Preparing to teach a class is a lot like preparing dinner for friends. Slightly nerve-wracking, more time-consuming than you expect, and each time, there are surprises, sometimes great, sometimes terrible. Always, you learn new things.  You can wing it and end up with a wonderful success.  Or, you can spend weeks preparing and still run into disaster. Is there a secret to planning?   In observing new graduate students teach creative writing classes, sometimes I see amazing instruction and other times I see a class period evaporate as student attention wanders. I’ve seen lessons that looked great on paper miss their mark completely and shy awkward teachers create terrific impromptu classroom experiences for grumpster teens at eight in the morning.    These new teachers are spending a lot of time prepping their classes and sometimes it pays off and sometimes it doesn’t.  So, how do we make the most of lesson planning?   First, consider the three things that typically cause a lesson to go off the rails:  Busy. The lesson is about too many things. Too much material and/or not well-organized in teachable, learnable steps. Vague. The content that the teacher wants students to deliver isn’t completely clear in her own mind. It seems clear—she wants to teach characterization, and we’ve all read a short story, and we’re discussing it—but she doesn’t have a way to teach how to do characterization down cold yet. Her lecture is loose, rambling, unfocused. Student comments are all over the place. Mission creep. Static.  There’s simply not enough happening in the class. Students are passive. No lightbulb moments. We’re lost in dim light.   I’ve been thinking a lot about what it is we can do to prepare a foolproof lesson. And I offer this recipe, based on years of designing and teaching my own creative writing classes and watching others prepare and teach. Big picture. Read your class goals and learning objectives. What is it you are actually trying to teach students this semester?  Take a step back from the text and focus on exactly what it is you want them to learn, overall, and then learn specifically, today. Goal and objective. Come up with some words for what it is the students are going to know at the end of this hour that they didn’t know before they came into the class. Goal: What will they have learned? Objective: What will they now be able to do? Check in: is this goal and objective something that is possible to learn in an hour? Is it clear? Super clear? Vocabulary.  Make a list of the new terms they will learn--a helpful way to keep your lesson on track.   Now that you have a sense of how your hour fits into the flow of your overall course, and a specific objective for today, and an outline for your content, it’s time to think about the structure of the hour—the courses you’ll serve your guest.   You probably use some or all of the following approaches in your classroom—lecture, discussion, guided close reading, peer group response, workshop, quizzing, and in class writing. Instead of staying locked in a usual pattern, take a moment to step back and figure out the best way for students to learn this new concept you are bringing them today.  For example, if you are going over a short story in the textbook, hoping to teach characterization, and you typically start with “discussion”, consider what it is you really want students to learn.  Four ways of rendering character? How dialogue reveals character? How to create a composite character? Or are you really teaching close reading: how to read and understand subtleties of character?     4. Chunk.  Think in terms of 20 minute chunks. Break your class into 20 minute sections—that’s about how long students can productively focus on one thing, processing, memorizing, learning. When you look at your goal for this lesson, how could you break it into two 20 minute chunks?  For a lesson on characterization, for the first twenty minutes, you could show them the three most important aspects of the technique, in the story assigned for that day, and then have them, in discussion, find more examples. Or, after you show them the technique in 10 minutes, they could write examples of their own in ten minutes.  For your second 20 minute chunk, you’ll need to build on this in a logical way. Maybe they’re revising a story from last week in class, incorporating the three new techniques.  If you teach a fifty minute class, this gives you ten minutes to sum up, review, and assign the next lesson’s homework. Those four strategies—big picture, clear goal for the lesson, new vocabulary, and chunking—give you one model for planning class. There are lots of ways to design a wonderful class; these are just some principles. Take what’s useful.    One last thought. Recently, I took a screenwriting workshop with storied Robert McKee (it was life-changing!) and I was struck by how much planning a class has in common with writing a screenplay. In a screenplay, every ten minutes, something needs to happen. I’ve been breaking my class prep down into ten minute sections and noting in the margins of my lesson plan what the take-home is for those ten minutes. That gives me an at-a-glance “menu” for the hour, and I write that menu on the board, reinforcing the teachings and also keeping me and my students on track. ... View more

­­ Like many Americans, I stayed close to a TV on July 26, listening to the prime time speeches during day one of the Democratic Convention, just as I had done a week before during the Republican Convention.  I knew there would be protests, that Sanders supporters were set to make a stand, and that Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Michelle Obama, and Bernie Sanders would speak. I expected all the speakers to do well—to deliver their messages with pride and passion.  And they did.  But from the moment the first lady stepped onto the stage, I sensed a change in the convention hall.  She was radiant in deep blue, with that wide smile and direct way of looking at her audience.  As she began to speak, the raucous crowd quieted; all eyes on her, and then she delivered what to me was the most impressive speech of either convention so far.  In roughly 1500 words, she supported her husband’s legacy, showed why Trump would be an inadequate president at best (without ever mentioning his name), explained why she supports Hillary Clinton (and why it’s important that girls everywhere think of it as routine for a woman to be President), and underscored her (and Clinton’s) focus on children and families.  This brief speech packed a powerful yet subtle punch.  I took a closer look at the speech today, and came away impressed again with our first lady’s ability to connect to audiences and with the strategies she uses to do so.  Of the roughly 1500 words in this speech, 43 of them are “we” “our,” or “us”—and another 35 are words that refer to young people—“kids,” “daughters,” “sons,” “children,” “our children,” and so on.  The repetition of these key words hammers home her message: that the decision we make in November will affect how our children are able to lead their lives. And in this endeavor—this focus on the good of our nation’s children—Ms. Obama aligns herself with Secretary Clinton, as mothers who care above all for “our children.” So repetition is one key to the power of this speech, but alliteration and parallelism also work to make the words very memorable:  “the lash of bondage, the shame of servitude, the sting of segregation”; “character and conviction”; “guts and grace”; and many more.  And the use of simple word choice and syntax underscores and amplifies sentences like “I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves.”  So this is a speech to savor, and to save.  I plan to use it in classes, asking students to read it and then carry out their own mini rhetorical analyses, then to watch the speech as Michelle Obama delivered it, noting her pacing (flawless), her pauses, her facial expressions and body language.  My guess is that students will learn a lot about how they can improve as speakers and presenters. And that they will have more insightful and thoughtful responses to the message the speech sends from having done so. [Image: Official portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama in Green Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy.)] ... View more

Ten or so years ago, a student I know wrote an essay on Wikipedia in which he coined the phrase “authorless prose.” He argued that the “people’s dictionary is written, rewritten, edited, and re-edited by so many hands that authorship is no longer a salient feature." Hence, authorless prose. I’ve thought a lot about this concept, and of course questions of authorship have preoccupied me ever since Lisa Ede and I did the research that led to Singular Texts / Plural Authors, where we—in the 1980s—assailed the concept of radical, individual, originary authorship. And I thought of it again during the Republican National Convention, after Melania Trump’s keynote and the subsequent revelations of its use, sometimes word-for-word, of a speech Michelle Obama gave at the Democratic National Convention in 2008. Leave aside the exquisite irony of the Trump campaign declaring Obama and his administration of every social ill imaginable while simultaneously approving a speech that “borrowed” from his wife’s language. And leave aside the debacle that followed: Melania Trump saying she wrote the speech herself, campaign operatives saying it was the work of speech writers, and campaign manager Manafort and Trump doubling down on their insistence that the words Melania Trump used were “common” words used by many. “No big deal,” they seemed to say, when the speechwriter eventually stepped forward and admitted the “mistake.” No need to resign: “innocent mistakes happen.” It would be fascinating to follow the development of that speech from beginning to end—and news agencies have been at work to track that history down. The speech was probably “authored” by several people, including Melania Trump. Again, authorless prose. What interests me is not the ownership of the words, the “authorship,” per se, but the veracity of them. Were the words in Melania Trump’s speech true and accurate? We may never know, since she is not likely to be giving more speeches any time soon, much less interviews. But what of her husband’s words—and the words of the larger campaign? Trump tweets almost daily—if not hourly—about “lyin’ Hillary,” and his entire campaign so far has been made up of a thin tissue of un-truths: about his “huge” business success, about his so-called university, even about his own background. In the meantime, “lyin’ Hillary” faced three investigations and something like 13 hours of often hostile grilling by a Congressional Committee that could find no proof of wrongdoing on her part. In fact, Clinton has been the subject of numerous investigations, some of them clearly political vendettas, yet none of which has found her guilty of breaking laws. Nevertheless, Trump and his followers—loudly and insistently—claim that she is guilty of murder and that she should be jailed—or even executed. Saying something over and over again doesn’t make it true. But it does make its way into public consciousness as if it were true. Plato famously said that a speaker needed not only to tell the truth but to appear to tell the truth. In this campaign, we are witnessing the nominee of a major political party doing neither. And still being supported—rapturously—by millions. It’s a sad day for truth, for veracity, for credibility. In such a time, writing about authorship and arguing over plagiarism seems a lot like trying to lock the barn door after the wildly irresponsible horse is already out. ... View more

Poetry is an oral as well as written tradition, and we are only doing half the work—and having half the fun— if we silently read a poem on the page. Unfortunately, I don’t always have the chance to emphasize this enough in the classroom. As I struggle for both depth and breadth in my courses, I often run out of time before I can focus on the performance of poetry. At least a few times during the semester, though, I create opportunities for students to engage with the performance of written texts. This might seem like an optional activity that doesn’t have the substance of a lecture or in-depth discussion, but I would disagree. In fact, in-class recitations can generate real excitement among students, in part because memorization requires a slow, attentive reading that we wish for every time we assign a new text. With this in mind, I recommend the Shakespeare Sonnet Slam as a classroom activity. In an English literature survey we spend a couple of classes reading sonnets by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, but because these sonnets represent one small unit out of many in a survey course, that’s about all the time we have for The Bard’s sequence. Even so, the memorization requires students to read their poem with a quality of attention that they wouldn’t ordinarily have. Even if our activity means that we get to spend less time discussing other poets, students quickly understand the power of a poetic sequence, and how it can convey a variety of emotional and intellectual struggles in innovative ways. Here’s how it works: First, I ask students to memorize one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. If students are anxious about the process of memorizing a poem, I offer them several strategies: they can write the poem, longhand, several times until they get a sense of how the lines fit together; they can photocopy the poem and carry it with them, memorizing it throughout the week; or they can memorize the poem by reciting it once through, then hiding the final word of the poem and reading it through, then hiding the final two words of the poem and reading it through, and so on until they’re reciting the poem with no words exposed. Once students have memorized their poem, the next task is understanding. In order for them to deliver Shakespeare’s lines with emotional accuracy, they have to attend to his sonnet logic: the turn that occurs, usually in the final couplet; the if/then structure that Shakespeare relies on to create tension in many of his poems; and the rhetorical strategies of his poems, whether they be blazons, anti-blazons, complaints, or poems of praise. I remind students that they have to make the language come alive so that anyone who listens will be deeply moved. With as many as twenty-five students in a class or discussion section, this can be quite challenging, but I’ve found that my students are so engaged with this challenge that they’re willing to extend the slam over two class meetings. I also recommend that they go to Poetry Out Loud​ for some advice on reciting well. When students recite their poems in class, they must also be prepared to talk about what they learned as a result of the process. They can talk about the narrative situation of the poem, the way Shakespeare relies on inherited wisdom from Erasmus, the Bible, or his contemporaries, or anything else that they think could be valuable to our understanding of the poem as a whole. Each student takes about 3-4 minutes for their total performance. In the past, I’ve sometimes asked colleagues to be the “judge” for the slam; other times, I’ve relied on students as the judges. The judges are allowed to award two prizes: one for exceptional recitation, and one for exceptional explication. Of course, one student could potentially receive both prizes. If you’re looking for a way to engage your students, try this exercise; if you already do something similar in your survey courses, please respond to this blog entry. [[This post originally appeared on LitBits on 10-4-11.]] ... View more

My oldest daughter graduated from college in May; she will begin an M.A. program at a public Midwestern university in the fall. She will fund her graduate studies by teaching in the university’s first-year composition program. I watch her and wonder if this teaching will be a means to an end, or if she will settle into this role, integrating composition pedagogy into the professional identity she is constructing for herself. I certainly didn’t see composition instruction as central to my career when I came to graduate school at the University of South Carolina in 1989; I had settled on theoretical linguistics as a career path. At least some teaching would be required, however, since appointment as a TA provided a much needed tuition waiver and stipend. Given that I chose a focus on second language acquisition, my first assignment was a sheltered ESL section—or “B section”—of the first-year composition sequence. I pushed myself into a basement classroom one hot August morning, and faced students whose names I could not pronounce, some of whom were older than I was, and who trusted, implicitly, that I could teach them. After a few weeks, I settled into this classroom role comfortably enough, managing the requisite balance between my own coursework and the demands of lesson preparation and grading.  I saw the balance, unfortunately, as management of disconnected and disparate identities, with my coursework fully privileged over the work of the classroom. Two semesters later, Professors Nancy Thompson and Rhonda Grego invited me to join them and three other graduate students for a directed reading and research group investigating pedagogy through action research. I accepted. I had taken “Teaching College Composition” the previous year, but the focus there had been on practical classroom organization and management strategies—surviving, in effect, the first year of teaching. As a theoretical inquiry, I did not know that “writing studies” existed. The research group unsettled me and my sense of a disciplinary identity; I was troubled by concepts and theoretical frameworks that were completely new to me. Members of the research group adopted Elbow and Belanoff’s text, A Community of Writers, for our students, and we tackled a number of additional readings for ourselves, including Peter Reason’s Human Inquiry in Action, Marie Wilson Nelson’s At the Point of Need, along with articles from Mike Rose, Peter Elbow, Michael Polanyi, Janet Emig, Ann Berthoff, Mina Shaughnessy, and many others. Contrasted to theoretical work in second language acquisition, lexical semantics, and syntax, this was, for me, a foreign language. Each reading and group session raised more questions, and suddenly, my sense of identity didn’t seem settled any longer. Christie Toth has coined the term “transdisciplinary cosmopolitanism”—a convergence of multiple areas of expertise and professional interests—to describe the particular identities of community college English instructors. Participation in the research group invited me to settle in a new “academic home,” and although I could not have foreseen this outcome at the time, it prepared me for my role as community college instructor. I recently found my journal from that practicum, buried in a filing cabinet. I see in it now the first inklings that composition pedagogy, applied linguistics, and theory could connect and enrich each other, that pedagogical research could be theory-driven and just as intellectually rewarding as traditional linguistic inquiry. My research project, in fact, examined the relationship between reading and writing, using two case studies: a basic writer and an ESL writer.  I think, at times, we assume community college instructors—especially those who have been through standard doctoral training—have had bad luck; they’ve “settled for” a community college teaching position because, for whatever reason, a university post hasn’t opened for them.  They do the drudge-work of teaching composition; they are disengaged from more lofty academic inquiry. I disagree. I did not settle “for” this identity; I settled “into” it. “Into” implies both a bounded space and a movement; the space may be bounded, but it is not static. I’m not “stuck” teaching basic, ESL, or first-year writing at a community college; I am doing intellectual work—work that I love—in my own “laboratory.” I attend conferences and read journals in composition studies, developmental education, reading, TESOL, and linguistics. At the moment, I am also doing background research on threshold concepts in information literacy for our college’s next QEP; this new work is a privilege, not a burden, because it challenges and expands what I do in the classroom.  I teach writing at a community college; I practice “transdisciplinary cosmopolitanism.” I wouldn’t settle for less. Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Join the Macmillan Community to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! ... View more

I’m just back from ten days of team teaching at the Bread Loaf School of English in Vermont’s Green Mountains. With legendary teachers Dixie Goswami and John Elder, I’m teaching a course called Writing and Acting for Change: We came up with the idea for this course nearly a year ago and were delighted when sixteen students (fifteen teachers and one employee of a children’s book publisher; and we limited the class to 16) signed up as soon as the courses were advertised.  Clearly , we had hit a nerve as these students recognize the perilous times we live in and want—along with their students—to tackle some very big challenges in their schools and communities.  Like hunger.  Like diabetes.  Like poverty. Like school policies that do nothing to help kids really engage with learning. Our discussions of Ida B. Wells’s Anti-Lynching pamphlets (edited by Jackie Royster) were animated and intense, with class members analyzing Wells’s brilliant rhetorical strategies and then connecting her work to the Black Lives Matter movement and to many pressing racial issues in their schools and communities.  Is it any coincidence, asked one participant that the states with the highest number of lynchings are also the states with the highest number of executions — often of Black men?  Our blog space quickly filled with postings and responses, and responses to responses, as we explored the need to write and act for change to racial, economic, and educational injustices close to home. The blog, as well as Twitter and email, are helping me keep up with the class while I’m away.  This week Dixie, along with Shel Sax and Tim O’Brien (both of whom work in educational technology), will be meeting every day (no holiday on the 4 th for them!) with our class, listening to a talk by Royster and reading parts of her Traces of a Stream, and fashioning the projects they will take back to their schools at the end of the summer. Then John Elder will return to lead the class for two weeks, focusing on environmental and food justice, with a visit by Bill McKibben and a skype session with Laurent Savoy (check out her latest books).  Along the way, Oskar Eustis (Director of the Public Theater in NY) will lead a workshop for our class on hip hop as acting for change (Oskar developed the mega-hit Hamilton at the Public).  And Brian McEleney (from Providence’s Trinity Repertory Company and the artistic director of the Bread Loaf Acting Ensemble) and members of the ensemble will work with our class to prepare for four joint presentation/performances they will give on the last two days of class.  Acting for change indeed! By then I’ll be back on campus to rejoin the class in real time and to learn from all of the work the students have done this summer.  I’ll be reporting on these events here, so please watch this space! ... View more

Unlike print-based genres—poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction—the dramatic genres, such as playwriting, are allied to certain material realities.  By this I mean that what is mentioned in a script is not just for a reader’s mind, but is meant to be concretized before an audience’s eyes.  I find myself frequently noting on drafts of student scripts that particular stage directions sound “expensive,” and I don’t mean this as a positive comment.  I use this word to discourage writers from including elements that would make staging difficult—for example, impossible special effects and overly frequent scene changes.  In a similar vein, I ask student authors to remember that acting is paid labor.  Frequently, beginning playwrights will include a character—often a waiter—who does very little.  In the professional theatre, the actor playing this character would have to be compensated for his or her work.  Therefore, inclusion in the script means an added expense, and if it’s not a meaningful expense, there’s no reason for it. What’s more, wasteful writing can mean not just a waste of monetary resources, but a waste of performer time.  To return to the waiter example, a playwright in a university setting could likely find a fellow student willing to play a minor role without compensation—meaning that the inclusion of a peripheral character would not increase expense in this case.  However, I ask writers to also take into account the performer’s perspective.  While student actors might be willing to play small roles, the truth is that no one wants to sit through weeks of rehearsal for a part that ultimately isn’t all that meaningful. A small part is one thing, a small and wholly insignificant part is quite another.  Therefore, ethically, the playwright should cut the role or make it worthwhile; otherwise, she or he is wasting someone’s (unpaid) time. Material realities have even greater significance when they illuminate larger issues of artistic representation.  Cultural prejudices, for example, exist everywhere; but it is easier to see their consequences in the dramatic arts.  As I remind students, acting is one of the only jobs where employers can legally include sex, age, and race as hiring considerations—even though these categories are subject to legal protections elsewhere.  Because scripts create work for actors, I remind my students that, with each role that they write, they are potentially creating or denying work for another human being—and often doing so along race-based, sex-based, and age-based lines.  In other words, since each role potentially puts food on someone’s table, playwrights must not ignore their responsibilities to society. If the roles they create put food only on the tables of young white males, I encourage them to at least be aware of the exclusions they’re building into their creative work. Just as the stage concretizes the text, so the field of dramatic writing concretizes the problems of representation that all creative writers face (or should be facing). In playwriting, it is harder to ignore one’s ethical responsibilities because they are so apparent.  A print-based writer knows in theory that she or he should not create characters that conform to offensive stereotypes.  The playwright, however, must understand that, when she or he creates such a role, she or he must essentially look another human being in the eye and say, “You.  Be that.” [[This post first appeared on LitBits on 3/30/12.]] ... View more

I am writing this post on July 4, shortly after writing to the class called Writing and Acting for Change that I am team-teaching at Vermont’s Bread Loaf School of English.  Though it’s a national holiday, Bread Loaf classes meet on the 4 th , and though I am not on campus physically right now I am in touch with the class through e-mail, Twitter, and our private class blog. When I got up this morning, a student in the class had added a similar but much more eloquent post: A good reminder of the need for embodied action indeed.  In our class, we are reminding ourselves every day that we must go beyond talk to ACT if we intend to create any real change.  Thanks to Frederick Douglass for providing a brilliant example and for giving us food for thought on every 4 th of July. [Image: Frederick Douglass, by Political Graveyard on Flickr] ... View more

The other night, my wife and I accidentally got sucked into watching a Jersey Shore marathon. If you’re not familiar with the show, it’s basically a high concept science fiction program that involves a group of grotesque orange aliens who derive sustenance from a diet consisting solely of hard liquor and whose highest form of compliment is to call someone a “Guido.” To be honest, the show is a little derivative of other science fiction shows that came before it—these aliens have the aggression of Klingons​ and the dull-witted brutality of the "toaster"-model Cylons​​​.  My wife and I agreed that the show was stupid and a waste of our time, and we turned off the TV once we realized it was 3:30 in the morning and this marathon wasn’t going to be over anytime soon. It’s as obvious as it is glib to point out that so-called “reality” television doesn’t resemble the world in which most of us actually live, but I worry that some people—and by some people, I mean some of my students—might mistake this manipulated footage and manufactured drama for something that resembles life on planet earth. Chuck Klosterman suggested in his essay “What Happens When People Stop Being Polite” that MTV’s The Real World fundamentally changed how young people relate to each other—“People started becoming personality templates,” Klosterman wrote, “devoid of complication and obsessed with melodrama.” Over the years, dozens of students have told me about auditioning for one reality show or another, and I could always tell which “type” they wanted to be—Sensitive Heterosexual Guy, Wild Party Girl, Intellectual-Yet-Approachable Black Dude.  The problem with reality television, really, is its tendency to reduce actual human beings into characters.  Static, superficial, underdeveloped characters at that. This is why I like to teach creative nonfiction to undergraduates.  While some writers, like Phillip Lopate​​, suggest that a nonfiction form like the personal essay is more suited for middle-aged people (who are, presumably, prone to reflection), I believe that it’s important for students to examine and write about their lives.  I know the complaints about college students’ supposed self-absorption, and I feel like it’s lately become fashionable to bemoan our students’ interest in writing about their own lives.  The suggestion is that writing about the self—particularly the young self, the self who hasn’t experienced very much of the world—convinces students that they can be writers without taking risks that involve experiences, adventures, and other people. I don’t subscribe to that theory.  To be sure, I don’t subscribe to the opposite theory, espoused by some composition scholars, that personal writing is good for students because they are already experts in their own lives.  I’ve met a lot of people in my life, and very few of them seemed to have much expertise when it comes to discussing themselves. When I ask my college students to write nonfiction, I am asking them to disregard the superficial, melodramatic narratives that tend to pass for reality in our popular culture and, instead, dig deeper.  A show like Bad Girls Club or Road Rules traffics in abstraction and stereotypes, but in memoir and essay writing, we’re looking for the concrete, for the unique individual consciousness.  We’re stripping away the constructed persona and focusing instead on the person, with all of the complexity and contradictions that would be sure to get her application to live in the Jersey Shore beach house rejected. Some of my students have become talented essayists and memoirists.  I’ve directed three phenomenal MFA theses concerned with post-traumatic stress disorder, the plight of undocumented immigrants, and growing up in an orphanage in the early 1960s.  I’ve seen students get accepted to Ph.D. programs and publish their work.  And while I take pride in whatever role I might have played in my students’ success, if I’m being honest, I have to tell you that I’m a little more proud whenever a student—through reading and writing creative nonfiction—achieves a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the world and himself.  It’s deeply gratifying to find out what happens when people stop being ridiculous caricatures, and start getting real. [This post first appeared on LitBits on 11/30/11] ... View more

Traci Gardner pointed out in her recent post (See Revising for a More Visual Syllabus: The Schedule)  that summer is the time many of us re-think and revise syllabi.   This work may seem peripheral to our teaching, since it is relegated to summer break, but it is not.  As Barclay Barrios pointed out in his reflections last year (See What’s a Syllabus?) , when we compose syllabi, we make “visual essays/arguments/statements” about the courses we are preparing to teach. Our syllabi, in essence, embody a number of critical course concepts:  rhetorical choice, multimodality, and documentation (as Gardner’s visual syllabus elements illustrate), or discourse communities, among others. As we write a syllabus, we wrangle with previous failures and successes, we experiment, and we comb through conference handouts and sticky notes on journal articles, pondering theory and borrowing from the work we have seen our colleagues doing.  This composing work is energizing; we imagine what is possible and what we might be able to accomplish with our students.  “This time,” I tell myself, “I will get it right.” Two years ago, in an effort to improve my syllabi and lay some groundwork for feedback and revision in my courses, I gave the following instructions to students on the first day of class: With the members of your group, review the syllabus critically.  Consider the following questions and write your comments on the discussion board in Blackboard.  Make sure that you include all group members’ names: How would you reformat the syllabus to make it easier for a student to read and understand? Would you change any of the following to make the syllabus easier for a student to read and understand? Order of presentation Language used Medium (i.e., print vs. digital) Design Text features (font, font size, layout, etc.) Anything else?  What questions do you have about the CONTENT of the syllabus?  Make a note of these. I had multiple goals for this assignment, including establishing a sense of community, getting students to read the syllabus carefully, and inviting reader-response early in the term.  After the activity, I reviewed student responses and revised my syllabus; I made significant changes in arrangement of content, moving much of the boilerplate material required by the college to the end of the document and making the schedule of assignments more accessible.  I also created a “Where to find it” box for the first page to direct students to page numbers or digital resources for information they would most likely ask about during the term.  The next semester I repeated the activity and added sidebars with advice and frequently asked questions.  In both semesters, students were surprised when I returned to class with a revised syllabus; I don’t think they expected me to consider their feedback seriously.  A discussion of the choices that I had to make to meet both their needs (as my primary readers) and the requirements of our college and its accreditors (a secondary but significant audience) helped me introduce key course concepts, and it also highlighted some very real quandaries I faced as a writer.  For example, my students were put off by the language of the official course description and learning outcomes, and they recommended that I change them; in fact, students quickly came to relish their position of authority as my intended readers, assuming a directive stance in their feedback.  We talked about some options:  could I re-word that particular section?  (No, the official language is mandatory.) Could I create two syllabi, one for students and one for the official record? (Possibly, but I am required to make the official version available to students, and writing two versions seems like unnecessary work.)  Could I include the official jargon and provide footnotes with definitions of terms? (Yes, but would students really read a footnoted syllabus?)  We decided there was no great solution, but in response to their ideas, I did move that section of the document to the end, and I created “so what” sidebars to paraphrase key points.  After two semesters, I abandoned the syllabus feedback activity.   I was satisfied with the syllabus revisions, and I didn’t give too much thought to the pedagogical potential of continuing.  But now, looking back, I see that this activity engaged students, in a preliminary way, with the threshold concepts around which I structure my courses, especially in my upper level ESL and co-requisite IRW courses.  It might be time to resurrect the syllabus feedback activity for the fall, especially as I am reworking my course to emphasize difficulty, writing about language, and multimodality. These will be threshold concepts, strange and troubling for my students. If I invite them to explore points of difficulty, linguistic choices, and the effects of visual design (and perhaps even audio design, as I experiment with screencasts of my syllabus) on the first day, I can establish a tone and a framework for the weeks that follow.                                                                                                                                     And perhaps the syllabus review belongs at the end of the class as well.  I could revise the end-of-term reflection assignment I described in a previous post to include a rhetorical analysis of my syllabus and the concepts contained in it (See All's Well That Ends Well).  It would be interesting to see how students’ perceptions as readers of my syllabus change after fifteen weeks of instruction and practice.   I doubt the first and last day syllabus review activities will yield exactly what I envision, but I’ll have next summer to tweak them again. 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What can we do to create a welcoming and inclusive environment for our students? How can we connect writing and reading instruction with our students’ concerns? The following reading lists offer links to short takes on a variety of topics that cover issues such as course design; pedagogical terms and frameworks; racial, linguistic, and cultural identity; and suggested readings for course syllabi. The heading for each list is briefly annotated. Photo: My cat Destiny, in search of a good read. Transitions to College As students transition to post-secondary education, they face new academic and social situations that present challenges, but also offer opportunities for growth as writers. Whether students transition directly from high school or military service, or are returning to college after a hiatus of many years, the sources in this first list focus on creating equitable classrooms for first-year students from a variety of backgrounds. The final item on the list shows the results from a recent survey on the expectations of high school teachers, college instructors, and employers in core content areas, including writing. The differing results offer a starting point for discussion about the purposes of post-secondary writing courses, as well as the needs and expectations of recent high school graduates attending college for the first time. Five Principles for Enacting Equity by Design Teaching First-Year Students ACT National Curriculum Survey 2016 Pedagogical Frameworks These sources offer lucid and succinct explanations of terms and frameworks that are frequently presented as keywords in post-secondary writing courses. The first two links are comprised of goals crafted by national organizations that shape our field. These lists can be shared with colleagues interested in national standards for first-year writing programs, which can and should include Basic Writing in their scope. The last two links offer a brief introduction to rhetorical concepts, and a revised version of Bloom’s Taxonomy. WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition (2014) Framework for Success in Post-Secondary Writing Rhetorical Concepts​ Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy Moving Beyond Self/Other Many of us teach in communities that are new to us, or work with students whose points of view and learning needs initially seem far removed from our own.  At the same time, we can create a classroom environment that offers respect for all students and gives them opportunities to grow as writers. The links on this list offer suggestions.  Teaching in Racially Diverse Classrooms Strategies of Inclusion for the Contemporary Classroom: Gender Issues Teaching Students with Disabilities LGBTQIA Ally Tips Promising Practices for Student Veterans in College Writing Classrooms Addressing Racial, Linguistic, and Cultural Identities Students claim identities from many intersecting racial, linguistic, and cultural contexts. Although students should not be required to represent their particular identity groups, we as teachers can benefit from learning more about how and why students’ perspectives may have been shaped in previous schooling and in experiences beyond our classrooms. The readings in this section come from a variety of academic sources and can help to inform our understandings of the world in which all of us live. How College-Bound Students of Color Should Prepare for Life on a Predominantly White Campus NCTE Statement Affirming #BlackLivesMatter Strategies for Teaching Native Americans CCCC Statement on Second Language Writing and Writers Addressing Islamophobia on College Campuses Course Planning: Recent Readings on Contemporary Issues In the last several years, local, national, and global catastrophes have disrupted our lives, whether directly or indirectly. Educators have compiled a series of syllabi with books, articles, films, and other multimedia that address four of these traumatic events. These syllabi were published on the web in response to killings of people of color and LGBTQ people in the United States in the cities of Ferguson (2014), Baltimore (2015), Charleston (2015), and Orlando (2016). Individually and collectively, the syllabi offer readings and approaches that inspire a wide variety of writing topics, which may, in turn appeal directly to students contemporary concerns and interests.  #PulseOrlandoSyllabus #Charlestonsyllabus #BaltimoreSyllabus #FergusonSyllabus ... View more

I’ve been teaching off and on at Bread Loaf – a graduate program associated with Middlebury College that grants MA degrees, primarily to teachers—since 1990.  To my mind, this is the best professional development program in the world for teachers, who spend four or five summers on “the mountain” reading, writing, talking, and learning together.  I’ve seen lives and classrooms transformed here, and my own teaching and learning have been powerfully impacted by the experience.  This summer I am team-teaching—with Dixie Goswami and John Elder (with visits from Oskar Eustis, Bill McKibben, Jacqueline Jones Royster, and others) a course called Writing and Acting for Change.  I will write more about that class, which is off to a tremendous start, soon. Two days ago, Bread Loaf opened with a reception for new and old students, a dinner, and opening “ceremonies,” where Director Emily Bartels and Middlebury President Laurie Patton spoke to the faculty and 263 students enrolled here this summer.  Then several faculty members added brief remarks.   Here’s what I had to say: It’s more than fair to say that we’ve had a hard month in this country; indeed, a hard year, with no respite in sight.  A massacre in Orlando based on hate of anything “different”; a dangerous buffoon running for President; a deadlocked, dysfunctional Congress beholden to lobbyists and special interests; more lives lost at the hands of police. We are in need, at a time like this, of being together, of each other.  As I drove up the mountain on a glorious Vermont night, I could almost feel the tensions begin to fade, if ever so slightly.  And when I arrived, I realized that I feel as much at home here as anywhere I’ve ever been.  I love this PLACE.  And I love the IDEA of Bread Loaf—the idea that teachers and scholars reading, writing, talking, learning, and working together can do things that none of us could do alone. As we all know, this place is very special:  its natural beauty—the forests, lakes, streams, this mountain—provides a spiritual grounding, a place for contemplation, a place for reflection, a place for peace. But the idea of Bread Loaf is equally special:  a commitment to make the worlds of our classrooms and communities better, better places to live and learn and grow. So while we are bound by emotional and intellectual ties to this magnificent place, we are also firmly tethered to our other places, our home communities, and to the effect we can and must have there.  It’s the synergy between the two that, to me, makes Bread Loaf unique.  The work we do here energizes and renews the work we do at home—and vice versa:  the work to create spaces of tolerance and inclusivity, of love and understanding, of respect and openness, spaces where a million different flowers can bloom and be themselves.  Together. ... View more

This summer I am revising some course documents to make my syllabus more engaging. So far, I have  rethought how I show the grade distribution, (see: Converting to a More Visual Syllabus) and last week, I demonstrated how I am redesigning the list of required resources. Today, I am taking on the course schedule. I usually arrange the schedule in a table, with a column for the class session date and another for the readings and work due that day. Above the table, I include the standard warning that the information is tentative and subject to change. It’s essentially the same arrangement that I have used since I began teaching. It isn’t an ideal system because the schedule always changes. I have never managed to design a perfect schedule. Student needs sometimes lead me to allow more time for an activity or to add some extra readings. I may get sick and have to cancel a session. The university may cancel classes for a snow day. Something can and always does happen, and I end up having to revise the schedule completely. I’m also skeptical that students use the schedule information. They  see the information on the first day, but few return on a regular basis to track what we are doing. The various due dates and assignments are all available on the course website and on a calendar in our course management system, so there is no reason to return to the syllabus for the details. Still, I like  to include  basic scheduling information on the syllabus so that students can see the overarching plan for the course and get a feel for the work that they will be doing. I decided to focus on the specific information that I wanted students to know from the beginning of the course and remove all the other extraneous information. That decision freed up a lot of space, so I was able to redesign the schedule as a timeline that marks the major activities. Here is the mockup that I have designed with Canva, a web-based graphic design program. Click on the image below to see an enlarged version of the mockup: I like this timeline version so much more than the original table version. The icons that I use on the schedule are also used on the assignments themselves, to visually connect the schedule across the course documents. The challenge of this version, however, is that as it stands, this mockup  is not accessible for everyone. Since the text is part of a graphic, I would have to either duplicate the information on the page in a long description or add a separate long description webpage with the information. Ideally, I will redo the timeline in HTML5 code with accessible features. Fortunately, Karl Stolley’s Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative posts on Image Accessibility, Part I: Beyond alt Attributes and Image Accessibility, Part II: Beyond src Attributes tell me exactly what I need to do to improve the revision. There is more work to do, but I am happy with the progress so far. What do you think? Would a timeline of the major projects work for your course syllabus?  I would love to hear your thoughts, so please leave me a comment below. I look forward to hearing from you. [Icons are copyright © 2015–2016 Hand-Drawn Goods and were purchased by the author.] ... View more

In the introductory creative writing course I teach, we spend the first half of the semester reading and writing fiction, and turn to poetry for the second half. This transition often provokes some anxiety. Many of my students have never written poetry before, and some have read very little—they come to the course with the assumption that poetry is highbrow and intimidating, and are cowed by the expectation that they will soon be writing their own. I do several things to demystify poetry—insofar as it can and should be demystified!—early on. We read lots of contemporary poems, so that students can hear voices that echo their own with regard to syntax and diction. We talk about the lessons covered in the fiction unit that carry over into poetry, and into all creative writing, things they already know to do, and do well—striving for detail, imagery, and nuance, avoiding the heavy-handed ending, establishing a compelling voice, etc.  And we do daily writing exercises to keep the writing brain limber and to alleviate that initial fear that can come with staring at a blank page and knowing you’ve got to, somehow, put a poem on it. If we do small bits of writing every day, then that blank page becomes familiar—a friend, or at least an only-moderately-irritating acquaintance. I kick off the poetry unit with one of my favorite exercises—it’s simple, but its simplicity is its key. I tell students that they’re going to be going outside for the next ten minutes. (I do this regardless of weather; some classes luck out with a 75 degree sun-filled day, but this fall found my students grumbling out into a chilly, heavy mist. I told them that great poems have been written about hardship.) While out there, they’re to do two tasks. First, I ask them to make note of three things they think no one else will notice—a line of ants streaming from a trashcan, a mismatched hubcap on a Honda in the nearby lot. And I ask them to write down the following beginnings of sentences: The sky looks like: The air feels like: The day smells like: Your task, I tell them, is to complete these sentences with something utterly true. Do not worry about being “poetic.” You’re not writing a poem; you’re just observing. Maybe the sky looks like a bag of dirty cotton balls. Not pretty, but accurate, and accuracy is your goal. Pay close attention and report back. Don’t be afraid to get a little weird—often the truest things are a little weird. When the students come back in, I ask everyone to share what they’ve observed, and to read what they’ve written. The results are wonderfully specific and intriguing: I saw where a dog had left a paw print in wet cement. I saw a girl roll her eyes while talking on her phone. The air feels like a wet fur coat. The day smells like cigarettes and gingko berries. By being consciously observant, and by removing the pressure to Write a Poem, students hook into sharp details that are original and evocative. The exercise also helps students to let go of the urge to explain or editorialize their observations. Because the assignment is simply to notice and report, not to write a poem, no one is tempted to dilute a great image with commentary. This exercise then leads us into a discussion of what subjects and words are suitable for poetry, how a strong image can usually stand on its own, and how cigarettes and asphalt and the leaf-clogged gutter—these specific, sensory, evocative, wonderfully common things—can be the most compelling parts of the world. The lesson I want them to take from the exercise and subsequent discussion is this: Don’t let the idea of writing a poem get in the way of writing a poem. [[This post originally appeared on LitBits on 11/22/11.]] ... View more

In contributing to Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle’s Naming What We Know: Threshhold Concepts of Writing Studies, I tried my hand at discussing the performative nature of writing: I have been thinking about this “threshold concept” recently as I re-read some of Peter Elbow’s work on voice (his edited Landmark Essays on Voice​ and Writing​) is another very rich source for thinking through this difficult and often problematic concept. Elbow is an eloquent proponent of voice in writing, arguing that its attention to voice can help students improve their writing and actually enjoy their writing; moreover, voice in writing helps captivate and guide readers. I don’t want to join the debate for or against “voice,” partly because Elbow has already tracked that debate pretty thoroughly. Instead, I’ve been thinking about whether describing writing as “performative” might get at some of the same qualities Elbow and others extol in good writing.  A few years ago, a student challenged my claim that writing was performative:  “I don’t see how you can say that. The writing I do in college doesn’t perform anything.  It’s just lifeless prose I turn in because it’s assigned.”  This student later decided to spend a term exploring the claim, and we spent ten weeks debating and looking at examples of writing he felt was “like a performance, like doing something.”  Many of the examples he brought in to discuss came from speeches, particularly those by Martin Luther King.  These speeches seemed to him clearly to be performances – to be performative.  So then I challenged him to figure out, concretely, what that meant.  By the next week, he had a list of characteristics he said helped to make a text performative, “and it didn’t take rocket science,” he said, “to figure it out.” At the top of the list of features was rhythm, followed by repetition (and even rhyme).  Vivid images, strong active verbs, concrete, specific nouns, metaphor and other figures of speech, and direct address followed in quick succession.  These are some of the elements that make a text come alive, that make it “speak.” Now I’m wondering whether the individual choices writers/speakers make in deploying these elements can account for a good portion of what we think of as “voice” in writing.  My guess is that the two are strongly connected—and I plan to follow up with some students this summer to push a little further into this exploration.  ... View more