Today's guest blogger is Kim Haimes-Korn​ (see end of post for bio). Students sometimes hesitate to take on multimodal projects because they place them in the category of “creativity.”  When asked, they often assert that they do not consider themselves “creative” and feel that these efforts come from an entirely different part of their brain that they are unable to access.  They see creativity in narrow terms and feel as if it is something they either have or not.  We also tend to see creativity in terms of origination – a goal that feels nearly impossible in this world where everything has been done before.  Students have heard the term, déjà vu – a feeling that we have when we recognize an experience as something that has happened many times before and feels familiar.   We can flip this idea and teach students to make the familiar strange (like cultural anthropologists and ethnographers) and present them with what creativity theorists refer to as vuja de, a way of thinking in which we can see old things in new ways (this term is attributed to comedian, George Carlin who first coined it in one of his routines).    When we ask students to engage in multimodality, we are, in fact asking them to be creative and to see things in new ways, engage in design thinking and create something that goes beyond words on a page.  Multimodal composition even harkens back to notions of rhetoric that employ right brain activities such as philosophical inquiry and invention and left brain activities such as techne (technique) and problem solving.  When students switch back and forth between these kinds of activities, they elevate the possibility of creative thinking.  When students develop rhetorical awareness and remix ideas this act of genre switching and visual representation engages them in creative acts of composition. I find it increasingly useful to include classroom activities that engage the both the right and left brain and expand notions of creativity for students.  As teachers, we do plenty of left brain activities in our classes, but I believe that it is productive to include right brain activities side by side to engage both sides of the brain.  There are many online resources for these kinds of activities (as it has a history in educational psychology) but I list some (digital, tactile, aesthetic and kinesthetic) below: Some Ideas for Engaging the Right Brain Image Searches Open ended art – painting, drawing/doodling, coloring Engaging both hemispheres – write with non-dominant hand – write words backwards Incorporate movement – walk backwards, stretch Music Play-dough, sculpting Meditation Blind drawing – object w/out looking at paper Photography – Digital Stories Although students eventually compose in digital spaces, I like to start them out with tangible acts of creativity that potentially push boundaries. For this particular activity, I introduce students to 4 different kinds of creativity (Gibson and Hodgetts, 1986) that push the definition beyond origination.  Innovation Synthesis Extension Duplication It is also helpful to include opportunities for non-structured, intellectual play that opens up possibilities for creative thinking.  Assignment: The Pipe Cleaner Activity - Engaging the Right and Left Brain I call this activity This is not a Pipe [Cleaner] after Magritte’s famous image of a pipe in which he reminds us about the difference between representation and reality (another important concept for multimodality).   You will need an abundant selection of craft pipe cleaners that come in different colors and designs so that students. Distribute Pipe Cleaners and allow students to create without boundaries (right brain) Introduce 4 types of creativity (left brain). Compare pipe cleaner creations and discuss kinds of creativity (right and left). Connect ideas to what we do as multimodal composers (left). Reflections on the Activity: Although this might seem simplistic, it gets interesting when you see what students create and the ways they come to understand creativity through the process.  I generally conduct this activity with college students or with colleagues at conferences and I am always encouraged by their delight at just seeing the pipe cleaners as a long forgotten activity of their youth.  It brings them back to a time when unstructured play felt more acceptable and when they were able to see possibilities before limitations.  Some participants make functional items such as glasses, or pen holders.  Others make miniature versions of larger things.  Some make full scenes while others shape animals or characters. Still others create conceptual structures that represent universal ideas or symbols.  Throughout this process they engage in innovation, synthesis, extension and duplication and come to see familiar things in new ways. For example, in what I call a Tale of Two Flowers (first image below), a student picked up the pipe cleaners and immediately constructed a somewhat predictable flower with petals, stem and leaves.  Another student tossed off her pipe cleaners in frustration because she felt the idea was “already taken.”  This gave us a great opportunity to discuss the concepts of duplication and extension. We talked about how the first student didn’t own or invent the concept of flower and in fact there are many versions and varieties of what we call flowers (both real and imaginary). At this point, the first student went back to his work and extended it through creating a scene (second image below) in which he synthesized the concept of flower into the larger context of its place in the world. As student present and discuss their creations with others they are additionally inspired through their classmates’ responses. The most difficult thing about this activity is getting students to stop.  They ultimately want to keep creating.  Many create, dissemble, and start again.  Some keep adding on and elaborating beyond their first creations. The activity opens up an excitement and an agency for them as they begin to see the possibilities for themselves as multimodal composers who can shape and reshape their ideas through different lenses and mediums. Guest blogger Kim Haimes-Korn is a Professor in the Digital Writing and Media Arts (DWMA) Department at Kennesaw State University. Kim’s teaching philosophy encourages dynamic learning, critical digital literacies and focuses on students’ powers to create their own knowledge through language and various “acts of composition.” She likes to have fun every day, return to nature when things get too crazy and think deeply about way too many things.  She loves teaching. It has helped her understand the value of amazing relationships and boundless creativity.  You can reach Kim at khaimesk@kennesaw.edu or visit her website Acts of Composition. ... View more

Today’s guest bloggers are Maureen McBride, Writing Center Director at the University of Nevada, Reno, and Meghan Sweeney, Assistant Professor of English at Saint Mary’s College of California. We love teaching writing—the opportunities that we can share with students to bring their ideas and voices into the world provide an internal sustenance for us. What we did not realize when we started out is that we would need to be teachers of reading to be effective teachers of writing. We have found that this is nowhere more evident than with students enrolled in basic writing. To teach reading, we begin by asking our students questions about what they read and how they read: What do you enjoy reading? Are you a fast reader? When we asked our students some of these questions and created assignments that required us to teach reading—and not just assign it—we realized there are many reading-writing disconnects our students are required to muddle through in isolation. Our quest to support our students led us to use versions of Marolina Salvatori’s difficulty paper, which asks students to discuss reading difficulties in writing to prepare them for more advanced discussions about the texts or more advanced writing about the text. Using the difficulty paper allows us to help students avoid getting “stuck” on difficulties and failing to engage with texts. In our research using the difficulty paper assignments, we found that our students identified a wide range of difficulties with the texts we assigned: length (e.g. reading the complete article) understanding unfamiliar vocabulary identifying the thesis/purpose finding relevance for detail/development understanding norms of different genres engaging with assigned texts What has emerged from our research more than anything else is that students see a distinct mismatch between what we ask them to write and what we ask them to read. Our research also highlighted how some of our students were using assigned readings in ways that we didn’t always intend, such as using a text intended to create a more informed context as a model for an assignment (“Difficulty Paper (Dis)Connections: Understanding the Threads Students Weave between their Reading and Writing.” CCC, vol. 66, no. 4, June 2015). Some of the great benefits of asking students to identify reading difficulties are the discussions the difficulties open up, such as how to shift from reading like a writer to reading like a critic to reading like a peer reviewer. Essentially, the difficulty papers made the reading process visible in our classrooms and since then have inspired us to create the following additional assignments that do the same: Ideal College Reader Reflections We use informal assignments to have students discuss what they think ideal college readers (and sometimes readers and writers) do and what their processes are, which can be very enlightening in terms of understanding how our basic writing students identify with the tasks we are asking them to complete. It helps students discuss dis/connections with their own reader-writer identities and lets instructors open up discussions about some of those myths/misconceptions. Disciplinary Representations of Reading After introducing students to the concept of disciplinary literacy, we invite advanced students from other disciplines to assign a genre that is common in their discipline. The advanced student then teaches the class for a day, discussing the questions they commonly ask, the perspective they strive to maintain, and the practices they employ when reading. Students ask these advanced students questions about their reading, then reflect on the experience. This process helps students realize that their reading processes and approaches may change after they leave the basic writing classroom. In the end, what this means for teachers of basic writing is that we need to be more intentional about teaching our students how to read and what to read for. Students have often had many experiences with teachers modeling writing process, but they lack similar experiences of having instructors model reading processes for difficult texts that vary in genre and purpose. We may have achieved making the writing process more visible to students, but somewhere we stopped modeling how to approach texts; we just fell into patterns of assigning readings and then wondering why our students were not engaged readers. Our take-aways for other teachers of basic writing: Scaffold reading expectations, specifically purpose Require reading process assignments Provide class time for discussions of reading Avoid summarizing the text for students during class discussion Be more intentional about text choices Create time and context for discussions of difficulties Leverage difficulties to promote connections between reading and writing Make a place for reading instruction in our composition classrooms. Our hope is that our identities have shifted from writing teachers to reading-writing teachers and that our shift will support students to see themselves as reader-writers or to at least see the connectedness. ... View more

What role will argumentation play in students’ studies after they complete first-year English? What role will it play in their lives outside the classroom?   In discussing the research assignment (see Argument and the Research Assignment), I mentioned before that I asked my students to speculate early in the research process how they could write a claim of fact, a claim of value, and a claim of policy about their topic. It is interesting to ask them as an exercise or even as part of a final exam to do the same with a topic in their major field. They may or may not have even thought about the controversies in their majors, but it is good for them to see the link to what they have been learning about argument. Having learned the concepts of claim, support, and warrant, of logical fallacies, of appeal, and of middle ground, they can apply them to essays they will have to write both in their major and in general education courses. Having learned the language of argumentation, they are ready to look at subjects in a range of content areas with a more critical eye. In Elements of Argument and Structure of Argument, we try to keep the readings current so that students can put theory into practice as they read and write about contemporary issues. Each edition brings major updates in the readings. This blog is meant to supplement the readings by applying theory to issues that may not even have been at the forefront of national or world consciousness when the last edition went to press or that have become of increasing concern since that time. Theories of argumentation are as old as Aristotle and as new as the daily headlines. ... View more

During a recent visit to the writing program at San Jose State, I had a chance to see the outstanding work they are doing – reevaluating, streamlining, and updating the curriculum for their writing courses and getting an ambitious, directed self-placement program underway. So no more “remedial” courses at SJSU. Rather, students choose to enroll in one or two semesters of writing (this is a “stretch” course that students can place themselves into). Then they will take a second-year course (English 1B) on critical writing, a course that may be taught from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Richard McNabb, who heads up the composition program, Tom Moriarty, who is in charge of Writing across the Curriculum, and Cindy Baer, who coordinates the “stretch program,” are all excited about the possibilities for students taking on more agency, more responsibility for their own learning and about the changes they are making to their curricula.  And they, wisely, plan to follow the students carefully, monitoring the progress of those who elect one course and those who elect two. By this time next year, they hope to have a rich data set to share and to compare. SJSU is also, wisely, working with the two-year and other colleges in the area that send students to them. In fact, the day I visited there were teachers from five area schools, all sharing information and eager to learn about what SJSU is doing. So if their work with the revised curriculum and directed self-placement is successful, it will surely have a ripple effect on other schools. I’m wondering what other schools have similar programs, especially since directed self-placement has been around for quite a long time and research supports its efficacy, if implemented carefully and well. In the meantime, I’m impressed with colleagues and students at San Jose State. ... View more

Dear Friends—let’s welcome the 8th edition of the MLA Handbook, published April 1, 2016, a simpler and more flexible system for students to learn and for us to teach. Most importantly, it is a system that allows us to focus students’ attention on why writers use sources and how documentation extends a research conversation. The emphasis of the 8th edition is not on rules; rather, it is on making documentation useful to readers and on helping writers to participate in an academic community—a community in which the exchange of ideas requires a system. As composition teachers, the ones in charge of introducing our students to MLA, we approach these seismic changes in the MLA system with some trepidation. We need to learn a new system and be comfortable and conversant with it in time for our September classes. Yet we understand, too, from our students’ confusion in documenting digital sources, and our own challenges in teaching an overly cumbersome system, why the 8th edition is needed. Here are the problems the 8th edition addresses: (1) In its attempt to keep up with the rapid evolution of sources, the 7th edition presented models for each source type or format. As the editors of the 8th edition write, “we need a system for documenting sources that begins with a few principles rather than a long list of rules.” The 8th edition shifts attention away from models for each source type to documentation principles that can be applied across sources. (2) Sources have become less stable and more mobile. Publications “migrate readily from one medium to another,” and are no longer contained in simple categories. An idea might start as a blog, for instance, develop into a TED talk, be published as an article, and reposted on a Web site. The source might be located or viewed in a format very different from its original publication, so guidelines are needed to account for that sort of migration.   Enter the 8th edition of the MLA, with its relaxed, more flexible approach to documentation. The 8th edition focuses attention on “simple traits shared by most works” that run across all sources: Author Title of Source Title of Container Other Contributors Version Number Publisher Publication Date Location These simple, core traits are recognizable to us as writing teachers, except for the new one, “container.” Here’s how to understand the container concept: A container is any larger work that contains or holds the source cited. A container might be an anthology, a print journal, a podcast series, an online discussion board, a Web site, and so forth. Containers can be nested: If a container is itself part of some larger container, such as a journal located in an online database or a photograph collection in a digital archive, then information about the second container--the online database or the digital archive--becomes part of the documentation to help readers locate it. As writing teachers, we encourage students to enter a research conversation by engaging with the ideas of other writers who have explored and studied their topic. We urge them to look for debates, areas of disagreement, so that they can find gaps and entry points for themselves in this conversation and gain authority by consulting a wide range of digital and print sources. The guidelines in MLA’s 8th edition make it easy for us to extend documentation as part of a research conversation between writers and sources and between writers and readers. Rather than teaching documentation as a series of rules to memorize, we can teach it rhetorically, as decisions made by writers to guide their readers quickly and unobtrusively to the source of a quotation, a paraphrased or summarized idea, or other kind of borrowed material used to support an argument. All of the Hacker/Sommers handbooks will feature guidelines and models based on the 8th edition of the MLA Handbook. Look for “2016 MLA Update” stickers on the covers. ... View more

Ends of semesters can be fraught and frenetic, both for students and for faculty.  My students are completing final revisions to projects begun earlier in the semester, and they are preparing for a final assessment.  I, in turn, am managing feedback in multiple modes and for multiple classes.  As Roy Stamper pointed out in his blog post The Endings of Things: A Couple of “Capstone” Assignments The Endings of Things: A Couple of “Capstone” Assignments, we are trying to review and reflect, knowing “there’s still work to be done.”  I am tempted each term to engage in “pedagogical cramming,” whereby I endeavor to introduce and review any concept I might have neglected or glossed over during the semester. But cramming, pedagogical or otherwise, rarely yields the results I want.  I’ve sat through countless sermons and lectures during which speakers couldn’t seem to “land the plane,” circling above their distracted audience with facts and pleas and suggestions and invitations and reminders and just-one-more-thing and let-me-just-add.  What is crammed into those final minutes is also the very information I tend forget before I’ve made it to the restroom after finally being dismissed. So, as we enter finals week, I am resisting that urge to cram and stuff, even if there are some boxes that will remain unchecked in my mental list of things to cover.  Instead, I will give the students an opportunity to reflect on their own writing and the threshold concepts underlying all the assignments I have given them.  Stamper calls such reflective opportunities “capstone assignments,” and he offers two examples.  Here is my own version: This week, I gave my students the following list of concepts, which I called my “basic principles.” All writing involves choices that affect meaning: words, structures, details, punctuation, and organization. Effective writing pays attention to the needs and the knowledge of a reader. As writers, we seek feedback and use it to revise (not just edit) our work. People’s words and ideas are valuable; we must handle them with accuracy and care when we write about them. We can never out-write our reading ability. (Adapted from Cheryl Hogue Smith) Uncertainty, difficulty, and confusion are normal parts of our growth as writers. Specific writing tasks require us to follow the conventions of a discourse community. Reading and writing demand thinking and make us better thinkers. I then asked the students to select any three of these principles.  For the final paper, they will write a letter to future students in our class, explaining and exploring the three principles that they chose.  Their exploration might include any of the following: An explanation of the principle in their own words Examples of how they have improved, developed, or changed their writing, based on this principle A specific example from a paper they have written this term which illustrates this principle A specific example from a comment I made or handout I gave which illustrates this principle How this principle will influence the way they write for future classes or for a future job Advice for future students, based on the principle My hope in this assignment is that the explicit statement of principles and the associated task will help students reflect and review more deliberately, without the pressure and pace associated with an in-class review session.  Each suggested strategy for developing the assignment also reviews a course concept or skill:  paraphrase, self-awareness, levels of specificity, interpretation and use of feedback, planning for concept transfer, and recognition of progress. I have lost a few students this term; employment changes, financial challenges, and family situations have kept some from completing.  But I believe those who have stayed with me to the end have grown in ways that neither they nor I would have imagined back in January.  Four began in ESL classes with me last August; you would be hard-pressed to match their initial, tentative pieces then with their researched-essays today.  I hope that when I receive their final letters next week, I will find that they, too, are celebrating their progress.  I’ll let you know what happens. ... View more

In this series of posts (see also Teaching the Election: Intro and Teaching the Election: Appiah and Teaching the Election: Gilbert) I’m talking about how to teach the election without promoting a single political point of view or allowing students to get stubbornly stuck in us vs. them political positions. The last reading I want to offer is Arora. If you’re using the third edition of Emerging, you might want to select Duhigg instead. Namit Arora’s “What Do We Deserve?” takes a close look at several models of economic justice in order to answer his titular question. Given that so much of any election revolves around questions of economics (both in terms of the national economy but also government spending and budgets), Arora’s essay can help students to figure out which model of economic justice resonates best with them and then use that to think about the various presidential candidates. One of the great things about Arora is that the models are clearly spelled out and defined, making them easy to acquire concepts that students can use with some facility. If you’ve moved to the third edition, I would recommend instead Charles Duhigg’s “From Civil Rights to Mega-Churches.” Duhigg is looking at the effects of strong and weak ties on social change but, more fundamentally, he is looking at the ramifications of peer pressure. Using Duhigg in the context of the elections does double-duty: it helps students to think about mechanisms of social change and it also invites them to consider the various peer pressures exerted upon them in relation to voting and the election. Ultimately, I feel compelled to teach if not the election itself then at least the issues that surround it. And I feel compelled to do so in a way that will equip students to make their own reasoned choices, to vote, and to become fully participating members in the political process. 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

This week I want to share a fun and free tool that you can use to talk about how HTML code works while playing around with remix. Mozilla X-Ray Goggles claim to help users “Remix Any Page on the Web” by revealing and then editing the text and code on target pages. To use the tool, you drag a button to your web browser’s toolbar. Visit the page you want to remix, and click the button to activate your X-Ray Goggles. Next, click on areas of the page and an editing area appears at the bottom of the page. You can change the text or the related HTML code. If you want to save your remixed page, create a Mozilla login and you can save the text to Thimble (Mozilla’s free web hosting site). This KQED Education video provides an overview and shows how the tool works in more detail: Video Link : 1610 The tool is meant for a younger audience. If you look at the activities at the bottom of the X-Ray Goggles page, you’ll notice that the age-level is 8 and up. That is a bit low compared to your basic college student, but the tool is very versatile. Don’t let that age range put you off. What matters is how you use the tool. Want your students to learn how to structure a particular document for online publication? Find a model and have them remix it with new content using X-Ray Goggles. Want to talk about the code behind web pages before you ask students to create their own websites from scratch? Use X-Ray Goggles to explore the different tags and attributes behind a variety of pages. Want your students to talk about how design matters on the web? Challenge them to all recreate a basic page by manipulating the code behind that content using X-Ray Goggles. Want students to create parody websites? Have the students visit the sites they will parody and use X-Ray Goggles to create their parody content in the format of the original site. Consider how simple it would be to create fake news sites or to turn that assignment around, to take fake or flawed site and create a more truthful and fact-checked version. You get the idea. The tool helps students see the HTML code in context of real, working pages, and it has the additional benefit of giving them a simple way to borrow and remix code and content. Do you know of other free web tools that can help in the classroom? Please tell me about them by leaving a comment below. ... View more

Let's start with this. Machine response to writing is here to stay. It will not be undone. And because we cannot wish it away, it is important, as Carl Whithaus argues in "Always Already: Automated Essay Scoring and Grammar-Checkers in College Writing Courses," to acknowledge what machines do poorly, what they may do well, and what strategies instructors and students can apply to make the best of automated response to writing given both its ubiquity and limits. Writing in 2012, Whithaus builds on advice that smart writing teachers recognized earlier in the use of software. For example, in On Composition and Commuters, published in 1987, Deborah H. Holdstein, writing of "prose analyzers, revision software, [and] spelling checkers," noted "Instructor guidance is essential to educate students in the appropriate role of a software program, to demonstrate the importance of integrating any 'lessons learned' into the writing process, and to emphasize the students' responsibility for the results of their labor" (21). Like Holdstein and Whithaus and many, many others, I favor teaching how to use things, including teaching when not to use things. And because every student who writes a course paper with a computer will at some point use a word processor that includes a grammar checker, it helps to teach students specifically how to use the grammar checker wisely. A good first principle is to teach students how a grammar checker's programming works, and what its current limits are. Faculty don't need to assign complicated research on natural language processing, artificial intelligence, context dependent analysis, and other details. Ask students to start with the Wikipedia entry for grammar checker for a quick overview. Les Perelman's more recent "Grammar Checkers Do Not Work" in the Writing Lab Newsletter offers useful insights that can help students understand the limits of the grammar checkers they are using now. For faculty, a useful piece for your own reading is Patricia Ericsson's and Tim McGee's 2002 "The politics of the program: ms word as the invisible grammarian" Once your students have read a bit on how grammar checker's work, the following approaches can help them make better decisions about the advice their grammar checker's offer. 1. Talk to students about active and passive learning. Software such as Grammarly, an online grammar checker, complies for students an error log. But having students create their own logs, where they learn to find and compile sentence level errors on their own, is more powerful simply for being more active --- something they do instead of something software does for them. By making the logs on their own, students will better remember and better recognize the issues the logs record. 2. Require student judgment and responsibility by teaching them to question grammar checker advice. Given that grammar checkers are less than fully accurate, students need to learn to question what is flagged and to look for what isn't flagged. Ask students to write about their decisions on which grammar checker advice to follow, which to ignore in process notes. 3. Teach style, not just grammar. A good way to focus consideration on sentence level issues to talk about grammar in service of style and voice. In this view, a run-on sentence isn't automatically fixed by inserting a comma because the grammar checker recommends one. Instead, the flagging of a run-on becomes an occasion to think about the sentence and what might make it more effective rather than merely correct. Nora Bacon, Star Medzerian and Keith Rhodes presented some fascinating research on how this approach can really improve students understanding of grammar overall at conference in April 2016. 4. Show students how to turn off their grammar checker in early drafts. In early drafts, where you might be encouraging students to freewrite or speedwrite as a strategy for getting their thoughts down, the grammar checker's squiggles can intrude on the energy you'd like writers to enjoy. So show students how to turn the grammar checker off. If you discover that students do not turn off grammar checkers, find ways to assign early drafting in spaces that do not have grammar checkers built in. This might be an online space such as a discussion forum in your LMS, a wiki space, a blog tool where you can turn off the function, or just a fun place like 750words. But exposing students to writing without a grammar checker always shadowing them might be a new experience for them. Hint: writing with a pen and paper always works. Sometimes old school is best. 4. Show students how to use their grammar checker deliberately. This is not a new idea. Holdstein advocated it in her 1987 monograph. In 1994, Ed Kolonoski's “Using the Eyes of the PC to Teach Revision." appeared Computers and Composition. As this old handout of mine shows, students can learn how to turn Word's grammar checker features on and off. 5. Teach copy editing and proofreading techniques at the final stages of the writing process. I show students how to reconfigure their writing, converting it from an essay to a list sentences. Single sentences can be looked at one at time, in the same way that a grammar handbook or grammar exercise isolates a single issue and single sentence. This handout on that is in Word; feel free to edit to suit your purposes. Having students read aloud is still a wonderful way to help them break up normal reading and discover error. ... View more

As I was teaching my Introduction to Literary Theory course this semester, I thought a lot about what it is that we’re teaching students to do.  I paid particular attention to the way that I taught students about formalism, which led me to further thinking when we hit other theories, including deconstruction, feminism and Marxism.  One of the things that’s so difficult about formalism for students -- whether they’re in a theory class or in an introduction to literature class -- is recognizing the rigor and care that we show when we’re serious about close readings.  For years, I’ve been trying to impress upon my students that they shouldn’t settle for a single example of something.  Rather, they should be paying attention to every instance of an image, thinking about how it changes over the course of a text. It hit me this year that I’ve been framing this all wrong for my students.  It’s all about the patterns.  For many of us -- particularly those of us who are a couple of decades away from our first college English course -- it’s easy to forget that finding themes and patterns of images is not particularly intuitive for most people.  This is something that seemed entirely obvious once I realized it -- and it’s something that many of the questions in anthologies ask students to do (e.g. “Trace the patterns of light and dark in ‘Araby.’”). But how often do we speak to our English majors about patterns? Of course, it’s not simply about finding a pattern -- or to put it in more scientific language, it’s not all about finding a complete dataset.  It’s about figuring out what to do with that textual information.  What we want to encourage in our students is not simply an ability to find all of the metaphors that are about animals, or all of the images that engage the ear, or every time the color yellow shows up in the novel. Instead, we want to help our students build the pattern and interpret from there. Even our work using theory requires this special kind of careful thinking: we cannot simply cherry-pick what we want from a text to make the point we want to make. We have to look at all of the possibilities and figure out whether or not they help our thesis or defeat our thesis -- and then we have to go back to reconsider our original impression of the text.   While I don’t have a particular exercise to help with this -- I’ll be working on that over the summer -- I think it’s an important insight for me.  It provides my English majors some boundaries on their interpretations (it can’t mean whatever you want it to mean, but must instead be plausible. Or, as I tell students, you cannot insist that Hamlet is about pterodactyls in space, because you want it to be.); it also gives us a way to talk about the interpretation of literature with students who are less comfortable with ambiguity.  It gives everyone a way in. ... View more

As pioneers of the analysis of popular culture, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno don't pull very much weight these days, especially among the followers of such writers as Dick Hebdige, Simon Frith, and Stuart Hall, who, one way or another, have embraced a "populist" approach to cultural studies, characterized by the conviction that, rather than being a top-down mode of social control, popular culture is actually a site for working-class "resistance" and "subversion."  But if certain contemporary events can be trusted, it appears that while the populists are right about the subversive potential of pop culture, that subversion can be startlingly reactionary rather than revolutionary.  Because in the curious march of Donald Trump towards the Republican nomination for the presidency, we can see how the uses of popular culture can lean to the right just as much as they can to the left.  Let me explain. As I have been saying for many years in Signs of Life in the U.S.A., America today is an entertainment culture—that is, a society in which the old lines between high culture and low, work and play, the "serious" and the "non-serious," have been blurred, or even abolished.  In an entertainment culture, everything is expected to be entertaining, and while this has been the case for quite some time in American politics, the rise of Donald Trump signals its full coming of age. One could say, of course, that Trump's RTV-style candidacy was anticipated by the cheerleader's campaign of Sarah Palin.  And before Palin there were Reagan and Schwarzenegger.  But the real foundation for the Trump campaign lies in the legacy of such call-in radio and television talk show hosts as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.  A volatile synthesis of talk radio (there's an element of Howard Stern in the mix too) and shock-schlock TV (think Jerry Springer), Trump's candidacy has been expressing the frustrations and anger of working and lower-middle-class Americans who feel left out of the conversation.  Giving them a voice, Trump has created the apparently oxymoronic spectacle of a multi-billionaire carrying the banner of a populist revolt. In such circumstances, I would hardly be surprised if the Donald—in an effort to shore up his support among evangelical Christians—were to choose Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty as his running mate.  And why not?  For when politics and pop culture have become one and the same, what should be surprising about a Donald/Duck administration? ... View more

Recently, I’ve been leading a month-long discussion on Stanford’s Book Salon, an online group started by the late great Diane Middlebrook. Diane was the noted biographer of Anne Sexton and Ted Hughes as well as of Billy Tipton (The Double Life of Billy Tipton chronicles the life of the jazz pianist who, for over 50 years, “passed” as a man—check it out!).   Diane was also a brilliant and supportive colleague and teacher; students literally lined up to get into her seminars. And she was a big fan of memoir. I’ve now hosted two of these salons, and each one has given me a chance to remember Diane and also to engage participants in reading and exploring graphic memoirs. The one we are currently working on is Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?   That’s Chast on the right, facing her parents, George and Elizabeth, to whom the book is dedicated, as they insist that they will talk only about “pleasant” things, among which are not death and plans for their very late years.   I find that graphic narratives work extremely well for memoir: the combination of words and images allow Chast to speak in her own voice and, through speech bubbles, allow her parents to speak for themselves; her drawings of them etch them firmly in readers’ minds. Especially haunting is the series of sketches of her mother that Chast drew during the last day of her mother’s life. No words needed there.   What has struck a chord with the people participating in the book salon is Chast’s unblinking honesty in describing her parents’ long decline and the part she played in their lives. An only child, Chast got more support/empathy from her father than her mother, who was the one IN CHARGE of the family in just about every way. Chast seems a lonely child, one left alone every day after school and often ignored, especially by her mother. When she married and moved away, Chast didn’t visit her “deep” Brooklyn home much, but that changed when her parents reached their late 80s and 90s and obviously needed help – though they would never admit it. As Chast describes it, they were “a unit,” timeless and everlasting, without a need for any other person at all.   Chast perseveres, however, though she hates doing it and hates not doing it: and that is the dilemma readers react very powerfully to. Many have found themselves in similar situations with aging parents: it’s not easy and it’s not pretty, yet children want and need to do what they can, while loathing many aspects of the work. Chast brilliantly captures the tensions, contradictions, and ambivalences in her own encounter with her parents’ last years.   She also manages to capture the absurdness of aging often in hilarious ways. Her father, moving slowly into dementia, moves in with Chast while his wife is in the hospital—and he becomes obsessed with a bunch of bankbooks back in his apartment (most of them acquired on a special “deal” that, for depositing $100, gets George and Elizabeth a “prize” of some kind—a toaster, blender, etc.). Convinced that evildoers are trying to break in and steal the bankbooks, he talks endlessly of them as if they are themselves survivors of some dreadful ordeal.   I have taught graphic memoirs since shortly after Art Spiegelman’s Maus won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 and I realized that I should be paying a lot more attention to comix, as he termed it. I’ve never had a student who was not moved by Maus: in the early days, when they had never heard of the book, some were dismayed that the Holocaust was the subject of a comic book. As soon as they entered the world of the narrative, however, they were captivated: over the years, a number of students told me they had disliked history until they read that book. I also loved teaching Lynda Barry’s One! Hundred! Demons!, a coming of age memoir, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Are You My Mother? And of course there are so many others: Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese; Belle Yang’s Forget Sorrow; GB Tran’s Vietnamerica—I could truly go on and on.   But I do not teach these works in literature classes—but in writing classes. I have found that college-age students are drawn to memoir and that the image/word combination resonates especially strongly with them. So we analyze the panels and gutters, studying how they carry the story forward silently, and we look at the structure of the entire work and imagine “translating” it into a research-based essay or another genre, looking at the rhetorical strategies at work in each version. Inevitably, we do some drawing too (I am the worst in the room at this!), and several students have gone on to create graphic memoirs of their own and to publish them online.   What I absolutely love about all the possibilities open to writers today is the freedom it offers students as they literally write/draw themselves into being. College is a time of self-representation, of identity-creation, of learning about who you are. To me, graphic narratives in general and graphic memoirs in particular make a perfect vehicle for exploring these questions. ... View more

As I’m working this evening, I am humming songs from Hamilton and reflecting on sessions from the Cs in Houston in April and NADE in Anaheim back in March — threshold concepts, transfer, critical reading in the writing classroom, IRW, accelerated programs, calls for action.  These professional meetings energize and inspire me to have “a mind at work,” and I always return to campus full of ideas and projects and research proposals, amazed at “how lucky we are to be alive right now…”  (Hamilton has come up on Pandora again). But how do I translate that energy for my students at this point in the semester?  Back in my classroom this morning, I heard myself saying, “If you take nothing else away from this course, remember that …”  Over the years, that phrase has come to signal discussion of the threshold concepts that define and structure my classes; in fact, I was framing my courses in this way well before I knew what  a threshold concept was, much less how such concepts might shape disciplinary conversations or a writing program.  With only two weeks left in the semester, I face pedagogical angst:  have I made the points clear?  Have I created the opportunities to invite students into liminal spaces and encourage them to experience threshold concepts for themselves?  Have I paid attention to their comments–have I listened well enough to recognize their tentative efforts to deal with the confusion which inevitably accompanies our initial encounters with threshold concepts? How can I revise the text of my classroom (as Donald Murray’s revision checklist always comes to mind)? I find myself preaching the concepts (as the wife of a preacher, pulpit-talk comes easily to me), whispering them in conferences, jotting them in the margins:  If you take nothing else away from this course, remember . . . you are writing for readers who will make their own meaning based on your lexical and grammatical choices.  If you take nothing else away from this course, remember . . .that you are a textual matchmaker, introducing your readers to your sources; in that position, you have both tremendous power and tremendous responsibility.  If you take nothing else away from this course, remember that language–and writing–reflects our identities and discourse communities.  If you take nothing else away from this course… These threshold concepts may seem simple, but they are not.  They are much harder to acquire than a paragraph template, a comma rule, or pattern for writing introductions, in part because they require agency and self-efficacy (one of those words I heard at the Cs) — stances which my students have rarely been asked to take (or, in some cases, actively hindered from taking).  More than once, weary eyes have met mine:  “Professor Moore, just tell me what to say and I will say it.”  Ahh, at this point in the term, how easy that would be.  And how terribly unfair and cruel to these readers and writers.  I’ve got just two weeks left in the semester.  Two weeks to craft responses that illustrate these threshold concepts.  Two weeks to resist asserting control over student writing.  Two weeks to invite students to experience the exhilaration of revision and the mot juste.  Two weeks to assure them that composing is hard work, even for their teacher… Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton gets it.  I may not be “just like my country,” “young, scrappy,” or “hungry,” but I’ve got two weeks left.  And I’m not throwing away my shot. ... View more

In this series of posts (see also Teaching the Election: Intro and Teaching the Election: Appiah) I’m talking about how to teach the election without promoting a single political point of view or allowing students to get stubbornly stuck in us vs. them political positions. Another great reading to help with that is Gilbert. Daniel Gilbert, in “Reporting Live from Tomorrow,” looks at how truly awful our imaginations are at predicting our future happiness. And really that’s what any election is all about: which candidate will lead in a way that offers me the most happiness for the next four years? Answering that kind of question, Gilbert shows, is anything but easy. Unless you use surrogates. For Gilbert, surrogates are people who are living an experience you hope to have. For example, if you want to find out if you’re really going to be happy as a doctor, then you should talk to someone who is a doctor. I think you could have students explore this concept, and its limitations, in relation to the election. What kind of surrogates might we locate to help make our voting decision? Of course, Gilbert also points out that people are loathe to use surrogates, believing that they are so special that in no way could someone else’s experience predict their own future happiness. That’s something for students to explore as well, considering the challenges to using surrogates in election decisions and life more generally. Critical thinking often lies, I believe, in complication. Thinking about future happiness in the context of the presidential election is a wonderful way for students to work on complicating Gilbert’s ideas. In the process, not only will they become more adept at working with ideas in general but perhaps they will, if nothing else, examine their own thinking processes in relation to their political choices. 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

Last week, Virginia Tech published Dear Professor ..., a short video that focused on three students thanking three teachers who had made a difference in their education. The video is set up as a surprise for the teachers, but rather than summarizing it, let me ask you to watch it: Video Link : 1615 It’s a nice tribute to the three teachers and to teachers in general; but once I reflected on it, I realized that it made a nice video assignment for a writing course. Students could mimic the video itself, inviting teachers in and surprising them with their letters. Such an assignment could be complicated, however, if students would like to salute teachers who are not geographically near or able to meet with them for the surprise filming. I compiled this list of alternatives that would also work: Create a video letter to a teacher, reading the letter as the students in the Virginia Tech video do. Tell a favorite anecdote about a teacher in a digital storytelling project. Collaborate with other students to honor a teacher to create a video letter, each reading a different part of the letter. Film artifacts from the class and relevant to the teacher, with a voice-over explaining the significance. Compose a list of great things about a teacher (like a top ten list), and then film a video that presents the list. Describe the lessons a teacher taught you or the most important thing a teacher taught you in a video tribute. Interview students who were also taught by the teacher about how the teacher has influenced them. Create an endorsement or testimonial video that explains why someone should take a class with a particular teacher. Compose video diary entries that reflect on significant classroom experiences with a teacher. Create a video that defines why teachers matter, with examples from a specific teacher you want to honor. In all the videos, students could film themselves with their phones, tablets, or computers or they could find images and piece still images together with a voiceover. After publishing the videos, students can send the honored teachers the links. These thank-you videos can be used for many other scenarios, of course. With some slight changes, the list could be used to thank any significant person the student knows (like a family member or coach), to show appreciation for a coworker, or to honor graduating students. Do you have suggestions for using video thank you messages? Want to share another video project? Let me know by leaving a comment below ... View more