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

Other creative writing teachers may be surprised how much time the typical playwriting class spends in the act of reading aloud. In my classes, students rarely if ever take their classmates’ scripts home to read silently.  Since plays are meant to be performed, writers learn a great deal more by hearing how their words function in the mouths of actors.  While, in an ideal world, readings would be rehearsed and conducted by trained performers, in reality most readings in a beginning playwriting class will be unrehearsed—“cold” readings—with members of the class.  Though imperfect, these early performances still stand to teach a lot—at least, insofar as they remind beginning writers that words are tied to and derive their significance from performance. Unfortunately, many instructors do not spend time on the skills of out-loud reading, sometimes called “oral interpretation.”  To help facilitate cold readings, instructors should discuss the reading as a form itself, as a type of performance.  By providing guidelines on author and actor preparation, the instructor can ensure a more valuable experience for all.  First, playwrights should prepare their scripts for easy reading. They should familiarize themselves with current playwriting format.  They should pay careful attention to stage directions.  While in rehearsed, fully-staged theatrical productions, all stage directions are performed; in a reading, though, they must be read by a narrator figure.  I suggest that writers take care to determine which directions must be read aloud and which directions can be suggested by the actor.  For example, “Pause” and “Sadly” can be acted.  In contrast, a stage direction like, “He walks in dressed like a bird,” should be read aloud or the audience may not understand.  As another example, if one character suddenly and quietly kills another, the audience may be confused unless that stage direction is read aloud. In their book Scriptwork, David Kahn and Donna Breed lay out guidelines for actors in an unrehearsed reading.  From my classroom experience, my best advice boils down to urging actors to refrain from making bold choices.  For example, I have occasionally heard an actor read a character a certain way—for example, as very lazy or as having a British accent—only to learn as the reading progresses that that interpretation is wrong, leaving the audience confused.  It is far better to read lines tentatively, without undue emphasis on how the speeches fit together.  In other words, at a cold reading, it is the playwright’s job to build a character, not the actor’s.  The actor’s job, then, is simply to express what is present on the page.  In a fuller production, the actor adds details and fleshes out the character; in a cold reading, to avoid an uninformed and incorrect interpretation, the performer should aim simply to neither to add nor detract. The skills of the reading are different from the skills of production.  But, if considered and thought out, they can yield a positive experience for all. ... View more

Today's guest blogger is Amanda Gaddam (see end of post for bio). At CCCC 2016, I had the privilege of attending a session titled “New Thoughts on Writing and First-Language Teaching,” in which Dr. Deborah Holdstein raised questions about the politics of privileging digital rhetorics over sustained reading and writing. In her presentation, she made me think about whether or not we’re living in a post-composition-class world and whether the move toward multimodality in writing assignments means that we’re leaving other important things behind.  As I reflect on this talk and consider the ways in which I incorporate multimodal assignments into my first-year writing classroom, the question of whether I’m taking care to properly ground each task in pedagogical theory and asking students to engage in genuine rhetorical inquiries keeps popping up. The in-class assignment that I created to accompany my varied multimodal assignments reassures me that no matter the prompt, I always try to get students to think about the choices that they’re making and the effects these choices have on their audience and the meaning of their texts.     Assignment The following worksheet and in-class activity can be used as accompaniment to a large variety of multimodal assignments that you’re already using in your classroom.  This works well with any project where students are asked to consider how their arguments can be most effectively communicated visually to a specific audience.  1. Introduce and complete the Visual Rhetoric Reflection Worksheet. In the planning or revision stages of a multimodal project, ask students to fill out the Visual Rhetoric Reflection Worksheet, which can be downloaded at the link provided and edited to replace or revise questions in order to fit your specific needs and assignments.  This worksheet asks students to detail their choices for visual elements in their multimodal project and articulate a strategy for communicating arguments to an outside audience.  Students can complete this at home or in the classroom, but I find it useful to have students fill this out on a computer and have access to an electronic version during class so that they can add examples of their selected colors, images, video, and audio directly into the document.    2. Break class up into groups of 2-3 students for peer review.  Ask one student in each group to read everything on their Visual Rhetoric Reflection Worksheet aloud to their small group except their argument and purpose.  The listener(s) should take notes on the information read aloud; after the reader is finished, the listener(s) should review their notes and try to identify what the speaker’s argument and purpose are based on the details given.  In many cases, listeners are able to identify the general topic of a speaker’s project, but they may have trouble discerning how the colors or images or typefaces help to complement or communicate the nuances of the speaker’s argument.  Upon revealing the intended argument and purpose of the multimodal text, the speaker and listener(s) should discuss how the visual choices might be revised to more effectively express an argument to the intended audience.  It’s the speaker’s turn to take notes; he or she should write down concrete steps for revising their visual elements before submitting their project.  3. Reflect on the process.  In writing or in a class discussion, ask students to talk about the changes they plan to make, the challenges of articulating their visual strategies, and how their classmates’ feedback influenced their writing and revision process.  The discussion underscores the value of getting outside feedback on writing, whether it’s traditional written text or visual or digital rhetoric.  Reflection: I use some version of this worksheet with nearly every multimodal assignment that I introduce because I want students to take time to consider the effectiveness of their non-textual choices and how those choices read to an outside audience.  It works particularly well with end-of-the-term ePortfolios because instead of treating the assignment like a receptacle where they stuff all of their writing from the course, students reshape their conception of the ePortfolio assignment when they have to articulate an argument and purpose for the project.  The final products have cohesive themes, the final reflections are more focused, and students engage in authentic visual rhetorical analysis and collaboration in order to create these texts.  Most importantly, they can see how the work that they’re doing is connected to the course goals—they’re not just “decorating” their writing. Guest blogger Amanda Gaddam is an adjunct instructor in the First-Year Writing Program and the School for New Learning at DePaul University. She holds a B.A. in English with a concentration in Literary Studies and a M.A. in Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse with a concentration in Teaching Writing and Language from DePaul, and her research interests include first-year composition, adult and non-traditional students, and writing center pedagogies. ... View more

There’s been a very interesting thread on the WPA listserv about feedback recently. All the posts have been very thoughtful:  some argued that too much negative feedback is not helpful to students; others said that we live in an age when “the student is never wrong” and are afraid to give tough criticism.  Jerry Nelms reminded everyone that neither positive nor negative feedback can be helpful if students don’t understand it or have a chance to respond to it.  Maja Wilson quoted Peter Elbow to illustrate the kind of exploratory response she finds effective:  This discussion got me thinking about my own research on teacher feedback (or response).  In the 1980s, Bob Connors and I assembled a large random sample of first-year student writing and wrote a series of articles based on our analysis. One of them was on teacher response, and what we found was a clear preponderance of negative commentary, some of it well meaning, some of it downright mean spirited.  (See “Teachers’ Rhetorical Comments on Student Papers.” College Composition and Communication. 44.2 (May 1993): 200-223.)  Over 20 years later, Karen Lunsford and I attempted to replicate the study Bob and I did, and while we focused on an analysis of formal errors in the large sample of writing we gathered, we also took a close look at teacher feedback. Once again, we noted a great deal of negative commentary, though we were glad not to find the ad hominem slash and burn comments I had seen in the 80s.  (We wrote about this study in “'Mistakes are a fact of life': A national comparative study.”  College Composition and Communication. 44.2 (May 1993): 200-223.) Over the decades, I’ve experimented with all kinds of response:  for a while I was so worried about intruding on students’ texts that I wrote all my comments on post-it notes.  I’ve taped my oral feedback, used email for extensive commentary, and talked with students about what seems most helpful to them. Eventually, I found that what seemed to work best for me and my students was for me to give my most extensive response on drafts:  this I provide in a running commentary on the draft, noting what is working well, what I don’t understand, what questions I have, what I might suggest for the next go round.  Such responses are in writing—but they are a prelude first, to the student’s response to my comments, given to me in the form of a memo, and second, to a conference where the student and I focus together on the draft and simply talk through the ideas in it and brainstorm about what to try for in the next draft (which is often the final one).  This mixture of writing and talking leaves a lot of leeway for the student and allows for, I hope, frank interchange, ideally the kind of “dialogic interaction” that students in the Stanford Study of Writing identified as moments when they learned the most.  As always, I benefit from reading the postings on WPA and think back to how often that group has been of tremendous importance to me and my students—and to our field.  I wonder if any of you read this thread and, if so, what your responses were, and what mode of feedback seems most effective to you. [Photo via: Marcin Bajer, on Flickr] ... View more

In this series of posts (see also Teaching the Election: Intro) I’m talking about how to teach the 2016 presidential election without promoting a single political point of view or allowing students to get stubbornly stuck in us vs. them political positions. One great reading to help with that is Appiah. Time and again I’ve advocated Kwame Anthony Appiah’s “Making Conversation” and “The Primacy of Practice.” And with good reason. Appiah’s ideas are fairly central to the thinking behind Emerging. They are also incredibly flexible, able to be applied to any number of situations, including the upcoming presidential election. Two of Appiah’s ideas are extremely useful here. The first is cosmopolitanism. Appiah explains in “Making Conversation” that we just don’t have the luxury any more of pretending other kinds of people don’t exist. The world is too crowded and too interconnected. Instead, the central challenge is how to get along. The way I see it, that’s the challenge in this deeply divisive election as well. When it’s all said and done, no matter who wins, we’ll still need to find a way to get along with each other. Weekly I see friends on Facebook announcing that they are defriending this or that or those or these friends because of their political postings. But defriending someone changes nothing. Those people still exist in the world if not in their lives and, ultimately, we will need to find a way to get along with them. The second idea from Appiah that I think is useful in this context is his analysis of the primacy of practice. Appiah points out that we can agree to take certain actions even if our reasons behind those actions, even if our values, differ. That gives me some hope for us in the post-election world. I don’t have to agree with the values of those who don’t hold my political leanings. It’s still possible to agree on actions. Appiah is a great reading to get students thinking about the polarization of politics and how to move past that in the aftermath of the election. Really, I think that’s the more crucial question here—not who will win but what we will do when that candidate does win. 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

As students were working on a Narrative Branding Remix assignment recently, I asked small groups to review example videos and compile a list of strengths and weaknesses. The group discussion strategy wasn’t groundbreaking. What was new for me was the technique I used to ask groups to report on their findings. Most often I ask students to simply choose someone to be the presenter, and that person summarizes the group’s observations. I usually ask each group to email me the notes with their names so that I can compile the ideas into a single document and share the notes with the entire class. That process meant extra work for me, however, and often delayed getting the notes to students who were absent or needed a notetaker. I began trying ways for students to gather their ideas into one document themselves, so that they would all have immediate access to the notes. We tried using Padlet, which I have used for class brainstorming (see Using Padlet for Class Brainstorming), but it was too distracting to have the different groups all on the same screen. Further, screen space became an issue, since the class was limited to one screen. I switched to asking groups to write their notes in a shared Google Doc. We then read and scrolled through the Doc as groups shared their observations. The shared Google Doc solved the problem with everyone writing on the same screen, but it introduced difficulties with scrolling and formatting. Even when I added a linked table of contents, groups had problems finding the right section of the document for their notes. If they wrote extensively, one group might end up creeping into another group’s page. Last, when groups turned to present their findings, I had to attempt to quickly reformat the entire document to make the text large enough to read on the screen. The process was better, but still not ideal. When it came time for the class discussion of example videos last month, I was reluctantly preparing to set up Google Docs for the groups to use when inspiration struck. Suddenly it occurred to me that I was using the wrong Google tool. Students were going to present their observations, so I should be using presentation software, not word processor software. I created a Google Slides file with a slide for each example video and placeholders for students to fill in, like this example: I was nervous when I introduced the idea to the class the next morning, but I worked to convince myself that the students in my classes all had the experience to make it work. They knew how to use slide presentations, and they had worked in collaborative Google Docs earlier in the term. I was just asking them to combine skills they already had. I told students that it might sound crazy, but we were going to give it a try. Happily, I can report that it was a grand success. Here are their slideshows: 10:10 class Branding Video Tips 11:15 class Branding Video Tips 01:25 class Branding Video Tips Once the groups finished gathering their ideas, I projected the slideshow and groups reported their observations while I clicked through the slides with the remote. It was easy to focus on each video as the groups analyzed them. I was free to move around the classroom, instead of being tied to the teacher workstation to scroll the Google Doc. The slide format helped students write more concise comments than they had with Google Docs. There was one significant change that I need to make. I had numbered the example videos (from 1 to 10), but I had included a title slide in the Google Slide files. That meant that Example Video #1 corresponded to slide #2, Example Video #2 corresponded to slide #3, and so forth. There was a bit of confusion, with some students ending up on the same slide. It was easy enough to sort out, but I could have avoided it by listing the slide numbers rather than simply numbering the list. I will know better next time—and I will definitely be using this technique again! Have you used collaborative composing in your writing classes? Do you have strategies that work or success stories to share? Please share your thoughts by leaving a comment below. [Top Photo Credit: Cropped from Duke Ellington DNG 349, by US Department of Education on Flickr, used under CC-SA-BY 2.0 license] ... View more

This entry was originally posted on December 9, 2014 on the Bits Blog. What you see in the photo on the right is the Logitech Professional Presenter R800 with Green Laser Pointer, one of the best purchases I have ever made for the classroom. Last spring, one of the students in my technical writing class had a remote like this Logitech Presenter, which his group used as they made their presentation. It seemed like an  awkward “pass the conch” game, as group members passed the remote back and forth to give their portion of the presentation, but it was better than all of them shuffling around at the keyboard. Seeing the tool in action, I realized that I needed a similar remote for  my Writing and Digital Media class. In that class, students give two individual presentations. Because of the classroom’s configuration, I open the presentations on the teacher’s workstation so that they can be displayed on the large screen. As they present, students, who stand on the other side of the room, call out, “Next slide please” to let me know when to advance the slideshow. It wasn’t the best set-up, but it worked. This fall, I forgot about ordering a remote on time, so my Writing and Digital Media students did their first presentations using that “next slide please” method. When sign-up time came for their second presentations, I ordered the remote and tried it out in the classroom while they were doing peer review on their projects. I hadn’t planned on experimenting on students, but as it turned out, I had seen them all do their first presentations without the remote, and I am now seeing them all present with it—and I cannot believe the difference that having the right technological gizmo has made in their presentations. With control over the progression of slides, students move fluidly from point to point in their presentations. There are no awkward pauses, when they are waiting for me to realize I need to advance the slide. Their transitions are smooth, and  students have been far more polished than they were during their first presentation. Even better, because I am no longer distracted by watching them for cues to advance the slides, I have been able to pay better attention to their presentations and take better notes on what they were doing. At $70, the remote was a pricey personal investment, but students have been so much better during their second presentations, that I’m glad I spent my money on it. It reminded me how important it is to make sure students have the right tools, instead of just trying to make do with what’s available, what’s cheap, or what’s free. Have you found something that completely changed students’ performance? Do you know of a piece of software or hardware that makes a difference? Tell me more by leaving  a comment below. ... View more

At last month's CCCC 2016 meeting, I participated in a workshop devoted to assignments and activities that help integrate a Handbook into our teaching.  I learned a lot from those who were there—they were full of great ideas for imaginative ways to engage students in becoming friends with their Handbooks. I kicked the session off with a couple of my own favorite strategies, one of which I call “Tools of the Trade.”  As I compose my syllabus, “Tools of the Trade” appears at least once a week, notifying students that on that particular day they are to come to class with any and all questions they have about the writing they are doing—and with their Handbook.  I allot between 15 and 30 minutes for this session and I (or a student) put the questions on screen as students call them out.  We then work in pairs, with our Handbook, to answer the questions (for the last few years, many many many of their questions have to do with documentation—no surprise there given the proliferation of kinds of sources!).  The team that comes up with the best answers in the shortest amount of time explains their search method, and I usually give a silly prize of some kind.  I find that after just one or two such sessions, students really loosen up and ask more and better questions—and get more and more familiar with their Handbook. A second idea I shared was what I call an “annotated and detonated bibliography.”  When we are working on research projects, students follow the guidelines and advice in their Handbook to prepare a brief annotated bibliography—usually of three sources that they find most useful to their projects.  But some years ago, I added a twist, asking students to also write an annotation for one source they decided NOT to use:  that’s the “detonated” bibliographic entry.  In explaining why they decided that this source was not appropriate or helpful for their project, they do some good critical thinking—and sometimes, after their analysis, find that they were wrong about this source and that it deserves a place in their project after all. Jeanne Bohannon from Kennesaw State shared some other good ideas.  She asks her students to do an analysis of several pieces of their writing—early in the term—and to identify at least five problem areas for them. (To help prepare for this, she has students take the diagnostic quiz associated with the “Top 20” mistakes in my Handbooks.)  They then write a blog post describing their own problem issues—and keep it at hand throughout the term, using it to check against drafts as they go.  Jeanne’s students also use their Handbook in working on collaborative projects, including a Women in STEM wiki.  Stephanie Vie from the University of Central Florida had still other ideas.  Given that I’ve spent a lot of time lately studying and understanding the new MLA guidelines for documentation, I especially liked the approach she takes in asking students to compare citation styles and to ask how those systems reflect the values of particular disciplines.  Why does the date come up front in an APA citation, but not in an MLA one?  This and other questions lead students to see that documentation systems are not simply arbitrary “rules,” but that they embed the ideology/values of their fields within them.  After this discussion, Stephanie challenges her students to a contest:  working in teams, they see who can “translate” an APA citation into an MLA—and vice versa—the fastest and most accurately.  Winners get a “free homework” slip for a prize, which students covet!  I also loved Stephanie’s “bad presentation slide” assignment. Students use the guidelines for how to prepare effective slides in their Handbook to create the very worst slide they can possibly come up with.  These become the source for a lot of fun and laughs—and also as examples of what NOT to do in the slides they prepare for their own presentations.  There were lots of other ideas tossed out by participants, and I came away impressed with the thoughtfulness of everyone involved. It took me years to learn to teach with my Handbook rather than simply “assign” and then ignore it.  The teachers in this workshop had all made this transition, and I expect they did so a lot faster than I did! ... View more

Readers of the late (and unquestionably great) Umberto Eco will recognize the subtitle of this blog as an allusion to his classic analysis of Casablanca, “a very mediocre film,” in his opinion, but one that achieves “Homeric” proportions in the sheer quantity of its clichés.  “Two clichés make us laugh,” he remarks, a “hundred clichés move us .  . .  it is a phenomenon worthy of awe.”  And so, by this standard, one might say that Gareth Edward’s version of Godzilla (2014) is pretty awesome. I came to this film at the direct suggestion of a colleague of mine at CSUN, who is also a member of the Macmillan Community: Eric Dinsmore.  Eric was curious to see what I would say about it, and, as it turns out, there's quite a lot to say, but I will restrict myself to one major angle as a guide to how to approach semiotic analyses of popular movies with obviously indicated “messages.” So, I won’t belabor the fact that Godzilla exploits just about every Hollywood cliché in the book, from the handsome (but sensitive) young warrior hero trying to save the world, to his joyous reunion with his beautiful wife and adorable child in the end.  I won’t pursue the film’s allusions to everything from the Roswell conspiracy theories (this time the government is concealing not extraterrestrials but what could only be called “intraterrestrials”), to the apocalyptic images seared into our memories by the 9/11 terror attacks.  I won’t dwell on the fact that the female MUTO (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism) in the story looks suspiciously like Shelob in The Lord of the Rings, nor that all the MUTOs look like the Alien crossed with a pterodactyl.  Nor will I spend any time on the way that the film exploits the Fukushima nuclear meltdown and the tsunami that caused it.  No, I’ll just concentrate on the movie's obvious, and superficial, theme, because Godzilla is exactly the kind of "movie with a message" that you might want to assign to your students as a popular cultural semiotics topic, and if it is not approached carefully the result could be nothing more than a restatement of what can be found on Wikipedia, or even on the jacket of the DVD.  First, a quick plot summary.  Though it takes some time for all this to become clear to the audience, the story concerns the discovery of a prehistoric species of subterranean monsters (the MUTOs) who thrive on nuclear radiation.  The dawning of the atomic age has drawn them to the surface to snack on all the nice nuclear goodies that can be found in such facilities as atomic power plants and nuclear waste dumps, and the main action of the film begins with the MUTO's destruction of a Japanese nuclear reactor, which just happens to be under surveillance by a shadowy international research organization called Monarch.  In a not very convincing plot complication, Monarch has also been monitoring a heretofore dormant Godzilla, who has apparently been sleeping under the same reactor, and whose awakening also contributes to the plant's destruction. After trashing the power plant, the MUTOs take off to invade the U.S. mainland (after a catastrophic stopover in Hawaii), and a young U.S. Naval lieutenant, who happens to be the son of the head engineer of the now defunct Japanese reactor, gets caught up in the mess and joins the resistance.  As the U.S. military helplessly attempts (and fails) to stop them, the MUTOs create a nest for hundreds of soon-to-hatch MUTOs (enough to destroy the Solar System, it would seem) in San Francisco.  But in a weird reversal of the tradition, it turns out that Godzilla—who is somehow able to hear and understand the MUTO’s “language” as they communicate with each other (across the Pacific Ocean no less)—decides for reasons of his own (yes, Godzilla is a “he” this time around for some reason that would be worth a separate analysis) that he should pursue the MUTOs and destroy them. Which, in the end, he does, and then swims off into the sunset as the survivors of a devastated San Francisco cheer him on: the Lone Ranger as reptilian monster.  It is true that Godzilla himself does a lot of damage in the course of all this, but hey, you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. Now, the movie goes out of its way to interpret itself for us through the words of a Japanese Monarch scientist, who tries to explain to an American admiral that since human “arrogance” against nature is responsible for the MUTO mess, only nature (in the form of Godzilla) can restore the “balance.”  In case we miss the point, the copy on the DVD jacket says straight out that this “spectacular adventure pits Godzilla, the world’s most famous monster, against malevolent creatures that, bolstered by humanity’s scientific arrogance, threaten our very existence.”  And if that isn’t enough, Wikipedia says the same thing. So it would be all too easy to write a semiotic analysis of Godzilla arguing simply that the movie’s “meaning” is that nuclear technology (and science too) is bad, and that nature is both good and self-restoring.  For what it's worth, that is the movie's self-conscious "message."  But that isn't really what the movie signifies. The key to the matter lies in looking not at what a movie says about itself but at what it does.  And this is what Godzilla does: it depicts a symbolic creature of the nuclear age (Godzilla=Nature) destroying other creatures (the MUTOs), who are no less "natural" (and no more nuclear) than he is.  Thus, the film's final image of the joyful reunion of the Naval lieutenant and his family, which Godzilla has made possible, is fundamentally reassuring.  Because the real “message” of the movie is that no matter how much of a mess human beings make of the world, nature itself (the Japanese character in the movie explicitly calls Godzilla a “god”) will fix everything up.  It’s like saying “don’t worry about global warming, because the earth will repair itself before everything gets completely out of hand.” I mean, for Godzilla’s sake! If the movie were more honest, the MUTOs would have won—just as On the Beach and The Day After show us the real outcome of total nuclear war. And, Godzilla, as a creation of the nuclear age, would have been on their side.  Making Godzilla the hero (the movie’s creators call him an “antihero,” but he’s a hero all right) is simply wish fulfillment. But if the movie had done that, it wouldn’t have grossed three quarters of a billion dollars, and that’s the real significance of this thing.  For when doing popular cultural semiotics, one must never lose sight of the fact that popular culture exists to produce profits, and uplifting artifacts produce much higher profits than downers.  An apocalyptic image of Godzilla and the MUTOs teaming up to trash the world (which would been more consistent with the stated "theme" of the movie) would be quite a downer indeed, so Godzilla instead panders to its audience’s desire to see the characters it most identifies with live happily ever after, while reassuring everyone that while humanity has messed up the planet, ultimately benign forces (somehow, somewhere) will take care of everything in the end. Now that’s science fiction. ... View more

I remember back when I was in speech class in middle school our teacher told us there were two subjects one should never discuss in polite company: politics and religion. I’ve mostly stuck to that precept and it has served me well. But in the classes I teach I want to prepare students to participate in the world outside the classroom and this year that most definitely means participating in the upcoming presidential election. And that’s a challenge. It’s not just that I want to be excessively polite in the classroom. It’s more that I don’t think it’s my duty (or right) to impose my own politics on students. The way I’ve pitched this when training new teachers is this: whatever politics you hold undoubtedly you believe it’s the position any rational, critically thinking individual would adopt. Thus, I don’t have to teach my politics; I just have to teach students critical thinking. Theoretically, if my political positions are simply the most obvious to any thinker, then my students will end up endorsing them through the skills I teach them. Another reason I tend to eschew politics in the classroom is evident every day in my Facebook newsfeed: politics too often leads to polarization rather than discussion. Even with friends who mostly hold the same general political leanings as I do, there are posts every day not simply promoting Candidate X but also bashing Candidate Y of the same party as well as Candidates A, B, and C of the other party. I’ve found something similar happens in the classroom. Rather than engaging in a synthetic discussion that progresses in meaning and understanding, students, I find, tend to adopt a single view and feel the need to prove it’s right and, what’s worse, prove that every other view is wrong. In the process, all positions get flattened into simplicity and congealed as well. (If you want to foreground this process for your students, James Surowiecki’s “Committees, Juries, and Teams: The Columbia Disaster and How Small Groups Can Be Made to Work” discusses theories of group dynamics that explain how this happens.) So, on the one hand I want students to be empowered agents in the public sphere and specifically the political process. On the other hand, I don’t want to talk politics since my experience suggests that doesn’t really get anywhere. And on the other other hand, I also don’t want to impose my political leanings on students. In the next three posts I’ll look at some of the readings in Emerging that offer you the ability to resolve this thorny challenge. I’ll be working from the second edition, since my guess is that’s the one most people are using right now, though I will try to point to some good substitutes for those readings that didn’t make it into the third. In the meantime, have you encountered this problem? What strategies do you use to negotiate this dilemma? ... View more

What role does research play in argumentation? Is there a place for the traditional research paper in an argumentation course? Back when most colleges and universities had a two-semester first-year writing sequence, the research paper came at the end of the second course. Sometimes it was about literature because the second-semester course also included a unit on writing about literature, and the professors who often still taught first-year writing much preferred to read a stack of research papers about literature. The research paper seemed an entity in and of itself, something separate from what had gone before, largely to be feared and dreaded. The handouts dictating all of the rules and regulations for the assignment could easily go on for more pages than one of the finished papers. Experienced teachers had learned from previous grading all of the many pitfalls of the research assignment. A final research assignment can be a much more natural outgrowth of what has gone before in a course in argumentation. It need not be something tacked on or dreaded. One of the best ways to teach students how to write arguments is to have them read arguments and then write about them. This is most often done by assigning selections from a reader. It can also be done by drawing examples from today’s headlines. An early assignment can be to analyze the types of support in an article, for example, drawing examples from the article itself. It can be an argumentative article from their textbook or an editorial from the daily newspaper. Students can learn to document the use of one source, with the ironic caveat that journalists don’t have to use parenthetical documentation – though online articles often include hyperlinks to sources. The next assignment can ask them to compare the use of support in two different editorials or articles, documenting appropriately. If the thesis simply compares the two, the essay will be supporting a claim of fact. If it proclaims one better than the other, it will be supporting a claim of value, which is more challenging. Two simple assignments, using one or two sources and simple parenthetical documentation, and even a one- or two-entry works cited page. They are learning to do a research paper and don’t even know it. Obviously approaching documented research in this way lets the teacher quickly check documentation because the only sources are a few readings assigned to the whole class. How quickly to move away from shared readings is up to the teacher, but a series of assignments from shared readings can prepare the students for the time when they branch out into independent research. Then a series of assignments based on the same body of individual research can lead from some of the most basic research assignments to some of the most challenging. Students can summarize an article they plan to use in a later essay. They can explain in writing how the topic lends itself to supporting a claim of fact, a claim or value, and a claim of policy. If they cannot come up with examples of all three, their topic may not be an appropriate one for an argumentative research paper. This works better as a means of helping them avoid poor topics than a list of forbidden topics; usually there were better reasons why teachers arrived at such lists over the years than simply that they could not stand to read one more essay on those topics. Many of us now assign more than one independently researched essay instead of one. We really are not being gluttons for punishment. It was always frustrating to realize what students did not understand about research and documentation only when it was too late to do anything about it because the term was over. If they instead write a claim-of-fact essay on their topic, documenting it properly, then a claim-of-value or a claim-of-policy one, they have two chances to get it right, and the second tends to be easy to grade because it is not totally new content, but rather a new slant on the material, hopefully with documentation problems corrected. Students need to research their arguments, and if giving credit to their sources becomes a natural part of the process, the term research ceases to fill them and their teachers with dread. ​[Image Source: Universität für Bodenkultur Wien on Flikr] ... View more

During my career, MLA has made four significant revisions to its document style. As an undergraduate and early graduate student, I had MLA style down pat: I knew without even thinking where every comma, period, and colon went and how to handle works cited entries as well as footnotes (yes, we used footnotes then!). When the first major change came out, I dutifully committed the changes to rote memory. But by the next revision, I had had it: My head was crammed way too full of MLA trivia: I decided not to worry about getting it all “by heart,” happy simply to look up the “rules” when I needed them. Along the way, I wrote several reference books, all of which included MLA style. Of course, we had to get everything “just right” in the books, and that meant poring over model after model to make sure that they matched the current style. Surely the word “tedious” was invented to describe this process—in vast understatement. But also along the way, sources began proliferating at a truly amazing rate. My “tools of the trade” days (listed in my syllabus on days when students were to bring in ANY question about writing) turned into workshops on documentation, as students brought in more and more obscure and out of the way sources, wondering how on earth to document them “according to MLA.” As a result, in my teaching and in my Handbooks, I have for quite some time been advising students to use their common sense and look for a model that seems closest to what they are trying to cite and use that to guide their citations. “Don’t worry or fuss over citations,” I told them. “Just do the best you can to provide your readers with the information they will need to locate that source.” Now comes a further revision, and a very significant one at that. On April 1, 2016, MLA released the eighth edition of The MLA Handbook. And I’m delighted to say that this time around, MLA has taken pretty much the route I’ve been taking for some time. Rather than providing models for each format (books, articles, DVDs, etc.) MLA now realizes that way lies madness (students have known this for quite a while!). Instead, MLA now provides a set of “universal elements,” which writers are to use to guide their documentation: author, title of source, title of “container” (an article’s title is the title of the source; a database like JSTOR is the “container”); other contributors, version, number, publisher, publication date, and location. Student writers provide as much of this information as possible; MLA realizes that the proliferation of sources and source types and source “containers” is so vast today that it is impossible to provide models for every format imaginable. So—URLs are back, and DOIs are “encouraged”; publisher titles are given in full (though we can omit Company); abbreviations are fewer – and words like “editor,” “edition,” and “revised” are now written out. To my chagrin, MLA now advises writers to refer to three or more authors by the first author’s name and “et al,” a practice that erases the contributions of others and continues to valorize single authorship (I am very disappointed in this particular aspect of the “new” MLA, but some things never change. . . .). Surely oddities remain: why use // to mark stanza breaks, for example? But on the whole, this is the most succinct and sensible revision to MLA documentation style in my long career. So—bravo for common sense and for a little leeway here and there. And here’s to remembering what is truly important about documentation: that readers can use it to identify—and double check—the sources used by others. What’s your take on this revision?? [Image Source: The Modern Language Association] ... View more

This post concludes my series on what’s coming in the third edition of Emerging.  In my next series of posts I’ll focus once again on using the text to teach current events.  I also hope to write a bit about textbook affordability, given that I will be serving on a university committee about the issue. I’m really quite proud of the text we’ve put together.  It’s been a strenuously long process, starting with the decision to move into a third edition and then reviewing what worked and didn’t work in the second edition, to thinking big thoughts about the kind of issues we felt demanded a place in the text and finding readings to help students think through those issues, to figuring out the details of the apparatus—revising the introduction, writing the headnotes, working out the assignments. There’s quite a bit of work involved in assembling a text and it is, without a doubt, a whole team effort. One of the things that helped me get it done was working with graduate students in my program who teach using the text.  I saw it as a chance to provide them with opportunities to work on a project like this, build on their CVs, and earn some much-needed cash in the process.  That has me thinking about avenues for professionalization and mentorship in our graduate programs.  And so I would like to wrap up by considering that issue. In our program, graduate students with teaching assistantships are mentored in the classroom through a required seminar on pedagogy, a colloquium on teaching, and yearly orientations to discuss what’s going on in the writing program.  But I think what’s more important is the mentoring that happens outside the classroom. When I was directing our writing program I would often get overwhelmed with email and would step away from my office. I always headed down to the large common office shared by our GTAs. It was a chance to decompress but I also thought of it as a chance to spend some time “in the trenches,” talking with students about what was going on in their classrooms and in their lives. It was always rewarding.  There were times when I could help solve problems both pedagogical and personal and there were times when I could commiserate with the challenges of teaching FYC.  I like to think that those moments functioned as an informal mentorship process as well. What sort of mentorship processes does your program have?  Are they formal or informal?  How do you connect with graduate students to prepare them for the profession and/or for life? 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

It all started with a contest sponsored by Virginia Tech University Relations. Next thing I knew, I was seeing options for Instagram assignments everywhere. At the beginning of the month, I was checking email before class, and I found details on the #SeeVT: Pic – Post – Win contest in the daily news email. The contest seemed on topic for my Writing and Digital Media course, so I quickly edited the day’s post to add this note: Prove that you are a smart user of digital media. Participate in the #SeeVT contest, adding the hashtag #Engl3844s16 to your post. We will bring up the photos in class. If you win a prize, you win two excused absences. If you have perfect attendance, we will negotiate an alternative. NOTE: You will have to give me your Instagram name if you win. Don’t worry; however, I won’t follow you or stroll through your old messages. Several students participated, though not as many as I had hoped. Since it was only for extra credit, I didn’t worry about it. I mentioned it at the three class sessions the week of the contest and pulled up the submitted images with the course hashtag. The winners were random, so I did stress that everyone had a chance. Happily, I can tell you that one of my students (shown right) won one of the daily contests, winning a t-shirt. After the contest that week, I am seeing Instagram and hashtag-based activities as a possibility everywhere. Most recently, I was in a meeting where a Crops and Environmental Sciences professor was describing how she wants students to learn more about how the grains they study are used in their food as well as how those crops related to different cultures and festivals. Immediately, I thought about how much students love to take photos of their food. So why not ask students to post photos of what they eat, tagging the crops that are involved and if possible connecting to any relevant cultures and festivals? As I think about my own classes for next term, I have been thinking about challenges to post images that relate to whatever we are covering each week. For my Writing and Digital Media class, students could simply post photos of any well-designed multimodal texts, and I will probably encourage that. Very specific challenges, however, will ask students to demonstrate their understanding of the concepts. Further, we can pull up the images in class and review the ideas. Generally, students will take photos of texts that demonstrate specific concepts from class. Along with the image, they will post an explanation of what makes the example effective as well as the relevant hashtags (one for the challenge of the week and one for the course). I’m thinking of the activity as a kind of semester-long scavenger hunt. Here’s the first draft of the challenges (in a list of ten, of course): Great use of color Multimodal text focused on performance Simple effective design Effective use of negative (white) space Strong use of visual emphasis Convincing use of a weblink (not on the web) Eye-catching poster or flyer Effective multimodal text with no linguistic text Strong multimodal text that uses only two colors Powerful use of photography I have a few goals for the list. First, I hope to encourage students to think beyond the comfortable understanding of texts as equivalent to words. Second, I want students to document only positive examples to avoid creating a critical tone in the course. I don’t want to unleash a squad of design police on the world. Next week, I will consider the logistical issues, like tracking and grading students’ submissions. Have you used Instagram or other shared photos in the classroom? Do you have suggestions to share? Let me hear from you by leaving a comment below. ... View more

The regular academic year is quickly coming to a close. As usual, I’m experiencing a mix of emotions. There’s certainly excitement about the possibilities of summer and other new beginnings. Really, who isn’t already thinking about a warm day on the beach with a good book in hand? These warm fuzzies, though, are always tinged with a little bit of sadness for the ending of a thing. It’s at this time of year that I begin to reflect on the semester that is ending and to consider carefully what I hope to achieve with my students in the final days of the term. More than ever, this time of year compels me to reflect on what we’ve accomplished as a class. At the same time, I know there’s still work to be done.  I know, for instance, that there are central concepts from my course that I want to revisit and highlight again in our remaining class sessions. These are the bedrock concepts of my course, the ideas around which the rest of their experiences in the class have been organized. These are also the concepts and skills I believe will benefit students the most as they move forward in their academic careers, and as they look ahead to their professional lives. More than anything else, I’m hopeful that my students will take with them more refined skills in assessing the dynamic complexities of various rhetorical situations. I hope I’ve provided them with transferable frameworks for analyzing and understanding these rhetorical situations no matter where they find themselves, whether in an academic, social, or professional context.  In this blog post, then, I’d like to share a couple of assignments I’ve used over the years to “wrap up” my WID-based first-year writing courses. I designed these “capstone” assignments, in both cases, to reach backward, to take students back into the heart of the course, as well as to reach forward, or to move them to consider their own futures as academic writers or professionals. Rhetorical Analysis of Student-Generated Academic Text Throughout my course, students rely on various frameworks, or lenses, to engage in rhetorical analysis. In this specific final course project I ask students to select a text, a specific genre they produced as part of the course (e.g., an interpretation of an artistic text, a literature review, a lab report), and to analyze the rhetoric of their text as a form of self-analysis and reflection.  As the assignment sheet indicates, students are directed to select for analysis one of their previous projects completed in the course, and to consider their audience for the project carefully before explaining (by citing and analyzing specific examples of their rhetorical decisions) how their texts were crafted (at both the global and local levels) to accommodate the needs and expectations of the particular academic community in which their work was situated.  For example, if a student selected her social science theory response project to analyze, then her task is to study closely how she constructed her own text, and to make a case for how that text (through its rhetoric--the structural, reference, and language features of the text) would satisfy the needs of a target audience of other social scientists. I like this assignment very much, partly because it reinforces many of the basic principles of rhetoric that are the heart of my course, but also because it asks students to recognize that their own, self-constructed texts are themselves complex rhetorical events that communicate specific disciplinary values via the elements through which they are constructed. I also just love the look on my students’ faces when I tell them they’ll be analyzing their own rhetoric for their final project in the course. Initially, many of them have a difficult time understanding how their own texts are “worthy” targets of rhetorical analysis. By positioning their own texts as “worthy” subjects for these kinds of investigations, though, I hope my students leave the course a little more able to see themselves as actual scholars who are capable of producing disciplinary texts that allow for authentic engagement in differing academic communities. Rhetorical Analysis of a Self-Selected Genre in the Applied Fields Another “capstone” project I use in my WID-based FYC course asks students to identify and explore an applied field of interest to them. As part of that exploration, I further ask students to identify a specific genre of (written) communication through which members of a selected applied field community often engage with one another. After identifying such a genre, and locating and reading examples of that genre, students are then asked to write a rhetorical analysis of the genre in which they identify the conventional expectations for the genre itself. More specifically, I ask students to answer the following question as the core of their analyses: what structural, language, and reference features does the genre conventionally rely on? Like the assignment described above, wherein students analyze a text they produced, this project requires students to engage in basic rhetorical analysis, to notice rhetorical features conventional to a applied fields genre. But this assignment also allows many students to reach into their own futures by investigating a genre they may produce professionally as a member of the specific applied field of interest to them. I’ve found that my students are really excited to have the opportunity to investigate the kinds of writing they may be asked to do as professionals in a specific applied field, as well as to get a chance to apply the rhetorical principles they’ve learned throughout my course to a more “real-life” situation. These two assignments reveal a couple of the ways I’ve tried to “cap” my first-year writing courses. I’d be interested in hearing about the ways others “cap” their own courses. What kinds of assignments do you find most appropriate for course endings? What makes them good “capping” projects? What do you like most about those assignments? 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