“[Becoming an artist] is a total risk of everything, of you and who you think you are, who you think you’d like to be, where you think you’d like to go—everything, and this forever.” -James Baldwin, “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity,” 1962    Last week was Union Week on our campus, one of 25 colleges in the City University of New York (CUNY) system, a large urban university system. Our union, the Professional Staff Congress (PFC), representing full-time and part-time faculty and staff at the 25 colleges, is negotiating for a new contract amid the many challenges faced by higher education. The Union Week Embroidery Project, an individual artistic project aiming to take a stand, is intended to highlight the needs of our campus with the understanding that all students deserve the right to a fully funded higher education, in clean and sustainable facilities.  Some of the 25 campuses are housed in former office buildings surrounded by highrises, concrete, and glass. They are close to the subway and in some ways indistinguishable from the surrounding city. In contrast, the campus where I teach is almost bucolic, with many trees and open green lawns where students gather on warm days. Geographically, the campus remains part of the city, but is located close to the suburbs and two miles from the subway.  Nevertheless, the physical plants at many of the campuses, including where I work, suffer from years of underfunding and subsequent neglect. Signs of disrepair are hiding in plain sight, with one instance late last year, of interruption to in-person classes. In spring semester 2023 and again this fall, returning to in-person teaching in the continued wake of the Coronavirus pandemic, I could not help but notice the worsening conditions on campus. The Union Week Embroidery Project finds inspiration from James Baldwin’s writing on the risks and responsibilities of becoming an artist, which are akin to the risks and responsibilities of the work of higher education. As the union works to negotiate a new contract, together we draw attention to the need to bear witness to the consequences of the deteriorating conditions around us–there is too much at stake to ignore.  In becoming aware of the consequences and intervening in the current situation, perhaps we can bring into being a hope that is so often absent these days, hope that our students and future generations of students can pursue a meaningful education, and, as a result, give back to a world that must continue to offer opportunities to flourish and grow.   Embroidered banner for Union Week: NO CUTS PSC CUNY   Danger Keep Out   No Trespassing   Yellow Post with Rusted Chain   Untended Air Conditioner with Dandelion     Timeworn Classroom Baseboard   Bulletin Board with Staples, Paper Scraps, and Graffiti. Graffiti Text: "Cliche➡ You go to my head, [you linger like a haunting refrain] ⬅ that’s good"   Portrait of the artist with glasses, black hoodie and black mask against blue skies and green trees   “I support the union because all of us must have opportunities to grow and flourish together in solidarity.” Sign by S. Bernstein black letters on rainbow-colored background   Notes and Credits The Union Week Embroidery Project was made for City University of New York's PSC CUNY (Professional Staff Congress) Union Week, which can be found on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/psc_qc/    The banner and sign are provided by PSC CUNY. The embroidery and other multimedia work is my own. A video for the Union Week Embroidery Project is available here: https://youtu.be/-vkWVmBTPEo  ... View more

Last week I wrote about the gap between the expectations we have for students and the expectations they have for our classes and their participation in them. Since then, I had an opportunity to join in on a Program in Writing and Rhetoric pre-term staff meeting at Stanford, led by my inimitable colleague Marvin Diogenes. During this session, Marvin asked all of us to turn the dial back to the first day of our first year in college, to our arrival at whatever school we attended. For him, that was fifty years ago this week, his first day as a first-year student at Stanford.  Marvin asked us to make notes about what that day was like: what did we remember about the place and our place in it? What was happening on campus at the time? What was happening in the larger world that week or month? What favorite movie or song or band do we remember from that year? What activities were we signed up for and why? How did we allocate our time between school work and “other” things? He had about twenty of these prompts, all designed to take us back in time to our 17- or 18-year-old selves, to get our heads back into that space, if only briefly. He described leaving his home in Michigan pretty much for the first time, getting ready to head west to California. He remembered packing two suitcases and two boxes, which his brother-in-law helped load into the car—when Marvin, being his ever-cautious self, remembered he had not packed his winter coat. No room in the suitcases now, so he wore it instead, onto the airplane headed to SFO. In those days, current Stanford students turned up at the airport to welcome new frosh and usher them onto waiting buses for the ride south to campus. Marvin found himself on one of those buses, the only person wearing anything even vaguely resembling a winter coat. Feeling awkward and out of it, a “nerd” from small town Michigan, he imagined everyone on the bus looking at him with derision or contempt. Or worse. It was a moment when he felt a complete outsider, ostracized and very much alone. He asked us to look over our notes and to think about when and where we might have experienced such a “winter coat” moment, and just how that had felt. View of Wallenberg Hall on the Stanford University Main Quad Then, more to the point, he asked us to remember such a moment when we looked out at the faces in our first classes this term. The students, he said, might look unengaged. They might look distant and even suspicious. Or just silent. Those appearances, though, don’t reveal the whole student, not by a long shot. We can be sure, Marvin reminded us, that each of them has had or will have a “winter coat” moment that will affect them deeply, though we won’t be able to see that at all. I’ll remember this story for a long time. Especially when I am greeting new students. And I will try very hard not to make snap judgments and to question my own assumptions about the students I see. I had more than one winter coat moments in my first year, from the time I badly mispronounced a word that I had only seen written to . . . well, you get the idea. And the movie of my first year? Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, after which I did not feel comfortable in the shower for almost a decade. What was your first week of college like? And do you recall a winter coat moment?   ... View more

Ann Charters edits The Story and its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. The new Compact Tenth Edition is now available.   The topic of poets writing short stories is nothing new, but what makes them do it? The difference between poetry and prose “has to do with music,” the New York poet Ted Berrigan said, as quoted in the anthology Beats at Naropa (2009). If Edgar Allen Poe had been alive when I was creating The Story and Its Writer, I would have asked him to comment on my topic, since he is the greatest American poet to have written prose tales. What makes Poe’s stories different from the work of other contemporary prose writers, such as Hawthorne and Melville, also known for their brilliant way with words? In “The Philosophy of Composition," Poe asserted his belief, shared by most readers during his lifetime, that poetry is the highest literary achievement. He followed this statement by ranking the prose tale as the next best, probably because his own talents did not include writing novels. We know what made Poe write his short prose tales – he made his living as a journalist, and his stories were so popular that he could sell them easily to earn his daily bread. Music can be found in both of Poe’s tales included in The Story and Its Writer. In “The Cask of Amontillado,” the last sound Montresor hears in the final paragraph of the story is “a jingling of the bells” from the carnival cap that Fortunato wears on his head. The reader has heard them three times earlier, while Montresor slowly leads his intoxicated victim through “the damp ground of the catacombs” in his family’s burial vault. In ”The Fall of the House of Usher,” music is pushed to its limit – which is silence. At the start of the story, Usher’s psychological condition is so “morbid” that he can listen only to string instruments, as he strums “the wild improvisations of his speaking guitar.” The narrator tells us that his friend’s “long improvised dirges will ring forever in my ears,” while including six stanzas of his ballad “The Haunted Palace” that linger forever on the page. Midway in the story, sounds replace music to signal the deteriorating circumstances. The last sound Usher hears is his sister’s “low moaning cry” just before his own death, and only the final words of the story bring a welcome silence. More than a century after Poe, Sandra Cisneros, the author featured in a new Casebook in the new Compact Tenth Edition, wanted to write stories “like poems, compact and lyrical and ending with reverberation.” The four stories from The House on Mango Street are each as short as a poem, and in them Cisneros’ language is as fluid as music. Not for her is Poe’s morbid, death-obsessed fantasies. Her short fiction is rooted in the here-and-now, as she explores the emotional world of a young, vulnerable Chicana girl finding her way in an unfriendly American landscape. Cisneros’ voice is her instrument in The House on Mango Street. Memory is her material. Her family’s ethnic background and poverty contribute to her emotional distress. Her lyrical voice courageously rises in song as she expresses her triumph as a gifted storyteller over her low position on the social totem pole. Her vocabulary – and her music – is as strong and as supple as the lyrics of a folksong. Recently I found a slender volume of short stories on the shelf of a local bookstore by another poet, the Nobel Prize winner Louise Gluck. On the cover of her book, Gluck calls Marigold and Rose (2022) “A Fiction.” It brilliantly exemplifies another way that poets write short stories. It isn’t a fantasy tale or a story based on the author’s memory of her feelings. Gluck’s way is to dramatize the thoughts of her imagined characters, not their actions or their emotions. Marigold and Rose are the two characters in her stories; they are fraternal twin girl babies less than a year old. Like Esperanza, Cisneros’ narrator, they are nurtured by a supportive family. Gluck is interested both in their instinctive closeness to each other as twin sisters, and in their marked differences as personalities, even as young as they are. Her short fiction sings a different tune, expressing subtle harmonics more than flowing melodies (as in Poe and Cisneros's stories). Get hold of a copy of Marigold and Rose, and enjoy. ... View more

Over the summer, I collaborated on a project to analyze reflection papers submitted by pre-service teachers, writing tutors, and English majors in advanced syntax.  The winding and messy analysis process of our research team pointed us to the students’ linguistic choices, examined through the lens of positioning theory (Davies & Harré, 1990), particularly the ways in which students seem to assume or distance themselves from agency (Duranti, 2004) in new professional or academic spaces. As I assigned the reflective pieces that would become the basis of our study (in the fall of 2022), I talked to the students about reflection as a component of both personal and professional practice—a discipline to be cultivated.  These students seemed familiar enough with reflection assignments, whether from high school or their first college English courses.  After all, reflection is considered a best practice in composition studies (just search for “reflection” on the WAC Clearinghouse site) and a defining trait in many high impact educational practices, or HIPs.  I have presented conference workshops on reflection in corequisite and FYC courses. Some of the student reflections we reviewed seemed perfunctory, superficial—simply performative.  And I have wondered if deep reflection can be accomplished when it is assigned; perhaps deep reflection arises only out of need, frustration, desire, passion, or even joy.  I suspect many of my students already practice reflection—but not in ways they can easily connect with my reflection assignments.  Photo by Marcos Paulo Prado via UnsplashSo here is what I want to know from you all, my colleagues:  how do you practice reflection?  Do you have preferred tools for reflection—journals, note apps, sticky notes, voice recorders?  Do you gather data for reflection in the classroom, perhaps anonymous surveys or regular check-ins?  Or, do your reflections arise more spontaneously?  Do you set aside time to muse, read, and think about what you are doing?  Or perhaps your reflection is more collaborative, arising naturally from the rhythm of joint research projects?  Do you share reflections with your students?  Do you reflect together?  If so, how? I am reminded that I, too, must complete assigned reflections:  each year I complete a narrative section for my annual review.  In that document, I am required to draw conclusions about my teaching, research, and service—connecting those conclusions to evidence, goals, scholarship, and my role in the university.   Sometimes that narrative also feels perfunctory and performative, and certainly not an adequate representation of a full year’s worth of thinking (and thinking about my thinking).  But I submit it nonetheless, as my students do—and think about how I might do it differently next time. If you have a favorite resource on reflection, please share.  I would love to hear how you practice reflection inside and outside of the classroom. ... View more

Fall term is just getting underway at my home university, and I’ve been talking with teachers of writing there—and across the country—about changes they are seeing in the new frosh class. Of course it is difficult and dangerous to generalize, since students’ experiences of the last few years have been extremely varied, but some patterns do seem to be emerging. What seems most noticeable as a new school year gets underway is a gap between the expectations of students and those of their teachers. I’ve written before about growing student resistance to reading, and particularly reading long texts: the TL;DR response from students seems widespread. But many students also seem more resistant to coming to class consistently or to adhering to deadlines. You could probably add to this list. These behaviors do not match teacher expectations, to say the least. As college writing classes increasingly go back to pre-pandemic norms of face-to-face meetings, it’s important to articulate these changes and then to engage our student partners in discussing them and in ways that invite students to think about and explore their own expectations and probe where they are coming from. To me, this means spending time up front in the term on such activities, taking time to write about what seems to have changed in terms of attitudes and expectations and to explore causes of those changes as well as their short-term and long-term consequences.  I have always thought of the first few days of any term as the time for establishing our classroom ethos, norms that we develop and describe together and that we return to throughout the term as we need to. Now I am thinking that I would want to devote perhaps more time at the beginning of the term on such activities, asking students to do small group work and some writing about what they expect a college writing class to be like, what they think its guidelines or requirements should be, and how they would describe the kind of classroom ethos that would be most productive for them. I would read these carefully, responding to each individually and using them as the basis for a whole class discussion. And I will probably refer to them during the course of the term, especially if we are struggling with that expectation “gap” I mentioned earlier. But I would wait until near the end of the term to return them to students and ask them to read what they wrote during the first week of class again, annotating that document and talking with it and back to it, reflecting on what they still hold to, what they might change, and why.  The Irving K. Barber Learning Centre of the University of British Columbia   Just thinking about such an activity takes me down memory lane to my first post-PhD job, teaching first-year writing at the University of British Columbia in the late seventies. At that time, UBC courses still followed some British traditions, and one of them was that my first-year writing classes were year-long; that is, these classes met for the first semester and then took a winter holiday during which the students received a “preliminary” grade—and then reconvened after the break for another semester of work together. This was the most luxurious and fruitful teaching situation I had during my 50 years of teaching: what an opportunity to watch writing develop over the course of an entire school year; what a delight to get to know the students and their work in fine detail. And what a chance to build a classroom ethos together, and to work together, for growth not just in writing and speaking ability but in depth of thinking and breadth of points of view.  What a shock it was for me to move from that system to what I have always called “the dreaded quarter system.” But I learned that growth and change are possible even in ten-week increments, and I learned to adjust. If we are anything, writing teachers are flexible, “reading” our students and our classroom contexts as carefully and clearly as we possibly can and asking students to do the same. The challenges we face today are surely different than they were five years ago, much less fifty, and I believe these challenges are more daunting than ever. But as this new school year begins, my faith in teachers of writing, and our students, still holds.   Image credit: CjayD via Wikimedia Commons ... View more

  Elizabeth Catanese is an Associate Professor of English and Humanities at Community College of Philadelphia. Trained in mindfulness-based stress reduction, Elizabeth has enjoyed incorporating mindfulness activities into her college classroom for over ten years. Elizabeth works to deepen her mindful awareness through writing children's books, cartooning and parenting her energetic twin preschoolers, Dylan and Escher.   The other day, my four-year-old son asked me how many years he would be in school. I calculated that the answer was anywhere from thirteen to twenty-one. Taken aback, he asked when I was finally allowed to stop going to school. For me, and many of us who are professors, the answer is, of course, never (or until retirement). “Why would you never leave?” he asked. “Because I love it,” I replied, and I do. Simply put, the positives of the teaching and learning experience far outweigh the negatives. The classroom is a productive and joyful space for me. This is true for many of my students as well. But classrooms in many students’ pasts have been spaces where learning was at best minimal and at worst traumatic. I’ve had many students express to me that their teachers were just trying to manage behavioral issues or they were good kids who were passed along from grade to grade without having achieved the learning outcomes. Students have shared that they were forced to read aloud in class despite having a learning disability, or they had a bladder disorder and were only allowed to go to the bathroom once a day; their friends bullied them and a teacher didn’t care; a teacher belittled them because of their race. The list goes on. Yet, I’ve spent much of my career pretty focused on the positive. The past is the past. What can I do now? What strengths do students have? What do they already bring to the table? How can I create community and connection right now? One day I decided to consider what would happen if I took a moment to focus on the negative. Let me explain: In a therapy session, I learned about Eric Berne's concept of reparenting. Rooted in Transactional Analysis, this approach is a psychological framework aimed at helping a client change unhealthy internal scripts formed in relation to their parents or caregivers. The therapist can help a client by “reparenting” them, and ultimately give them the tools needed to be a positive and strong parent to themselves. I wondered if it would be possible to see my job as a professor not just as a teacher, but one who reteachers. Rather than brushing over all of the negatives that occurred in students’ pasts and starting the class as a blank slate, I reminded myself of the challenging and traumatic experiences students shared with me and wrote them down in a notebook. Refocusing on these stories made me shift my perspective from “what am I doing for students?” to “what am I undoing for them?” and later “what am I helping them undo for themselves?” Calling to mind the bad experiences, it turns out, has allowed me to do more good. More than anything, it has opened up my lesson plans to give more space to student story and voice. I ask students about their negative educational encounters on their contact forms, and we now talk about their best and worst classroom experiences while setting our classroom community. When a student describes an example of the latter during this activity, I often use the word “deserve.” For example, if a student was in a class where their learning goals were not being met, I say “you deserved to have your needs met; how might that inform what we do here?” and then “how might that inform what you do here?” It’s not about blaming the bad experiences, but about validating the needs of the individual perceiving them that way. The second question reminds student that they have more power over their experience in the classroom than they might have felt they did in the past. Metacognitive activities also work well for reteachering. After an activity, students can reflect on how they feel it helped them to grow, or what might have been better about the activity or their engagement with it. These can be questions at the end of a quiz or questions to talk to their peers about. Thinking about being a professor from the lens of reteachering doesn’t mean categorically labeling some things good and others bad. After all, one student’s unfortunate classroom experience can be the next student’s positive one. It is simply about creating space to hear about the past since the past is often creating a script for the present, and that script may not be a script anyone wants to follow. Using this lens has created a subtle shift in my pedagogy, at times affirming what I already do and at times leading me to larger changes in my teaching; it has truly has helped me to become a more caring and compassionate teacher. I hope for my students (and my son) that anything less than joy in the classroom is given space to transform into story and then into inner strength. I truly believe that it is inner strength that opens the door for the greatest amount of compassion and growth within in our communities. ... View more

“It seems to me that the artist’s struggle for his integrity must be considered as a kind of metaphor for the struggle, which is universal and daily, of all human beings on the face of this globe to get to become human beings.”  -James Baldwin, “The Artist’s Struggle with Integrity,” A lecture presented in New York City, November 1962. “Whether or not we like it, we have reached a point, black and white in this country, where all of the previous systems of communication, negotiation, [and] accommodation, have become unusable.” -James Baldwin, “On the Murder of Six Children from Birmingham, Alabama. A talk given in New York City on September 25, 1963, ten days after the murders.   In 1963, news flashed from incomprehensible (the assassination of Medgar Evers in June) to astounding (the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which included Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream,” and the speech, given by John Lewis, National Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in August), to catastrophic (the murders of six children, as cited by the PostArchive, four little girls in a church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, and two young boys shot, one by a police officer, during civil unrest in the streets of Birmingham). Those despairing, hopeful, and devastating days are, unfortunately, absent from my memory, and I have spent years trying to fill in the gaps of my early childhood. I was a white five-year-old in the fall of 1963, and my memories center on insular moments of home, and community. The adults in my life believed, to the detriment of everyone in our community and beyond, that what happened in the larger world had nothing to do with us. Yet, as Baldwin so cogently reminds his audience, that mindset of “accommodation” was and had always been “unusable.” Indeed, as Baldwin suggested in 1962, as human beings we must struggle with our integrity. Sometime between the March on Washington and the murders of the Birmingham children, I started kindergarten. What I remember most remains the excitement of that transition, and the joy of new experiences. That is one of my first memories of school. But now that memory is forever transformed by learning the historical contexts of my early schooling.  In planning a first-year college writing course sixty years later, I reflected on and struggled with the memories of the redlined communities where I grew up, and the segregated classrooms that constituted some of my first encounters with academic literacy and formal education. I considered the unconscious biases that remain from those encounters and how I would need to reframe the curriculum for students coming of age six decades later. And so I return to James Baldwin’s “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity” as a grounding text, while considering how to rethink the assignment sequence in College Writing. Below are thumbnail sketches of the three writing projects that will constitute the new semester. A journal, not described here, is also part of the required coursework. In the coming weeks I will offer updates of the work in our face-to-face classroom. The course theme is “Creativity: Think Outside the Box.”   College Writing Assignment Sequence Fall 2023 Writing Project 1 Analysis/Manifesto: In your own opinion and in your own words, find and discuss the most important points in “Artist’s Struggle.” Then, update “Artist’s Struggle” for 2023. You can address questions such as: What issues should be added to “Artist’s Struggle” in 2023? In your opinion, what issues are important to your generation as Civil Rights struggles were to Baldwin? Why? What does it mean to be an artist in 2023? What are the struggles? What can and should artists do?  In ideal conditions, what should be done to create a better world?  How could mental health? Climate change? Access to fair and equitable education K-12 schools or college? Something else?   Writing Project 2  Application/Multimedia:  Find a passage from “Artist’s Struggle” and translate the passage in your own words, and discuss how this passage relates to the message of “Artist’ Struggle.” Then, create a multimedia project based on your ideas, and describe how the process and product of your multimedia work connects to “Artist’s Struggle.”  To inspire the multimedia project, our  class will have an opportunity to visit the campus art museum and to create your own work of art based on the visit and “Artist’s Struggle.” More information forthcoming. Writing Project 3: Revision/Research:  Make a multimedia catalog of works connected to your earlier writing on “Artist’s Struggle.” Include at least one other source by James  Baldwin, and 3-5 additional sources of your own choosing.  In your own words, and using quotes and evidence from “Artist’s Struggle” and your additional sources, explain the relationships that you find between “Artist’s Struggle” and each piece of multimedia collected in your catalog. You can include revised sections of WP 1 and WP 2 if they are relevant to your catalog. More information forthcoming. Graphic: Word Web Illustration of the work of College Writing by Susan Naomi Bernstein     ... View more

My current and upcoming blog posts will focus on the work being done by two-year college teacher-scholars who have contributed to Teaching Accelerated and Corequisite Composition, a collection I edited that will be published by Utah State University Press in November 2023. The posts will feature a brief description of the author’s chapter, with the professor describing what they most hope readers will take from their chapter. I’ll also be asking contributors how their thoughts on their chapter have changed in the two years between its composition and publication, as well as any goals they have for the current semester.   This month, I talked with Lesley Broder, who joined the English Department at CUNY’s Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn in 2008, shortly before receiving her doctorate in English from Stony Brook University. Lesley began her career teaching middle and high school; she later taught at Suffolk County Community College and Stony Brook University, where she also served as assistant director of the writing center. At Kingsborough, she coordinated the accelerated learning program for nearly a decade. Lesley’s research focuses on gender and sexuality, popular theater trends in New York City, and writing placement and assessment.   Lesley’s chapter in Teaching Accelerated and Corequisite Composition, “Inching Toward Equity: Graduated Choice in the Corequisite Classroom,” outlines how to use choice boards to organize assignments in the small group section of a corequisite class. The chapter begins with a history of corequisite instruction at Kingsborough, which, not surprisingly, began with a visit from the Community College of Baltimore County’s Peter Adams. Though the Kingsborough program has been successful overall, recent disaggregated data indicates that while 65.6% of white students pass the corequisite, only 41.8% of Black students and 41.2% of Hispanic students are passing. As a result, Lesley began developing equity-forward course materials that offered students more flexibility in how they interacted with their instructor and completed their assignments. Lesley describes in detail the use of choice boards, which “present students with a grid with a number of tasks to complete within a designated period,” and shows why this option is especially effective in online classes.   However, the chapter’s larger point, Lesley notes, “is not to advocate for choice boards as the way to teach but rather to be open to differentiating instruction in the ALP section. In its various formats, the ALP group is typically small; this allows for flexibility in ways that aren’t feasible for larger student groupings. Providing even a few options for approaching the material might make a difference for some students.”   When I asked Lesley about any additional insights she might have gained over time about her chapter’s subject matter, she pointed out that the pandemic was waning as she composed her piece: We were at that transition moment between operating fully remote and re-entering the campus with strict testing, social distancing, and mask protocols. Now that those pandemic restrictions are largely lifted, many professors I talk with notice that students have come to expect extreme flexibility. I hope we can find ways to help students succeed as well as adjust to responsibilities as members of a classroom community. Not surprisingly, the need to balance flexibility with responsibility is a theme touched on by many of the contributors to Teaching Accelerated and Corequisite Composition.   Our conversation turned to the potentially overwhelming challenges our profession faces with the widespread use of generative artificial intelligence as a tool—and substitute—for student writing.  Lesley admitted she was “curious” to see how AI will alter writing instruction. She acknowledged that while “Students have long used resources to ‘help’ complete their work, whether it is a willing family member, information from Wikipedia, or an online essay writing service, ChatGPT works so quickly that it can promote a mindless approach to composing.”   Lesley conceded that she was of two minds when it comes to dealing with AI this term. She concludes, “For a low-tech approach, I hope to use more in-class, handwritten assignments for low stakes writing. I also want to evaluate ChatGPT’s responses when we are at the end of a unit to help students avoid an uncritical mindset. We are moving into a new time in writing instruction for sure!” ... View more

Ann Charters edits The Story and its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. The new Compact Tenth Edition is now available.   It’s always good news when a major work of literature becomes “P.D.” (in the public domain). Almost forty years ago, when I compiled the first edition of The Story and Its Writer, Hemingway’s reputation was such that the amount of money it cost to obtain permission to include one of his short stories in an anthology was determined by the number of words in the story. The lengthy “Big Two-Hearted River” was rarely anthologized. Now that it has entered the public domain, I predict that we will see it included in many short story collections as an example of his finest writing. Hemingway’s story became so well-known since its initial publication in 1925 that, thirty-five years later, it inspired the San Francisco writer Richard Brautigan to write his spoof “The Cleveland Wrecking Yard,” reimagining the idyllic landscape of “The Big Two-Hearted River” despoiled in a junk yard in Brautigan’s own city. More than a half-century later, we can still find Brautigan’s yard as he described it. I know that whenever I want, I can pay a visit to something like it in a so-called “antique store” close to where I live in rural Connecticut. Why was Nature in such a serious state of decline during the years between Hemingway and Brautigan’s time? An alert reader of “Big Two-Hearted River” can spot the compulsive and ecologically destructive behavior in Nick Adams’ actions after he jumps off the train to fish the trout-teeming stream. In the story, Nick, of course, is Hemingway’s persona. In A Moveable Feast, he wrote that “the story was about coming back from the war [World War One] but there was no mention of the war in it.” The critic Jackson Benson wrote that like much of Hemingway’s fiction at that time, the narrative was dream-like, “a compulsive nightmare,” steaming from the author’s experience of trauma after being wounded on the Italian front at the age of nineteen when a mortar exploded between his legs. As I read “Big Two-Hearted River,” I recognized that an aspect of Nick’s traumatized behavior is his addiction to canned comfort food. He has filled his backpack with canned goods. He carries a can opener as one of his essential tools. His eyes and his stomach delight in the sight of his red-hot frying pan over the campfire, and in the smell of its bubbling, sizzling mixture of cooked macaroni and beans dumped from two of these cans.  Nick may be a scrupulously disciplined trout fisherman, but he has a fatal flaw as a human being. His emotional dependence on his immediate gratification from the carbohydrate-rich, heavily salted, sugar loaded, prepared food produced by factories operating in his over-industrialized society eventually will contribute, in the following centuries, to the ecological disaster mankind has made of our forests and trout streams and our entire planet. Probably Nick has responsibly disposed of his empty tin cans when he left his camp, but how many eons must pass before they bio-degrade? Does the later creation of the National Wildlife Refuge in Seney, Michigan – the location of Hemingway’s story – compensate for his ecological damage? Zora Neale Hurston’s story “The Country in the Woman” is also a comparatively early American story that is new to this edition of The Story and Its Writer. Published nearly a century ago and rescued from oblivion by a Hurston scholar after its initial appearance in 1927 in the Pittsburgh Courier, it is far less troubling than Hemingway’s long story. Hurston is at her finest when championing the underdog. Without spoiling this resurrected story for the reader by describing it, I merely say that we find the author at her best here.      ... View more

Commencement season is in full swing across the country: in my little village on the northern California coast, a friend’s son gave the valedictory speech for his middle school with all of his admirers, including me, cheering him on. The next day, I attended the graduation ceremony for the five graduates of our local charter school, three of whom delivered “valedictories.” We were outdoors, looking through redwood trees out to the Pacific Ocean, and the young graduates had a theme: gratitude for the families and friends who had supported them to this point. Commencement at Stanford isn’t for another few days when graduate and legendary tennis star John McEnroe will address the graduating class. I won’t be there in person to hear McEnroe, though I will tune in to see/hear the address later. In the meantime, I have been tuning in to some of this year’s commencement speeches, as I always do this time of year, and I’ve noted some recurring themes. Credit: Williams College via Wikimedia Commons   One of these is the importance of listening—to yourself as well as others—that came up in speeches by host, producer, and author Oprah Winfrey (Tennessee State); actor Sterling K. Brown (Washington University); former Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker (Bentley University); and former Senator Liz Cheney. Here's Winfrey: “When you get yourself quiet enough to listen, I mean really listen, you can begin to distill the still, small voice, which is always representing the truth of you from the noise of the world.” And Brown: “For me, the goal of higher education is the same overriding goal I have for my life. And that is to become the best next version of myself. And you’re the only one who can know what that is—if you give yourself the time and the space to listen to what is already inside of you.” Winfrey and Brown are urging grads to listen—really listen—to their best inner selves, but Baker reminds them that it’s important to listen to other people as well: “This whole thing about listening . . . it’s real. My mom was a Democrat, and my dad, who is now 94, is a Republican . . . Growing up, the dinner table at our house was a constant conversation. I had friends who lobbied to come by just to watch. Nobody’s motives were questioned when my mom and dad went back and forth on the issues of the day. Nobody threw anything. But people had plenty of opinions. There was only one rule. You had to listen more than you spoke. And when you spoke, you had to demonstrate some appreciation for what the other person was saying.” And finally, Senator Liz Cheney: “America cannot remain a free nation if we abandon the truth. So as you go out to change the world, resolve that you will stand in truth. Those who are trying to unravel the foundations of our republic. . . know they can’t succeed if you vote. So, Class of 2023: get out and vote. This means listening and learning, including—especially, from those with whom we disagree. Of course, many other themes are being sounded as well, from Academy Award-winning actor Michelle Yeoh’s advice to Harvard Law grads to value collaboration over competition: (“For every winner, there doesn’t have to be a loser. In fact, most success stories are less about competition and more about collaboration . . . The truth is, I could not have done any of this alone.”) to Senator Raphael Warnock’s challenge to Bard College grads to “find your passion” and then to speak out about it (“I challenge you to find that thing in the world that feels like such a deep moral contradiction that you cannot be silent. You have to express yourself; you have to stand up and try to make the world better.”) As I have read and listened to these speeches, I’ve thought they would make an excellent basis for an analytic writing assignment. Students could learn a lot by reading and/or listening to, say, ten or twelve of this year’s commencement addresses and then looking for patterns and themes, for similarities and differences in content, in style, in delivery. Such an assignment would work well done in pairs or small groups. Or students could emulate Bill Gates’s 2023 address to the graduates of Northern Arizona University, in which he writes the commencement address he wishes he had heard. The results of such assignments might come in many genres, from a traditional print analytic essay to multimodal presentations, from spoken word or hip hop to visual and verbal collages—all ways to explore their own futures. Congratulations to all this year’s grads, whose college careers have been marked by pandemic pressures and so much more. And congratulations to all the teachers of writing who have stood by them. ... View more

Amid the super-hype surrounding ChatGPT (and similar programs) these days–not just the predictable Little Red Hen “the sky is falling” response from so many, but the much more deeply informed critical analyses from AI researchers like Geoffrey Hinton–it’s been hard for me (and I suspect for many teachers of writing) to sort through all the noise surrounding the issue of generative AI in order to think hard about our discipline, writing, and its future. Writing, like rhetoric, is a plastic art, shapeshifting to meet changing needs and circumstances and opportunities. Plato famously decried this plasticity, charging that writing would kill memory and hamper communication. And indeed, writing did challenge the centrality of memory, which has been further marginalized by all the writing “assistants” now at writer’s disposal. The slow, gradual shift from orality to literacy—and the blending of the two—accompanied huge changes in communication and commerce as well as in the way people experienced the world. The advent of the printing press marked another gigantic shift in communicative technologies, as did the subsequent industrial revolution.    An example of what DALL-E can do when prompted   Clearly, we are in the midst of another such cataclysmic shift, as machines not only aid human communication but—as hundreds of AI researchers and leaders are currently warning Congress as well as the world community—are close to taking over communication in ways that could have devastating effects. At such a time, scholars and teachers of writing need to be part of the conversation, working to define “writing” in the age of AI (and beyond), exploring what it means to be a human writer today, and making sure that scholars of writing and rhetoric are at the AI table. In addition, we need to be asking how our responsibilities to students are changing in light of the rise of AI. What are we preparing student writers to DO—and what should we be preparing them for? That’s where prompt engineering comes in, the goal of which is to use prompts—or really chains of prompts—to lead the burgeoning group of generative AI apps to do what the human engineers want them to do. As a brief article in Forbes recently put it, “Learning to get the best results from generative AI is a skill that needs to be learned and honed. . .” Easier said than done!  Assuming that human writers will, at least in the near future, be able to direct the writing that ChatGPT, Bard, and their brethren do, what is our responsibility in preparing these human writers: what abilities (and ethics) will they need to possess, and how should we teach them? In the Forbes piece, author and futurist Bernard Marr sums up the abilities prompt engineering requires: in addition to having a grasp of subject matter and being able to attend carefully to details, such writers will need skill in communication, organizational, data analysis, critical thinking, and high-level planning. At the end of the article, Marr suggests that students interested in pursuing prompt engineering look to the online course portal Udemy for online courses or to Next-Level Prompt Engineering with AI, which “promises to teach students to create effective prompts that will give them a competitive edge over everyone else trying to use AI to automate their tasks.” I plan to take a look at these online courses: I wonder if they have an ethical component, or if they are asking students to consider the short and long-term implications and consequences of what their instructions/prompts will yield. In the meantime, when I look at the list of skills needed to become a prompt engineer (and to earn salaries of over 300K a year), I see skills that are embedded in most if not all of the writing courses we teach. Are teachers of writing today paying more attention to prompt engineering and other “new” jobs emerging as a result of AI? More important, how can we make sure that we will have a voice in creating intellectually robust and ethical curricula for students pursuing such jobs?   ... View more

For some fifty years now, I’ve had two favorite times of year: fall term, when I’ve gotten to welcome first-year students to campus for orientation; and spring term, specifically May, when I’ve always been involved in student writing award ceremonies. It’s that second time of year again right now, and colleges and universities across the country are honoring students for outstanding work in writing—and increasingly, in speaking.  When I was serving as Director of Stanford’s Program in Writing and Rhetoric, we had an opportunity to redesign the writing curriculum and to create a new second-year course focusing on research-based writing and more specifically on the oral presentation of that research. I remember the excitement and the angst that went into designing and piloting this new course. Those were the early days of using “new” technologies in our classrooms, and we were learning to use the technology ourselves at the same time we were engaging our students in using it. (I am just thankful that my first attempt at a PowerPoint presentation was not recorded for posterity!)   Stanford University awards the Andrea Lunsford Oral Presentation Awards at the conclusion of every spring term   In the first year of teaching this new course, our students undertook significant research projects, presenting them first in written form and then, after considerable revision, in oral/multimedia form. We learned right away that our students loved the work of transforming a lengthy written essay into a 12-to-15-minute oral/multimedia presentation and that doing so inevitably sharpened their thinking and the point of their arguments. In fact, our students insisted, in that first year, on revising their written essays in light of what they had learned in “winnowing” them into oral presentations.  That was long ago, and now this assignment sequence is used by teachers and students across the country. And the course is still very popular at Stanford—and has gotten better and better as the Program in Writing and Rhetoric has refined and improved it. Just last week, the nominees and winners of the Lunsford Oral Presentation of Research Awards were honored at a reception, during which winners and their projects were introduced by their instructors, who presented them with several books, a certificate of merit, and a cash award. I attended the event virtually and was thrilled by the depth and breadth of research these students have undertaken—and by their poise and eloquence. I’ve since watched their presentations, and you can do so, too. The work these second-year college students are doing is inspiring, especially considering that these students suffered through the Covid pandemic. Topics included the resistance to monolingualism in general and standardized French in particular in a presentation titled “Investigating the Diverse Dynamics of English Language Borrowing in French Rap Music”; “When Disability and Design Meet”; “Professionalism of Black Hair: Workplace Standards or a Continuation of Bondage”; “How Not to Forget: Collective Memory on Social Media”; and “Where Have Our Mothers Gone? Remedying the Native American Infant and Maternal Health Disparity Crisis with Traditional Birthing Practices.”  In accepting the awards, these students invariably thanked not only their instructors but also their peers, commenting on how much they had learned from working together and on how much support they had received. So while each of the presentations was authored by one student, the importance of collaboration and the collaboration nature of the entire endeavor was mentioned over and over. Even though I was not there physically, the strength of the mutual admiration society gathered to celebrate exemplary research and equally exemplary presentation of it was palpable. In her magnificent poem “To Be of Use,” Marge Piercy says that a “thing worth doing, done well, has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.” These students’ work was surely worth doing (several commented that an “assignment” had turned into a “passion” that would continue to guide their studies), was surely done well, and surely took a shape that “satisfies, clean and evident.” It was an honor and privilege to be among these students.  I expect that teachers of writing across the country are attending similar ceremonies this month. How I wish I could meet some of the students winning awards for writing and speaking at their universities to offer congratulations–and thanks.   Image by King of Hearts from Wikimedia Commons ... View more

Ever since George Lucas mashed up Gene Roddenberry and J.R.R. Tolkien to create one of the most profitable movie franchises in cinematic history, fantasy has come to dominate the American box office—whether involving sci-fi space operas, sword-and-sorcery medievalism, extraterrestrials, superheroes, vampires, or zombies (just to name some of the most popular examples over the years).  So dominant has fantasy become that the question today isn’t whether any competing genre has emerged to challenge it but, rather, which sorts of fantasy are currently the most popular.  In the 1990s, for example, extraterrestrials seemed to be everywhere (The X-Files, Roswell), but they were eventually overtaken by vampires, who for quite some time looked like they would never be dethroned… until zombies came along, and then it looked like it was going to be all zombies, all the time, for all time.  But now superheroes rule the roost, with such one-time leaders of the cinematic super-pack as Batman and Spider-Man being currently eclipsed by Black Panther, Thor, Loki, Ant-Man, Shazam!, assorted Avengers, and a gang of Guardians that includes a highly precocious raccoon… just to name a few. The semiotic question accordingly becomes: what does the currently unstoppable hegemony of the superhero tell us? As is always the case in a semiotic analysis, we can begin to answer this question with the construction of a system of associations and differences. In the case of superheroes, that system begins with the invention of Superman in the 1930s, and extends forwards to every current star in the superverse (if I may coin a term).  What all these heroes have in common—and which is something that they share with such mythological heroes as Gilgamesh, Hercules, and Beowulf—is that they defend their societies from external threats and dangers.  The superhero, in short, offers the comforting reassurance that a fearsome world can be brought under control—that all, in the end, will be well, thanks to the superhero’s prowess and vigilance. But there is a significant difference between the dangers presented in the early Superman and Batman sagas—threats to American society that were generally posed by such masterminds of organized crime as the Joker and the Penguin—and the fundamentally cosmic threats that haunt the superverse today.  For today the danger is existential: the entire universe is at stake, and without a band of Guardians or Avengers standing between humanity and the super villains who threaten to destroy us all, we would be doomed to extinction. I think that the most likely (or abductive) explanation for the current preeminence of the existential superhero is to be found in the fact that we are not having a very good century.  From the events of 9/11 to the ever-increasing threat of environmental collapse posed by global warming (not to mention the after effects of the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic), things are not going well, and for the first time in their history Americans seem to be losing their traditional, and heretofore unshakable, optimism.  The current crop of superheroes accordingly reflects a growing uneasiness, a sense of implacable doom. But popular culture mediates, as well as reflects, social distress, offering for the price of theater admission a comforting reassurance that all, in the end, will be well.  An Avengers: Infinity War, in which half the universe is destroyed, is followed by a sequel, Avengers: Endgame, in which the dead are brought back to life.  When necessary, the hypothetical existence of multi-verses can be trotted out, along with time travel and other sci-fi expedients, to revive the dead and restore normality.  Thus, in spite of how terrible everything looks in reality, today’s superheroes offer not only entertainment but a kind of existential salvation.  Which, of course, is why such tales are called fantasies.   Photo by Craig McLachlan (2019), used under the Unsplash License. ... View more

In 2018, increasingly alarmed at the polarization and the vitriol characterizing too much of our national discourse, Tim Shriver (Chair of the Special Olympics) and some colleagues founded UNITE “to find ways to help ease divisions in our country.” The group soon began to focus on language as one major means of creating and exacerbating divisions, and by 2021 they were developing what they came to call the Dignity Index, a set of measures for determining the degree of contempt (or its opposite, which they call dignity) in political discourse, especially between or among people who disagree. Convinced that contempt causes division and that dignity eases it, they hypothesized that putting a spotlight on language that conveys contempt or dignity might reduce contempt and help ease the tension and division so evident in public discourse.  UNITE put their Index to work during the 2022 midterm elections in Utah, training scorers to rank political speeches. They found that “voters from opposite ends of the spectrum were able to agree on scores” and came up with three key findings: first, the Index attracted a lot of attention from people who wanted to learn about it and become trained in using it; second, while people tend to come to the Index thinking of it as a way to judge the speech of others, they soon begin applying it to themselves and their own speech; and finally, when people spent time with the Index, they came to recognize contempt as a major problem, and one that they have some agency in helping to solve.   The group went on to launch “Students for Dignity” at the University of Utah and other universities and to develop additional training materials and courses for others who want to learn how to use the Index to bring about change in communication and ultimately to “embrace a dignity culture.” You can read their 2023 report, "The Dignity Index: Utah Pilot Project Technical Summary," here. One passage from the report seems worth quoting in full: During Dignity Index development, UNITE team members reported something unanticipated: as the expression of dignity rises in conversation, so did curiosity, humility, vulnerability, and the ability to see the good in others and the flaws in oneself. Observations such as these underscore the premise that treating others with dignity and easing divisions and solving problems are the same set of skills. This suggests the Dignity Index could be a helpful tool in easing political division and supporting productive public dialogue. I was especially interested in the report’s description of what some students had to say about using the Index. One student said: “We started to apply the guide in our own lives. We were reflecting on it, we understood it, and we trained on it and talked about it." This comment that suggests that we teachers of writing might use the Dignity Index in our classes, preparing students to use it and then working with them as they apply it to discursive exchanges they are studying in class, to political speeches, and to their own language use. As I’ve studied the report and tried to learn more about the development of the Index, I have wondered about the choice of “dignity” as the best term to encompass the kind of open, respectful, care-full language they are advocating. I expect that for many students, “dignity” and “dignified” connote a kind of distanced stuffiness that resists the definition the UNITE team implies. I wonder if they considered and debated other possible terms, such as “respect” (which comes with its own set of connotational problems as well) or “good regard.” I think “respect” might serve as a better antonym for “contempt” for students today. But in the meantime, whatever terms are chosen, an index that has been tested as thoroughly as this one has and that allows us to take a close look at how our own speech and/or writing veers toward contempt or toward dignity warrants our attention. Check out the eight levels on the contempt-dignity continuum here.   ... View more

Instructors of writing are usually omnivorous readers. After all, we enjoy sentences, don’t we? As summer break inches nearer, my stack of “reward” books beckons. After hearing philosopher of science Lee McIntyre speak in an NPR interview, I couldn’t wait to dive into his engagingly written book, How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations with Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason. The radio interview offers a galloping overview of his approach to persuasion — Rogerian in nature — based on the psychology of belief, and the intention to reduce a sense of threat. McIntyre says, I’ve been having these conversations with science deniers and with others around these topics [to understand] how to assess what it is that people care about. I think that that’s actually the route to changing people’s mind. McIntyre opens his book with his remarkable experiences at a Flat Earth Convention, where he challenges himself, with self-deprecating humor, to practice respectful engagement with science-deniers. His tips? “Remain calm. Be respectful. Engage them in conversation. Try to build some trust” (28).  McIntyre offers evidence of this approach’s efficacy in his radio interview: There are well-known cases, [like] Jim Bridenstine, who President Trump appointed to be the chief administrator at NASA. Bridenstine was a climate change denier when he was in Congress. He was only in NASA for I think a few weeks before he changed his mind on climate change, which was amazing. It was based on his conversations with NASA scientists. He knew the evidence, but it was when he met the people, he got to know them, he got to trust them. That’s when he changed his mind. I’ll invite students to read McIntosh’s radio interview transcript next time I teach Andrew J. Hoffman’s essay, “The Full Scope,” included in the “Sustainability and Environmental Studies” readings in From Inquiry to Academic Writing, co-authored with Stuart Greene. Like McIntyre, Hoffman understands that throwing facts at a skeptic is a tactic destined to fail. Hoffman notes, “We cannot scold, lecture, or treat people with disrespect if we are to gain their trust; and trust is at the center of an effective theory of change” (743). Both authors acknowledge the stakes of these conversations are high — think climate crisis, vaccine skepticism, and threats to public health departments nationally. And yet, these conversations are necessary if we are to survive this moment in history. Lee McIntyre and Andrew Hoffman acknowledge that they are calling us into challenging rhetorical spaces, and that we might fail occasionally. I’m glad I have a (slightly) slower season ahead to practice these rhetorical tactics. After all, being calm, respectful, and engaging people in trust-building conversations is the rhetorician’s take on The Golden Rule. It’s as simple — and difficult — as that. Happy reading! Photo by April Lidinsky (2023). ... View more