhetorical actions in response to recurrent situations or situation-types.’” To illustrate, we draw on many examples from students’ own experience to illustrate how this works (for example, syllabi and text messages). We provide some heuristics for thinking about how texts work, drawing on Sonja Foss and John Swales, among others. For example: what conditions call for this type of text? What content is typically contained in this type of text? What form does this type of text typically take? We ask students to engage in some reflection about their own experience. For example, what do specific instances of genres they commonly encounter (like syllabi) have in common, and what changes across individual instances? We end by providing some specific ways for students to think differently in all of their classes, and as they use the Writing about Writing textbook.     We are excited about this new addition to Writing about Writing, and look forward to hearing about your experiences using it with your students.     ... View more

Another summer almost over: grandnieces Audrey and Lila start school in just over a week (7 th and 3 rd grades respectively—a very big deal), and frosh are starting to pour onto campuses across the country. My favorite time: a new school year. This summer, though, I’ve had the exhilarating experience of teaching Writing and Acting for Change at the Bread Loaf Graduate School of English, and so it has given me a jump-start on this school year and on thinking more and more about how important it is for students to have an opportunity to use writing to make things happen. That is a definition of “good writing” that emerged from a five–year longitudinal study of writers I and colleagues did at Stanford. As the students progressed, they turned away from instrumentalist and reductive definitions of writing and began to say, over and over, that good writing gets up off the page and marches out to make something good happen in the world. I’ve taken that lesson to heart, and thus try to provide opportunities for such expansive public writing in all my classes. And it certainly proved true in my summer Bread Loaf course. Reading/viewing/listening to the final projects left me breathless, from high school students and their teacher in Vermont working with brand new immigrant youth through a new course on media literacy; to high schoolers in Illinois taking on a narrative action project aimed at using podcasts to document the construction of a digital archive for the Mother Jones Museum; to the development of a new spoken word project at a Massachusetts high school where students will use poetry to act as teachers, advocates, and agents of positive change; to Kentucky teachers and students creating a new course—Cooking 101—that will introduce students to planting and gardening and harvesting skills as well as to cooking what they grow and studying its economic and environmental footprint, to . . . well, I could go on and on. These projects are the epitome of assignments that make things happen in the world, and that keep on giving gifts to the students who carry them out. I can hardly wait for the report that should begin to trickle in as the year begins and the Bread Loafers put these projects into place. So I was thinking a lot about the wonderful bounty of good and purposeful writing for change during a recent visit to the University of South Carolina’s writing program. There I met with faculty and graduate student instructors who were preparing for the first days of class and working on curricula. The two first-year courses they teach allow for writing that makes good things happen, and while some brand new teachers will take it slow, all seemed committed to the idea of fostering writing that is active and engaged. I spent a delightful day talking with the teachers about the major issues they face in the classroom: too-large classes, too little resources provided from upper administration, and all challenges of turning a disparate bunch of college frosh into a learning community. They were full of brilliant ideas and, as I always am at this time of year, “fired up and ready to go.” On my way out after a day of meetings, the Associate Director of the program, Nicole Fisk, gave me a gift, a book written together with the students in her first-year class, which had taken a service learning turn. The students and their teacher had gotten to know a displaced Syrian student, a refugee, studying at their university, and they had talked with her about her experiences. Out of these discussions grew their project: they would study the refugee crisis in Syria and would try their hands at writing a children’s book to raise awareness of the war(s) in Syria and the suffering of countless children. I Had a Home in Syria is the result of their collaboration; together, they wrote it, worked with an illustrator, published it (Grog Blossom Press in Columbia, SC), sold the book online, and mounted a GoFundMe campaign. All proceeds went toward the tuition of the Syrian student they had gotten to know. One of the students who worked on the project later said, “I was somewhat opposed to helping refugees before taking this class, just because that’s what the status quo was, but once you meet a refugee face to face, everything changes.” That’s writing and acting for change . . . and using writing to make something good happen in the world. When I think of all the projects like the ones I’ve described here, happening all over the United States, it gives me cause for hope and reaffirms my belief in all our students. [photo: RGA Classroom by LLLEV on flickr] ... View more

It was a rough summer here in South Florida, particularly for those of us who are queer.  The shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando hit very close to home.  As more than one friend pointed out, Omar Mateen, the shooter, lived equidistant from Orlando and my home city of Wilton Manors, the second gayest city in the United States.  He could have just as easily headed here.  And with a best friend who works security at one of the most popular gay bars in town, the whole incident was beyond unsettling.   One of the many administrative hats I wear at school is Director of Florida Atlantic University’s Center for Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.  I was thus quite grateful to be able to coordinate and participate in our school’s response to the shooting.  We had a memorial, an open discussion for students (many of whom are Hispanic and many of whom are from the Orlando area), and a panel discussion.  The turnout for all of these was impressive, particularly during a summer session, and included not only our students but also many faculty, staff, and administrators.  In the wake of these events, our college has reached out to work more closely with the university’s Office of Diversity and Multicultural Affairs.  It feels very good to be making a difference.   But I’ve also been thinking about how to make a difference in my classroom, not just for queer and Latino students but perhaps more particularly for transgender students.  If you follow the news closely, you may have noted an alarming rise in violence against transgendered people, particularly those of color.  Our school already has a list of gender neutral bathrooms, the result of a grassroots petition by a transgender student in our college, but I wanted to make sure I made my classroom a safe space for transgender students.   Here are some of the practices I’ve adopted:         Preferred Name. Before calling the roster on the first day of class, I ask students to let me know if they use a name other than the one the registrar uses.  I’ve always done this because sometimes Katherine goes by Katy or Jerome by Jer.  It’s more important than ever since at our school the registrar can only change a student’s name in the system after a legal name change, a byzantine process in Florida.  Transgender students who haven’t transitioned or who don’t have the resources for a legal name change may be stuck with an official name that doesn’t match their gender identity.       Preferred Pronouns. I always do a quick ice breaker activity on the first day so I can learn my student’s names.  I usually ask about their major, their experience with writing, and something really interesting about them (this last one is always a lot of fun and helps me learn names quickly).  I now also ask students for their preferred pronouns, allowing transgender students another way to claim their identity within my classroom.  I also normalize this by providing the class all the same information about myself.       Modeling Behavior. I try be particularly conscious about my behavior in front of the class and particularly aware of my use of language.  Students look to me to set the standard for the classroom and I can do a lot to make sure that our class is safe and inclusive.       Class Discussions. Some of the readings in Emerging are also useful for fostering conversation, thinking, and writing about issues around gender in general and transgender specifically.  Ruth Padawer’s “Sisterhood is Complicated” explores the complications that arise when transgender students transition from female to male at all-female schools.  Julia Serano, author of “Why Nice Guys Finish Last,” is herself transgender and uses her unique perspective to discuss the challenges of being a man in relation to dating and rape culture. Kenji Yoshino’s “Preface” and “The New Civil Rights” looks at the pressures to “cover” or downplay a disfavored aspect of identity.  You might also use Kwame Anthony Appiah to talk about our need to coexist with those different from us or Francis Fukuyama on the importance of human dignity or Dan Savage and Urvashi Vaid on the violence faced by queer youth.  As Yoshino points out, changes in civil rights are more likely to come through conversations than laws and as Appiah notes practices can change before values do.  Discussing queer and transgender issues in the classroom, then, offers us a way to make change even if there are no transgender students in the class.   Life has pretty much returned to normal here in South Florida, though there is a much more visible police presence outside the bars in Wilton Manors even now.  Classes started for us August 22 and a new wave of students are filtering through our classes. As we continue to heal from what happened in Orlando and as transgendered people continue to face horrific violence around the world, it’s good to know that in some small way I can make a difference.  You can, too.  Please share other tips you have for making your classroom a safe and inclusive space. ... View more

Last week was the first week of classes at Virginia Tech, so at this point, the term is well underway. I have spent a lot of time this summer getting ready for this moment, by doing research and making plans to improve what I do in my classes. While I have lots of ideas, I hadn’t thought about them in an organized way until I read David Gooblar’s 4 Resolutions for the New Semester over on Chronicle Vitae. I certainly relate to the goals that Gooblar shares, but more importantly, I realized that I too wanted to write down my goals for the term. Since I do everything in lists of ten, I want to share my ten resolutions: Increase class participation, especially online. I’m not happy with the discussions that take place in my online class. Honestly, though, I have never been the best at leading discussions in the classroom, either. I want to make it better this year. Give students more choice. Uniform assignments rarely work for students, especially in technical writing where students are working on diverse career goals. The kind of writing a computer science major learns is quite different from what a food science major needs. I want to design a series of assignments that lets students choose the tasks that matter to their goals. Switch to Pass/Fail grading. After Asao Inoue’s presentation at the Conference of the CWPA in July and reading his research, I am convinced more than ever that the behavioral grading system I devised years ago for professional writing classes is the way to go. Naturally, the course grade has to be A to F, but most of the coursework students do can easily be graded as "acceptable" or "not," with the option to revise. Give feedback more quickly. I am notoriously slow at grading. It frustrates me, and it frustrates students. My goal is always to at least have work turned back before the next project is due, and often I barely make it. Sometimes I fail. I want to make sure students get their work back soon enough to let them revise and benefit from the feedback this year. More formative feedback. Building on the Pass/Fail grading and faster feedback, I want to spend less time justifying or editing in my feedback and put more effort into urging students to revise and improve their work—as well as giving them the support they need to make that happen. Ask students to track their own work. I started asking students to gather details on their participation in the course a couple of years ago. This year, I want to step up that practice. With students tracking their own participation, they are aware throughout the term where they stand as far as that portion of their grade is concerned, not just at the end of the term when they write their self-assessment. Encourage more (or better) reflection. I always ask students to reflect on their work, telling me about their goals they set and challenges they have encountered with their projects. I want to work on deeper reflection, however. Student reflections too often feel as if they are only going through the motions. Students write the reflections only because they have to, not because the process will help them improve their writing. I need to create more transparency in the practice so that students can find more value in these reflections. Add videos to online courses. I have been relying on websites and discussion boards for my online courses. I do point students to relevant video tutorials from Lynda.com (which students can access for free at my university), but I haven’t created any of my own video content for the course. It’s a bit of a challenge, as I don’t have the best software for the task. Still, I need to make it happen. I think it will allow me to give the students demonstrations and explanations that the resources I have been using are not. Add an AMA session. That’s an Ask Me Anything session, like those frequently done on Reddit. Particularly in the online courses I teach, students never get to see me or learn much about me. Granted they don’t need to know everything about me, but I think answering their questions will help me connect more with the class. I heard an “On Point” rebroadcast recently on how parents and step-parents function in blended families, and the speaker kept stressing “connection before correction.” That same idea might apply well to teaching. Encourage community. I want to build more community and support in my classes. I want students to be as willing to turn to one another for feedback, praise, and support as they are to ask me. My great hope is that the changes I am making to build more participation and to improve assessment and feedback will lead students to support one another and collaborate as a community. So, those are my goals for this school year. It is a lot to accomplish, but I hope I can make it happen. It certainly gives me plenty of ideas to share in the coming weeks, so stay tuned—and if you have new school resolutions of your own, please share them in a comment below. Here’s to a fantastic new school year!   Source: Goal? by Alexander Boden, on Flickr, used under CC-SA-BY 2.0 license ... View more

At some point while he was running, the kid’s batting helmet must have fallen off, because you can see his light blond hair—still short from the disastrous haircut his father gave him before his First Communion—practically glowing under the California sun.  He’s in the second grade and his t-ball team is the Reds.  Inexplicably, their t-shirt (the only “uniform” t-ballers get) is orange.  He is sliding, kicking up dirt, but he has already passed home plate.  Afraid that he’ll wind up short, he always waits until he has already tagged up to begin his slide.  Sliding is his favorite part of the game—that, and the free snow cones they get after they play. Obviously, this young athlete is me, and this is my wife’s favorite picture of me when I was a kid.   I loved to play t-ball, though I obviously wasn’t very good at it.  In t-ball—at least in our league—there were no strike outs, probably because swinging at and missing a stationary ball mounted on a tee wasn’t the sort of thing that tended to happen.  It did to me, though.  All the time.  I would approach the tee confidently, bring my bat back, and then twist my entire body into that swing, to the point that my eye left the ball long before the bat in my hand woooooshed right over it.  The grown-ups would let me do it over.  Eventually, I’d wind up on a base. I wasn’t an athletic kid—and I’m not a big sports guy now—but looking at this photo reminds me of why I loved playing (mostly, it was about being with my friends), and how important that game was to me.  We take pictures of the stuff that matters, after all, and my father apparently had the presence of mind to realize that this was an experience I’d want to look back on. Each semester, as an exercise in writing memoir, I ask my students to look at a photograph that has a special significance for them and to write “the story of the photo.”  I encourage them to avoid family portraits or landscape shots (unless there’s something really unexpected lurking behind the smiles in the portrait or beyond the scene captured in the landscape), and instead focus on those photos that capture a moment that someone realized was worth holding onto.  Maybe it’s a photo from the junior prom, or graduation.  Maybe it’s a picture from the last big party before the old gang had to pack up and move away to college, promising to keep in touch even while knowing that something important was coming to an end.  Maybe it’s the picture of a little kid, carving a pumpkin while her dad—out of frame except for his hands—guides her efforts with the knife.  The photo itself isn’t what’s significant—it’s the memory that the photo represents that we’re after.  As I said, we photograph that which we decide is important enough to capture forever; we write memoir for the same reason. I’ve mentioned before that the most common challenge for the creative nonfiction instructor is disabusing students of the belief that “there’s nothing interesting about me—nothing worth writing about.”  Students often think that nothing short of climbing the world’s tallest mountain while battling cancer will qualify them to become memoirists.  This exercise is designed to emphasize the idea that the point of this type of writing isn’t to write about an experience that’s fascinating on its own, but rather to write about an experience so well that it becomes fascinating for the reader.  As V.S. Pritchett has written, “It’s all in the art.  You get no credit for living.” [[This post originally appeared on LitBits on April 17, 2012.]]  ... View more

I’ve been so energized by teaching at the Bread Loaf School of English this summer that now that the term is over and the fall term approaches, I find myself thinking more and more about all I learned this summer. What I saw, over and over, were the most remarkable teachers imaginable at work: working against sometimes insuperable odds (in terms of state and local regulations and in sometimes deplorable conditions), these teachers are finding ways to reach young people and to engage them in deep, active learning through reading, writing, speaking, and performing. One especially powerful demonstration came when I was introduced to What’s the Story: The Vermont Young People Social Action Team, a course that brings together students from over a dozen schools in Vermont to engage in “a collaborative process of identifying and researching local topics of interest, drafting and publishing position papers, as well as designing, creating, and using media to effect positive change." Part online and part in-person, the course pairs student learner/activists with mentors at their schools and experts in policy making, social action, environmental science, and so on. Students in this very special class earn graduation credit under Vermont’s Act 77, “which promotes flexible pathways to graduation.” The brainchild of Vermont teachers at Bread Loaf, What’s the Story has been a huge success, so much so that the leaders of the project are looking for ways to scale up. Students across the state are invited to apply and each year-long course enrolls a cohort of 15 to 20 participants. And they love it. As one participant says, “I like working toward a goal in this course, seeing how the project evolves, and having the motivation to get the work done so that I will make change.” Another adds, “We are heading this project, not the teachers. If we ask for help, we get advice, but that’s it; this is our project.” I’d love to see similar projects springing up all over the country, and it strikes me that college writing programs might well become partners in the endeavor as well. ... View more

Dramatic texts are one part writing, one part performed experience.  In other words, a script must be judged not just by the quality of the writing, but by how well it works on stage. This concept is difficult for beginning playwrights to grasp. Textbooks try various ways to explain. For example, some call the script a “blueprint” for performance—a means to an end, rather than an end itself.  Additionally, some instructors discuss the magic of “theatricality”—that je ne sais quoi that separates dramatic writing from the other genres. Because “theatricality” is inconceivable apart from action—apart from the act of doing that constitutes performance—the teaching of playwriting requires performance as part of classroom activities. The concept of performance as pre-eminent should undergird all course structures. For example, when possible, written assignments should be shared aloud in class: hearing texts with an audience is preferable to at-home silent reading because the former better approximates how scripts are meant to be experienced. Dramatic writers must learn to see themselves as performers. They do not need to be good performers, but they need to be willing. They need to be able to play roles well enough that they can hear in their minds the characters’ voices as they commit words to paper. It is not the same skill as that of the actor, who hears primarily one voice at a time, but is more like that of the stage director who understands the interplay of multiple voices. Most playwrights, I believe, mutter to themselves. And, while a little murmuring is probably common to all creative writers, I would guess that playwrights spend an inordinate amount of time muttering speeches and singing songs to themselves. This skill—necessary as a “trying out” of characters—can be nurtured in students by having them perform. To teach theatricality at its most basic, I suggest “The Play without Words” exercise, which I do with beginning playwrights at the start of each semester. For this exercise, students write a one-page play with a plot, in which no one speaks. Students must convey that plot through performance, using only materials readily available—the classroom, items from home, and three random classmates. This challenging exercise goes a long way toward illuminating both the limitations and benefits of the stage.  Students typically try to do too much:  for example, one young woman once tried to show a couple saying their last loving good-byes before they jumped from a collapsing World Trade Center. While interesting, the premise is inscrutable without additional trappings—words or set—as explanation.  On the other hand, students have learned how marvelously engaging it is to have a swordfight or an actor pretending to be an animal:  these actions seem hokey on the page, but are magic in performance. By having students perform early on, they internalize the “theatricality” that separates playwriting from the other genres, thereby laying the groundwork to become better dramatists. How do you get student writers to incorporate theatricality in their dramatic works? How much does performance figure into your teaching? What are your favorite classroom exercises? [[This post originally appeared on LitBits on October 19, 2011.]]  ... View more

Many basic writing and first-year composition courses require students to conduct research and integrate the sources they find into their written work. The research paper poses challenges for instructors for a number of reasons: the changing nature of information literacy, the variety of disciplinary expectations for presenting and citing research, and the complexities of managing summary, paraphrase, and quotation, problems which were highlighted in the work of Rebecca Moore Howard and her colleagues in the Citation Project. In addition, faculty from other disciplines may view research as a generalizable skill set which can and should be covered in English courses; as a result, they expect students to arrive “research-ready” in their introductory and sophomore-level courses. My college recently selected information literacy and research as our new Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) topic. I was asked to lead plan development and draft a literature review over the summer. While at first reluctant, I have found the work to be directly related to what I am doing in the composition classroom and what I am reading about threshold concepts and teaching for transfer. One resource in particular stands out: The Association of College and Research Libraries’ (ACRL) Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education, which was adopted earlier this year. The Framework approaches information literacy not as a set of discrete skills, but rather as a connected set of threshold concepts which have been identified and refined by experts in the field (similar to the methods employed by Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle to determine threshold concepts for writing studies). These fundamental concepts echo and complement writing instruction: Authority is constructed and contextual Information creation as a process Information has value Research as inquiry Scholarship as conversation Searching as strategic exploration Under each concept, the Framework lists “knowledge practices,” which describe activities to foster development of the concept, and “dispositions,” which characterize emotions and attitudes of students who successfully acquire and apply the concept (the dispositions are similar to the “habits of mind” in the Framework for Success in Post-Secondary Writing). I believe the Framework can lead to new avenues of collaboration, research, and reflection for first-year composition instructors and their library colleagues. The framework also provides instructors like me with new tools for assessing the effectiveness of our pedagogy. Let me provide one example. In my composition classes, I require a researched essay.  Students begin finding sources early in the semester and build an annotated bibliography throughout the course. This 10-week search for sources is designed to emphasize reading skills, summary writing, and a sense of the on-going conversation connected to the issue chosen by the student.  Once the bibliography of ten sources has been accepted, students write the researched essay. One student, after completing his annotated bibliography this summer, submitted an eight-page paper in which every sentence after the introduction was followed by a parenthetical citation. There were no signal phrases, no discussion of credentials, and no attempt to distinguish between types of sources, which included both scholarly research, online news and periodicals, and a political blog.  After reading the paper, I tried to articulate for myself—and for the student—why the paper did not fulfill the expectations of the course. The ACRL framework provided two answers. First, in integrating his sources, the student did not “assess the fit between an information product’s creation process and a particular information need,” which is a knowledge practice associated with the “information as process” concept. Thus, while well-organized and grammatically sound, when addressing different parts of the research question, the paper did not distinguish between the reflections of a political blogger and the results of an academic study. In addition, the student did not meet the goal of the semester-long project to develop his “own authoritative voice,” which is a practice associated with the concept that “authority is constructed and contextual.”  I must ask if I provided opportunities to develop these knowledge practices. While I focused on the thinking and writing required to integrate multiple sources in a paragraph, and while I spoke about genres and authority as students searched for sources, I did not address these two together. In other words, when we worked on source integration, we didn’t discuss types of information and how to assess whether a particular source was a good fit for the paragraph.  In fact, I used the literature review from an article by Howard, Serviss, and Rodrigue to illustrate how sources could be integrated, without acknowledging that such a literature review draws only from academic research studies.  I want to address source integration and student voice differently this fall. In teaching research, it is very easy to present information literacy as a package of skills that begin with using search engines and end with punctuating an in-text citation appropriately. But a reductionist focus on the skills of information literacy, much like a reductionist focus on skills in writing, may not help students function as consumers and producers of information, even though it allows us to check assessment boxes easily enough. Students should be able to do more than plug terms into a search engine or database; they need to understand the differences between the two and how those differences can influence the outcomes research.  The ACRL Framework provides English instructors with an alternative theory of information literacy, one which recognizes the contextual complexities of research. ... View more

Seems like I’ve been thinking about abilities/disabilities a lot lately. I’ve written about Brenda Brueggemann’s brilliant work—and recommended her “Why I Mind,” which is on YouTube—and our Bread Loaf class has been doing quite a bit of soul searching in terms of our relationships, as teachers, to students with varying abilities/disabilities. And now comes Shoulder the Lion, a documentary film by Erinnisse Heuver and Patryk Rebisz.  Because a good friend is featured in the film, I drove to the Rafael Cinema House in San Rafael a few days ago to see a screening.  Knowing my friend, I expected it to be good: but in fact it was so far above good that I was just stunned.  This searing documentary tells the stories of three artists:  Alice Wingwall, an artist and photographer who lost her sight in 2000; Graham Sharpe, an Irish musician whose advancing Tinnitus makes it impossible for him to participate in his beloved band; and Katie Dallam, a veteran and psychologist who lost half her brain in a boxing match (“Million Dollar Baby” was inspired by this event).  The film moves back and forth among these stories, as the artists speak directly to viewers of their ongoing work and the emotions that accompany it.  In the Dallam sections, we learn that losing half her brain left her with “nothing, nothing at all.” She had no memory, and she had to re-learn absolutely everything, from eating to speaking.  Eventually, Dallam discovered art and found that her “disability” had taken away all her inhibitions.  The results are fantastical, larger than life, monstrous, fabulous, riveting sculptures and paintings. Sharpe never tells us how his tinnitus developed or whether doctors have tried any treatments, but he dwells on his emotional state as he sank into and eventually accepted the fact that no matter what he would hear ringing in his ears:  the sound, he says, is like TV static, with no reception, and it’s LOUD.  He turned his talents to building a music festival in Ireland, which after ten years had won the reputation of “Best Small Festival” in the country. At the end of the film, we see him sitting in a field, strumming his guitar, and writing lyrics, something he continues to do even though he can’t really play them. Alice Wingwall, a dear friend for well over a decade now, speaks eloquently of losing her vision, of her deep anger at being blind, of her realization that “seeing” is about more than vision, of her sadness that so many sighted people today do very little true seeing—bombarded by images as we are—and of her determination to keep on capturing images.  And so she does, as brilliantly and dramatically as displayed in the film.  With her husband, architect and writer Donlyn Lyndon, she answered questions after the film in her typical straightforward, witty way.  And we met Rumba, her guide dog, who took the entire screening in stride, as though she knew she was a “star” of the show. This film, and the artists represented in it, give testimony to an argument Shirley Brice Heath has made throughout her career: that some form of art (music, dance, sculpture, painting, drama) is essential to human development.  Heath’s work with youth groups across the country has engaged young people in artistic endeavors, and for decades she has documented the progress they have made and the way in which art has enriched and changed their lives.  Of course, I think of writing as an art—and speaking as well.  That’s one reason I want writing teachers everywhere to focus on the ART of and in writing/speaking.  The style, the rhythm, the cadences, the syntax, all of which bring a written or spoken performance to life.  As teachers, we need to remember that all people have artistic potential (just ask comics artist Lynda Barry, and check out her books!), and especially so those with “disabilities.” ... View more

Today, we welcome guest blogger Annalise Mabe!   Annalise Mabe was a student in the creative writing pedagogy practicum I teach at the University of South Florida. She assisted with the revision of The Practice of Creative Writing.  She is currently a graduate student in the MFA program at USF, finishing her thesis. She teaches creative writing, composition, and is coordinator for the university's Writing Studio.  Her work has been featured many places, including Brevity, The Rumpus, and The Offing.  - Heather Sellers How do we teach our students, and ourselves, how to write something new and compelling? We know there is no formula or simple-step process to follow to get the output we desire: the fresh take, the perfect hook, the narrative that many will want to read.             But we can and must look closely at what others are doing. When I began writing more intensively in my college courses, I remember staring at the blank white document page on my laptop computer, the vertical bar blinking at me, waiting for me to type something brilliant, a knock-it-out-of-the-park piece, the envy of Oliver Sacks, Diane Ackerman, and John McPhee combined. And the more I stared, the more the pressure mounted. The more I sat idly, the more I felt like I couldn’t write anything well, or anything at all, and so I often closed my laptop and took to reading in bed.             Then, when I was in graduate school, I read “Swimming,” by Joel Peckham, a braided essay that pivoted and turned quickly, using section breakers between parts to weave research and personal narratives. I realized that if I wanted to learn to write like that, I had to try the form on in my own style.             At first I felt like this wasn’t allowed, the trying on of another writer’s style, but I realized that sometimes the only way to learn how to do something new is by imitating. Sometimes, imitating is the only way we can see what the writer was thinking, what they were seeing from their place on the page as they wrote and drafted their work. I broke down “Swimming,” annotating the essay, inking up the margins in red. I identified the variances in syntax: short and choppy? Or long-winded and ranting? I noticed when Peckham used statistics, when he used a personal story, and when he wove both together. How could he do it so seamlessly? How could I do it too? And importantly, how could I teach my students to do it?             In the Introductory Creative Writing course I taught last spring at the University of South Florida, I assigned my students the short essay “After the Hysterectomy,” by Ira Sukrungruang. Their homework was to read the piece once for enjoyment, starring or underlining their favorite parts along the way, and then to read the piece again, this time reading slowly through the piece and looking more closely at their favorite parts in order to investigate what tools were working well. I asked my students to look at the items they had marked and ask themselves explicitly: Why did I like this part? If the answer was “it was poignant,” or “it was just really good,” I asked them to examine what the writer was doing more closely. What point of view is the writer using? Is he using commands in the piece? Are certain phrases or lines repeated? What sensory details can you detect, make you feel as though you are there? I wanted them to identify the tools (litany, second-person point of view, and lyrical language). Then they got to practice.             Because Sukrungruang’s piece was strictly second person, addressing a “you” throughout the piece, I asked my students to do the same in 750 words or less. I allowed them to stick with the same topic (relationships that end) or to take it somewhere entirely new; the choice was up to them as long as they adhered to the previous guidelines. And what followed was a collection of classroom essays so vivid in detail, so compelling in their litanies of lost loves, of waning light, I was surprised the work had come from mere freshmen and sophomores. However, there were a few students with essays that hit too closely to our model to be called their own, which was fine for practice but not for publishing. When teaching my students to identify and break down the work of others before emulating it themselves, I tell them that if their modeled work is too similar, they must employ an “after” which lets readers know the idea or form did not come from the student but from the author of inspiration. Another option is to cite, possibly with an asterisk, that explains where some of the material originated. As writers, we have the option to pay homage with an “after” to our inspirations, which means under the title we can write “After Joan Didion,” (usually in italics) to signify that something has been borrowed from the original author—nothing quotable, but maybe the style or the form, maybe your product or your student’s product was inspired by her. We can cite our sources, or we can take on another’s form purely for practice, but we must never plagiarize.             Through these imitations, my students have learned to play on the page, eliminating the pressure of getting the word down perfectly because they are in the space, the mindset, of following another person, another writer who has been there before. There is something about watching a coach or an older sibling run the drill first. There is safety in the teacher’s instruction and in the guidelines and parameters set out for students by the author’s piece and the assignment details that let them discover, on their own, new ways to write. Under the assignments instructions, students are able to replicate the new moves, empowering themselves while keeping the play in practice. Watching my students read and imitate work by current professional writers and come away with new sets of tools and writing techniques has empowered me as an instructor in seeing their progress, and has opened them up to the constant conversation these writers are having in the real world through their work. ... View more

This last week at the Bread Loaf School of English, my team-taught class had a visit from Professor Brenda Brueggemann (University of Connecticut) and Professor Susan Birch (Middlebury College) to talk about their experience and work with disability studies and with what Brenda called the “temporarily able-bodied.” This class session produced a series of passionate and insightful postings from teachers in the class, all of whom work with students with various disabilities, but few of whom had studied much about such teaching. They had a number of “a-ha” moments. Maya wrote: Amber added this: Others wrote of their own experiences in teaching large classes including many students with disabilities – but with few if any resources and no real training in how best to teach such students. A few reported feeling despair. But the class discussion with Brenda and Susan, at last, gave them some good vocabulary (“well, I guess, I am ‘temporarily able bodied,’ but already I know I have pretty poor eyesight. I’m guessing that that ‘temporary’ is going to be very temporary for most people.”) I’ve known Brenda Brueggemann since her graduate school days, and I’ve been inspired by her work for decades. If you haven’t read Lend Me Your Ear or Deaf Subjects: Between Identities and Places, I recommend them both, or any of Brenda’s other amazing scholarly work. Perhaps I was once “temporarily able bodied,” but I’ve written before of a cognitive disability I discovered only in graduate school: great difficulty visualizing things. I learned to deal with that issue (as Brenda says, not a problem to deal with by “overcoming” but a part of my identity). As I write this, I am losing vision to macular degeneration. Another part of my identity. So today feels like a good day to reassess, once again, what I know about teaching and learning with students with disabilities. Of all kinds. To hear/see some of Brenda’s insights, check out “Why I Mind on YouTube.” ... View more