Marisa Koulen Marisa Koulen is pursuing her PhD in English concentrating on Rhetoric, Composition, and Pedagogy at the University of Houston. She has taught a range of courses including First Year Writing I, First Year Writing II, and Advanced Composition. Marisa's teaching philosophy centers on acknowledging all students as writers and challenging them to critically engage in making meaning through social justice and advocacy writing. Her research explores the intersection of antiracist writing assessment and multimodal composition pedagogy. As a first-generation American and college student, Marisa is passionate about supporting students, especially those from marginalized communities, navigate the transformative power of education and literacy.       How does the next generation of students inspire you?  The next generation of students inspires me with their increasing awareness of social justice and their willingness to challenge systems of inequality. They enter the classroom with a powerful sense of activism and a desire to make their voices heard, even in my first year writing classes. These students push me, as an educator, to be more reflective, to deconstruct barriers to learning, and to make sure my classroom is a place where all voices are acknowledged and valued. Their courage to question norms and advocate for change invigorates my commitment to building inclusive and responsive writing assignments in my classroom.   What is the most important skill you aim to provide your students? The most important skill I aim to provide my students is the ability to critically reflect on their own learning and writing processes and provide/receive feedback. Reflection encourages students to become aware of their growth, understand the reasons behind their choices, and see their learning as ongoing. This metacognitive skill not only empowers them to develop as writers in my class, but also to become lifelong learners, confident in adapting their skills to new contexts. By fostering feedback and reflection, I also equip them with the tools needed to navigate and shape the world around them, both in writing and beyond. Whether using digital platforms like Padlet for anonymous feedback or facilitating breakout room activities in online classes, I prioritize spaces where students feel comfortable sharing their thoughts and supporting each other. Regular reflections and interactive discussions (like word clouds and other visualizers) are integrated to ensure that learning is a shared and dynamic process. To ensure my course is inclusive, equitable, and culturally responsive, I center my teaching around representation, linguistic diversity, and equitable assessment practices. I use labor-based grading to value students’ efforts rather than imposing traditional language norms, allowing them to take risks and grow as writers. I also encourage students to draw on their personal and cultural experiences in their writing, which allows their unique voices to flourish in the classroom. Additionally, consistent feedback mechanisms allow me to adapt the course based on students’ expressed needs. Experience giving and receiving feedback is invaluable in the classroom, as these skills transfer beyond just writing.   Marisa's Assignment That Works Below is a brief synopsis of Marisa's assignment. For the full activity, see Logical Fallacies in the Wild.    The "Logical Fallacies in the Wild" assignment is designed to bridge the critical rhetorical analysis skills discussed in the course textbook and in professional academic examples with students' lived experiences, emphasizing the situated nature of communication across diverse discourse communities. Its primary goal is to cultivate an awareness of how logical fallacies are not only pervasive but also ideologically loaded, particularly within the context of consumer culture on social media platforms. By requiring students to locate fallacies in advertisements found during their own personal social media use, this assignment actively situates their learning within spaces that shape and reflect their identities. This assignment helps students acknowledge that rhetoric operates everywhere! ... View more

I recently wrote about my struggle with AI overload, a post prompted by an email predicting that AI would soon take over the “routine work of scholarly editing and publication.”  What, I wonder, makes something routine in scholarship or academia? My social media feed, guided by my history of clicks, has lately been flooded with advertisements for AI platforms that promise to clear my hectic schedule by picking up some of the drudgery of my job—specifically, providing feedback on student writing, crafting standard letters, or even putting together meeting agendas.  Apparently, those tasks are “routine” and can be handed over to a trained LLM (Large-Language Model). For a fee, of course. Except I don’t think of these as routine.  (Well, maybe writing agendas could be seen as routine; still, I think reducing the number of required committee meetings and service responsibilities for faculty who teach four or five courses per term is a more helpful solution than letting a machine throw together a bulleted list of agenda items.  Just a thought.) I suspect that most of us who teach composition would not agree that response to writing is so “routine” that it should be handed off to an algorithm.  But what about other tasks, such as annual self-evaluations or recommendation letters for students? Over the Thanksgiving break, I wrote three recommendations for students applying to graduate programs.  The process took over six hours of my “vacation days.”  Surely, one might suggest, I could have saved time by generating a letter template from ChatGPT and tweaking the details, right? My answer, without hesitation, is “no way.”  It’s not that I produced something particularly masterful in those letters over six hours, nor do I expect that the letters will be the deciding factor for graduate admissions committees.  And given enough detail, could the AI produce something similar?  Perhaps.  But the AI will not have the joy of reviewing, remembering, discovering forgotten moments and sorting through assignments, emails, projects, or random hand-written artifacts from these students, who have shaped the way I teach just as much as I shaped their undergraduate experiences. For each student, the process began with a review of a CV, followed by a transcript review to find all the classes taken with me, as well as classes in which the student worked with me as a supplemental instructor or writing fellow.  I looked for conference presentations and academic service—noting that two of the three students attended faculty-focused conferences to present research with me.  I thought about my initial impressions of each one and how those impressions changed as I saw their particular passions appear in course projects—or as I came to rely on their help as supplemental instructors in my classes.  I recalled when they frustrated me, when they made me laugh, and when they made me think differently about concepts or my own teaching practices.   I imagined what each would bring to a graduate program, of course, but I also tried to articulate what they brought to our undergraduate program—and to me.  My teaching is better because of these students, and I wanted to articulate why as part of these letters.  I suppose one could say that given all this information, ChatGPT could have produced an effective letter.  But truthfully, the letter wrote itself once I had worked through the process of remembering.  And I suppose others might suggest that it was the extraordinary qualities of these particular students that made the writing process meaningful; had the students not been quite so stellar, perhaps the process would have felt more routine—and perhaps I would have given it over to the AI in that case. But I don’t think so.  My limited interactions with students who are not quite so remarkable still contain valuable stories and possibilities.  Reviewing those stories is not a waste of my time, however constrained that time may be.  So, I am back to my original question: what qualifies a task as “routine” to the extent that it can be relegated to AI?  Who decides that?  And how will those decisions—whoever makes them—impact our work going forward?  These are just some of the questions that give me pause.  For now, I need to proofread some recommendation letters.  ... View more

Toni Morrison published her slim non-fiction meditation, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, in 1993. The historical context shimmers in my memory. In 1991, my graduate cohort analyzed every moment of Anita Hill’s testimony about her harrowing harassment from then Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. In response, 1992 ushered in the “Year of the Woman,” with a record number of women being elected and re-elected to the Senate. In those years, people everywhere were talking about narratives about sexism and racism that haunted American culture. Without explicitly referencing those political touchstones, Morrison published Playing in the Dark the next year, to challenge readers to consider all the ways language shapes our literary, cultural, and political imaginations. Just after the recent election, I taught the Preface and Chapter One of Playing in the Dark to my writing students. I was moved to hear from them how relevant they find Morrison’s insights, now. Morrison writes specifically about the ways racism haunts the sentences and plot lines — often through pointed silences — of celebrated literary classics written by white writers, from Edgar Alan Poe, to Henry James, to William Faulkner, to Flannery O’Connor. Morrison guides readers through her own process of learning to see the repression and functions of Blackness as tools for moving forward white characters’ development. Morrison offers many examples of Black characters who function only to turn the plot, including the Countess in James' What Maisie Knew (13). These are active writerly choices, Morrison argues. Those choices have cultural and political weight that affect both victims of racism and those who perpetuate the racism (11). In other words, as my students concluded after some discussion, Morrison shows us why, as both readers and writers, we must take language seriously. Our language shapes our entire world views. Morrison locates her own readerly awakening as the moment when she "stopped reading as a reader and began to read as a writer” (15). She continues, “Yes, I wanted to identify those moments when American literature was complicit in the fabrication of racism, but equally important, I wanted to see when literature exploded and undermined it” (16). Morrison calls both writers and readers to action:  Every writerly decision we make — and learn to pay attention to as readers — builds a world of consequences. This crucial insight — that we must learn to “read as writers” and “write as readers” —  is the central tenet of From Inquiry to Academic Writing (5e), my co-authored book with Stuart Greene. We scaffold for students specific steps for the reading approach Toni Morrison calls for in literary texts, with an eye for the implications of every writerly decision in academic texts. These steps strengthen critical reading strategies, of course; that’s what we mean by “reading as a writer.” But the steps also help students name the decisions and moves of academic writing so that they can practice them in their own writing, with real readers in mind; that what's we mean by “writing as a reader." Here is our five-step Rhetorical Analysis assignment (62), which can be adapted to many different assignments: Identify the situation. What motivates the writer to write? Identify the writer's purpose. What does the writer want readers to do or think about? Identify the writer's claims. What is the writer's main claim? What minor claims does the writer make? Identify appeals to ethos, pathos, and logos. How does the writer establish credibility, develop a relationship with readers, and use evidence to support a claim? Identify the writer's audience. What do you know about the writer's audience? What does the writer's language imply about the readers? What about the writer's references? The structure of the text? These steps can help students with any level of expertise flex the necessary muscles to be more effective readers and writers, and to understand the consequences of every word choice. As Morrison reminds us — and my students affirm — those consequences for our cultural and political imaginations can be dire, or downright inspiring. ... View more

Hayden Kindrat Hayden Kindrat is pursuing his PhD in English Literature at Stony Brook University (SUNY), with a focus in American and Anglophone literature, science fiction, and environmental fiction and ideas (all in the mid-twentieth century). He has taught courses in Stony Brook's English Department and Department of Writing and Rhetoric. He lives in Queens in New York City.               What do you think is the most important recent development or pedagogical approach in teaching composition? Generative AI, for sure. I don’t think any development in the past has had so much potential to disembody and disincorporate the actual process of writing to such a degree. Students are using AI to write papers, AI-generated papers are being published in academic journals. When we read it, we can usually intuitively sense that something is wrong, but we can’t always put our fingers on why; we are already talking about using AI to detect AI writing.    It is especially important, too, because of its consequences on morale, which we’re already seeing. It is challenging for instructors; it has necessitated a presumption of guilt, so that we feed our students’ work into specious and faulty detection software; there is an atmosphere of paranoia shared in by students and instructors alike. Every semester for the last few years I have had students approach me with their concerns about their work being arbitrarily flagged for plagiarism, and every semester I receive papers that have clearly been written using AI — but I do not have the tools or the resources to definitively prove it, because the technology is evolving and changing faster than institutions can adapt.    It already seems like it is necessitating a total overhaul of how we administer even the most basic and fundamental writing instruction, and a reconsideration of what is or should be sought or valued in student writing. It’s disorienting to think about!     What is the most important skill you aim to provide your students? Probably to think meaningfully and critically and what they write, how they’re writing, and all of the other processes that go into writing. And, of course, to think the same way about what they read or otherwise consume. I use the word “consume” because I think, with the way we are inundated with information and sensory input, deliberation tends to go out the window. We’re basically being conditioned to take information about as consciously as we take in oxygen. To take in as much as possible, as quickly as possible. I think it’s important to impart to students that everything they take in can and should be scrutinized for how it works, what it is saying, what the purpose or the intent behind it is, the nature and logic of its rhetoric, and so on.    In college writing courses, this is especially relevant to argumentation. Encouraging students to slow down, to think about what they’re saying, the best way to say it depending on the audience, and what evidence needs to be provided to actually convince an audience of something, is key — and one way to do this is to teach them to parse these same elements in the things they read, see, watch, and hear.    Hayden's Assignment That Works Below is a brief synopsis of Hayden's assignment. For the full activity, see Database Scavenger Hunt.   This activity is designed to acquaint WRT 102 students with the databases accessible to them through Stony Brook University’s libraries. It takes place in the classroom. I usually set aside forty-five minutes to an hour for this activity.   Students are asked to bring their laptops to class, and to break into groups of four. I give the entire class a search task to complete which will involve the use of advanced search options, database directories and research guides, boolean operators (AND, OR), and phrase searching with quotation marks, which they’ve become glancingly familiar with prior to this activity. The first team to complete the task gets a point (candy, extra credit, etc), but they have to demonstrate for the class how they arrived at their search result on the classroom’s overhead.   Some of these tasks involve whittling down massive search results by whatever means they can think of, from hundreds of thousands of results, to hundreds, to a single search result. For example: “Make a search query involving ‘Shakespeare’ that yields a single search result.” Others involve using date ranges, such as “Find me the earliest mention of Stony Brook’s mascot, Wolfie, in a newspaper,” or, “Find a contemporaneous review of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, or, “Tell me something about the Long Island Railroad in 1976.” Others still are a bit more open ended, such as “Find me a weird New York State animal fact.”   I’ve done a variation of this activity later in the semester, after students have chosen their research topics and we have discussed “scholarly” and “popular” sources and Joseph Bizup’s BEAM method. Students work individually or in groups to find articles, and also to evaluate the articles in real time. I’ve found that responses tend to be interesting in what they reveal about how deeply students are thinking about the nature of the information they’re pulling, potentially for sources and evidence in their own writing. Some get very nitty-gritty with the advanced search features of a given database, others sidestep it all and wade into the morass of thousands or even millions of results for a basic query. And almost every time I do this assignment, I have a couple students who just try to use Google, which can create some problems when it comes to actually accessing an article behind an institutional paywall.  ... View more

by Jenn Fishman This is a post in an occasional series affiliated with the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), a regional event with national reach held annually in Milwaukee, WI. Learn more below and in posts tagged “writing innovation” and “WIS.” On the 5th anniversary of the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), we held a series of conversations for a 2023 issue of Community Literacy Journal. In one of them, a dialogue about “Takeaways,” WIS Steering Committee member Aleisha Balestri describes the 5-minute flashtalk she gave at WIS ‘22. It was about her efforts to “vex” faculty-only conversations about students’ engagement with writing at the College of DuPage, where she teaches. Her strategy was as direct as it was elegant in its simplicity: she invited students to participate, resulting in “a very powerful conversation.”  Aleisha concludes her remarks by saying: “I would love to see WIS bring students to the forefront,” and all of us on the WIS Steering Committee agreed. Although undergraduate writers participated in the first three symposia (2018-2020), they did not return when WIS came back from a year-long, COVID-compelled hiatus. As a result, undergraduate writers were not part of the first hybrid symposium, “Writing As ______,” in 2022 or “Write it Out” in 2023. Likewise, they did not benefit from the company of the first two cohorts of Bedford/St. Martin’s WIS Fellows or the first international WIS attendees.  The literature on undergraduate research in writing studies helps explain what happened. In The Naylor Report on Undergraduate Research in Writing Studies, Sophia Abbot, Hannah Bellowoar, and Eric E. Hall discuss some of the many internal and external challenges that mentors of undergraduate researchers face. The list includes everything from lack of time outside the classroom to lack of material support. Writing instructors and administrators who organize course- or program-related showcases experience similar difficulties, even though the rewards for helping undergraduate writers go public are great. It’s no mistake that undergraduate research is one of the original high impact educational practices, and we’ve all seen students gain not only confidence but also intellectual and proto-professional insight when their writing circulates through publications or presentations delivered beyond the classroom With all of the above in mind, we committed to welcoming undergraduates back to the symposium in 2024. Full credit goes to Max Gray, a digital scholarship librarian at Marquette University and a WIS Steering Committee member, for the lightbulb moment that made it possible. Max suggested going digital and inviting undergrads to share pre-recorded, audio and video compositions, which could be featured both during and after each WIS. Running with that idea, Aleisha, Max, and I dreamt up a new program genre, the 3-minute flare, and the rest is WIS history. In 2024 the WIS theme was “Writing Human/s,” and the flares we received were a testament to how much humanness can be conveyed in 120 seconds of writing. Click through our digital showcase and find a love letter, a villanelle, and other poetry. Listen to ruminations on AI, COVID, and group communication as well as penmanship and writing in nature. Meet students who are haunted by writing and tormented by writer’s block. Their flares burn alongside those by students who are grounded and comforted by writing as “the light [they] turn to in the darkness.” Contributors span first-year students and super seniors. They are majors in everything from English to engineering and psychology, and they identify many ways, including as writers and readers-turned-writers. Together, the first cache of WIS flares confirms there may be no more powerful string of words than the declaration: “I am a writer.” Looking ahead to WIS ‘25, we invite you and your students to contribute. The importance of writing educators—teachers, mentors, and advisors—is legible in the flares we received as well as the shoutouts that authors gave to the teachers and mentors who supported their efforts, including Darcie Thoune at UW-La Crosse, Kat O’Meara and Laurie MacDiarmid at St. Norbert College, and Nila Horner at Michigan Tech.  The WIS ‘25 theme is mise en place, the culinary term for putting everything in place before starting to cook, especially in a professional kitchen. We’ve adopted this phrase as not only a metaphor for getting ready to write but also a pathway to exploring the interrelationships between writing and food. In addition, we have cooked up a second genre for undergraduate writers. To complement 3-minute flares we are also inviting 30-second sparks.  You and yours are cordially invited to join us. The prompts for flares and sparks as well as a proposal guide are available online, and submissions are due 12/13. Proposals for other WIS genres—flashtalks, workshops, posters, artifacts, displays, performances, and installations—are due 10/25. Registration opens in early November.  ... View more

Elizabeth Novotny Elizabeth Novotny is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric, Theory, and Culture at Michigan Technological University. She teaches First-Year Composition and other writing courses, such as Advanced Composition and Technical and Professional Communication. She is also a Composition Graduate Assistant and assists the program director in delivering instruction in the graduate-level Composition Pedagogy and orientation for new instructors, as well as supporting curriculum development and administrative tasks. Elizabeth’s research interests include writing studies, pedagogy, rhetorical theory, and continental philosophy. For her dissertation, she is working on a project that examines the relationship between FYC student conceptions of rhetorical agency and their writing practice.         How does the next generation of students inspire you? In our composition course at Michigan Tech, students research a topic of their choice throughout the semester. The variety of topics is amazing! Just last semester, I read about microtransactions in gaming, improving air traffic flow, the evolution of jazz music, factors impacting the processed food industry, linear infrastructure’s effect on wildlife, and much more. Students always keep me on my toes and remind me that there’s more to learn. I am constantly impressed by the questions they ask and the answers they find, and it’s inspiring to see them pursue their interests and gain confidence as researchers. My favorite part of teaching is being a genuinely interested and invested reader of student work.   How do you engage students in your course, whether f2f, online, or hybrid? Too often, students think that struggling with writing means that they are bad at it or there is something wrong with them. At Michigan Tech, a STEM-focused institution, we have a lot of students who are hesitant about writing. To engage them, I focus on making my own writing process visible, especially messy works-in-progress. It is important to acknowledge that writing is not perfectible and that it is difficult for everyone, not just for beginner or novice writers. Students need to see me as a fellow writer who is engaged in the same kinds of activities that I am asking them to do. For example, I share critical feedback I’ve received on my own writing and talk about the writing or research projects I’m currently working on. I’ll share examples of pieces of my undergraduate work in comparison to more recent work to demonstrate my growth. Another strategy I will often use is completing an activity along with students and projecting my work on the board as I do it. These kinds of practices lead to a comfortable classroom environment where it is accepted and encouraged to struggle. As a class, we view a challenging writing or reading experience as evidence that we are ready to learn something new.   Elizabeth's Assignment That Works Below is a brief synopsis of Elizabeth's assignment. For the full activity, see the Exploring Place assignment prompt. The assignment I presented during Assignments that Work is a supplementary assignment that I created collaboratively with another PhD student in my program, Kendall Belopavlovich. This assignment asks students to reflect on their story of being in the Keweenaw (the area where Michigan Tech is located) and go to a new place of their choice. Students explore their chosen place, and while they’re there, write a reflection on how their experience of being in the Keweenaw has changed as a result of interacting with that place. Students have responded very positively to this assignment. Most often, students mention a newfound appreciation for the unique natural beauty of the area or observe cultural differences that come from living in a remote place. Many students also express that this assignment has helped them value exploration and curiosity about the places around them. From my Assignments that Work presentation, I received valuable feedback from the other Bedford New Scholars that will help develop the assignment further. For example, I might have students complete a pre-reflection in a familiar place, which will allow them to reflect more intentionally about what changes they notice about themselves and about their writing when they go to a new place. I also got new ideas for incorporating multimodal elements into this assignment, such as asking students to make a map of how they moved through space and how they communicated there. I’m excited about making these updates moving forward! ... View more

Kim Haimes-Korn is a Professor of English and Digital Writing at Kennesaw State University. She also trains graduate student teachers in composition theory and pedagogy. Kim’s teaching philosophy encourages dynamic learning and critical digital literacies and focuses on students’ powers to create their own knowledge through language and various “acts of composition.” She is a regular contributor to this Multimodal Monday academic blog since 2014. She likes to have fun every day, return to nature when things get too crazy, and think deeply about way too many things. She loves teaching. It has helped her understand the value of amazing relationships and boundless creativity. You can reach Kim at khaimesk@kennesaw.edu or visit her website: Acts of Composition I incorporate visual and multimodal image work in most of my classes. In addition to writing prompts, I have students compose representative images and send them out on what I call curation events. I have described some of these in earlier posts where I have students curate playlists, strike out on visual journeys, and even attend live curation events where they create content for community partners. Image curation involves the processes of collection, selection, interpretation, creation, and sharing. The act of curation provides students with valuable skills that they can use in their academic, personal, and professional lives. It enhances critical thinking, creative composing, and is essential for digital writing where visuals are an integral part of the genre. Like any act of composition, image curation is about understanding your rhetorical situation: Your subjects, audiences, purposes, and contexts. We use these components to filter our collections and shape our perceptions. As a curator, we need an open awareness of what is around us and the connections between things that make them collections.  Click here to see Sample Image Archive  We can use different parameters as we create our image assignments such as chronological or thematic arrangements. We can give students particular prompts to guide their attention or present opportunities for them to choose their own collections. I use them for the purposes of invention and brainstorming ideas, arrangement as they organize their thoughts, and drafting as they incorporate them into their final products. Students already participate in acts of curation through social media where they collect, select, edit and distribute their images to tell stories. We curate and archive family photos, events, and objects that create systematic portraits of our lives over time. If you ever have participated in any of these activities, you know that you must be organized to make it work. We have all searched hopelessly for lost files or that one image that is randomly assigned by our computers if we do not define the parameters. It sounds obvious but students often do not know the value of archiving and organizing content in a digital world. I find that teaching students about archive organization is time well spent. I start at the beginning. File naming is important for easy retrieval down the line. Students do not really think about this as part of the process and haphazardly choose non-descript names such as “project one” or “my assignment.” I teach them to be specific and informative so they can glance at the file name and know something about what is inside. This might include their initials, title of the project, and dates among other things. I encourage them to think beyond the individual document, image, or file and see the bigger picture of how these things relate to and differentiate themselves from other things within their larger archival space. This often involves creating thoughtful folders and sub-folders to categorize their work. Basic Course Archive example   I also benefit as a teacher when I build in consistent naming protocols for files and folders so that we are intentionally structuring individual and class archives of their work over the term. This helps with their own work but also helps me when I go to evaluate so I do not have to spend my time searching and opening randomly named files to find the right assignments. I also see my whole class as an archiving opportunity for collecting, reflecting, and sharing student work (as well as my own scholarly research). You can use any platform, but I like a class Google Drive where students create individual and team folders for all to view. This is especially important when students curate and archive for community partners because they can easily share these organized folders with clients (preparing them for strong professional communication). Google provides a free, universal archive space with easy access and plenty of online support. I tried something new this semester and added Weekly Image Archive assignments where students showcase their work. Once again, I return to Google slides and have students choose one image from their weekly assignment to add to that week’s collaborative archive slideshow. They go through their own archives and select an image that speaks to the assignment and demonstrates strong visual composition. They include their name and a short description of the image and its meaning. We then show them to the class which reinforces that week’s lessons. It also gives students more ownership and pride in their work and helps us define quality by viewing strong work from their classmates. It does not take up too much class time as we create it together on the spot at the start of class. This activity raises the bar when students know they will be sharing their work with others rather than just turning it in to their teacher for evaluation. It is a time of both admiration and learning. Archives give us the opportunity to go back and reuse and repurpose images for future projects and new content. They provide digital, historical spaces for us to store, preserve, and revisit our work over time. I usually have students reflect upon their archived spaces at the end of the term to articulate their learning which gives them an overview perspective to see their work as an interconnected collection instead of isolated individual assignments. Although archiving is a skill that we assume students already have, I find they benefit from dedicated instruction towards these organizational practices. ... View more

by Darci Thoune, Kelly Blewett, and Kat O’Meara   This post is part of an occasional series affiliated with the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), a regional event with national reach that meets annually online and in Milwaukee, WI, led by Chief Capacitator Jenn Fishman. Learn more below and in posts tagged “writing innovation” and “WIS.”   As others have explored in previous posts about the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), part of its success has always been rooted in our commitment to the small. In many ways, we’re fortunate to be in a field that offers such a spectrum of professional development opportunities (flagship conferences, regional conferences, webinars, publications). And we imagine our small gathering, with its emphasis on writing innovation, community-building, and mentoring, as complementary to this abundance of opportunity in the field. Events like the WIS, because it’s small, can cater to particular needs, interests and whims of writing instructors in our corner of academia. We’re not the only ones doing this work though. Organizations like the Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA) have been successfully marshaling the small for decades with their regional affiliates program and, more recently, with their decision to hold one-day regional gatherings in summer of 2024 in lieu of holding a national conference. Glimpsing Regional Conferences and Affiliates within CWPA Kelly Blewett, WPA at Indiana University East and current president of CWPA CWPA’s decision to hold regional conferences in 2024 was informed by our commitment to the small. It’s so valuable for WPAs in a particular region to come together officially and under the banner of larger organizations to connect, trade information, and think together about the work we do. We modeled these regional events on a longstanding event hosted by the Carolinas affiliate called “Meeting in the Middle,” which, incredibly, just held its 18th annual gathering last February. Wendy Sharer, a current editor of WPA Journal who is a member of that affiliate, explained what makes that annual event work so well: it is affordable, interactive, has a social component built around ample breaks, shared meals, and people can attend within an easy driving distance. A small ad hoc regional conference committee, which included both Wendy and me, built these components into the call for the CWPA regional events in 2024. From Florida to Maryland to Wisconsin to Illinois to Texas, WPAs gathered, to learn, to connect. Connecting like this doesn’t have to require a lot of work. As Wendy pointed out, sessions built around a prompt like “Share a problem that your program is currently working on” often lead to rich, vibrant discussion that require little advance preparation.t is tremendously valuable to know the people who are WPAing around you, and I think that’s why we currently have 14 affiliates within CWPA. (Applications are always open for more.)  As a WPA myself, I’ve informally met several of my counterparts at local events and while there is some crossover among the Indiana writing programs, I am a firm believer that more crossover would be a good thing for everyone. When I think about the next chapter of my own career, fostering an Indiana affiliate program is on my list of things to do, and I’m grateful that such an affiliate could be endorsed and supported by the CWPA. Small But Mighty—A Regional Collaboration in Wisconsin Kat O’Meara, WPA at St. Norbert College in De Pere, WI   Darci and I formally established the Wisconsin Affiliate through CWPA in 2021, but our small but mighty collection of Wisco WPAs did not formally meet until the opportunity arose for regional conferences this summer of 2024. This event was super exciting to plan, and we decided to take a “less is more” approach, considering it was our inaugural session. We had two goals for the day: To establish a foundation for our Wisco Affiliate, and to use this precious time together to collaborate on WPA projects and issues. We coordinated a space at St. Norbert College utilizing our $500 WPA Affiliate start-up grant (offered to all new affiliates!), and we procured catering from a local sandwich shop in De Pere, Wisconsin. And perhaps the most exciting detail (for Darci and me) was the creation of a WI WPA t-shirt for all attendees to take home with them. To our surprise and delight, a solid dozen WPAs from all over Wisconsin heeded the call. We were a vibrant, interesting collection of administrators hailing from four-year public universities, mid-sized private universities, technical colleges, and small liberal arts colleges. The common threads, of course, were our ties to the Dairy State and the college student writers we all serve. After brief introductions, each attendee shared a WPA-specific project (or problem) to see where we could find through-lines and connections, and to offer initial strategies and support. The “projects and problems” brainstorm revealed some common woes: helping all faculty see themselves as writing teachers, rising numbers of students who need more foundational writing and academic support, balancing expertise and power with general austerity across changing institutional landscapes. But what also emerged were hopeful commonalities like our mutual desire for sharing resources (for placement, for teaching research skills) and how we can lean on one another across the state—even if we are each at our own institutions. While we have a long way to go before the Wisco Affiliate is on the level with a longstanding affiliate like Carolinas, the July meeting was an imperative first step toward some authentic statewide collaboration, and I’m so glad we did it. In hindsight, I’m proud of the foundation Darci and I were able to lay in July, and I am so grateful for the opportunity to collaborate with fellow writing program administrators with the support of the CWPA.   The theme for WIS ‘25 is mise en place, a culinary term for putting things in place before cooking, especially in a professional kitchen. For us, it’s a metaphor for getting ready to write as well as a pathway to exploring the interrelationship between writing and food. Join us online or in Milwaukee, WI, January 30-31, 2025. Proposals are welcome through 10/25 and, for undergraduate writers, through 12/13. Registration opens in early November. ... View more

by Jessie Wirkus Haynes and Jenn Fishman This post is part of an occasional series affiliated with the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), a regional event with national reach organized by a group of cross-institutional colleagues including Jessie and Jenn. Learn more below and in posts tagged “writing innovation” and “WIS.”    It’s no secret that professional conferences can be inaccessible in myriad ways. Too often they cost too much physically as well as financially, and panels of 3 to 5 people reading 15- to 20-minute papers can be difficult—or impossible—to follow without a range of resources that are not always readily available. What so many of us want —and feel we need—are opportunities to connect with colleagues and share ideas. Whether online or onsite, we hunger to have the kinds of back-and-forths that spark on-the-spot aha moments, spur and deepen professional relations, and enable new teaching and research possibilities.    That’s what motivated us to collaborate with campus colleagues Elizabeth Gibes and Kelsey Otero to start the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS) in 2018. At the time, Elizabeth was a digital scholarship and research librarian, and Kelsey helmed Marquette’s Social Innovation Initiative. Through our cross-disciplinary collaboration, we founded an event that features short talks, hands-on workshops, and multiple formal and informal opportunities to interact over the course of two days. For us, it was a recipe that worked, and participants over the years have described WIS as a respite, a space for reflection, a good venue for trying out new things, and a place where participants of all ranks, roles, and career stages can find inspiration as well as space for growth and change.    A key part of the WIS process is the post-symposium debrief, where the Steering Committee meets to discuss the immediate past WIS and look ahead to the next. One of the latest innovations to emerge from these discussions is the WIS satellite. The idea is to share the spirit of WIS beyond the annual 2-day symposium by inviting past participants to lead WIS-related happenings at their home institutions. As a group, we liked the idea of expanding access to WIS through additional events, and we were eager to find out how satellites could be tailored to suit different campuses’ and communities’ interests and needs. In particular, we hoped satellites might encourage interdepartmental and local cross-institutional collaborations around writing and writing education.    Thanks to Jessie’s initiative and leadership, her campus, Bellin College, hosted the first WIS satellite on March 18th, 2024. Bellin is a private college specializing in healthcare education in Green Bay, Wisconsin. As Jessie recalls:    When the WIS steering committee suggested an expansion into satellite events, I knew that Bellin College was the perfect place for this to happen. Often, in the STEM or healthcare settings, students and faculty can forget the importance of writing. As the lone English faculty member at the institution, I am highly invested in sharing the importance of writing for the healthcare professions to emphasize that writing isn’t just grammar or citation styles like APA; rather, it is an everyday practice, including charting, narrative medicine, professional research, literature reviews, research critiques, scholarly papers (and more). By effectively learning rhetoric and writing, students learn how to communicate successfully with a diverse set of patients, making healthcare more effective, compassionate, and equitable. My desire was both to innovate and to collaborate: I want students and faculty to think about writing as critical thinking, to see the humanities as a necessary part of healthcare, something that creates empathy and the ability to successfully interact with patients, caregivers, co-workers, and organizations.   Bellin College was extremely supportive of this idea, and Dr. Casey Rentmeester, Professor of Philosophy and Director of Academic Success, played a huge role in making this an interdisciplinary event as he spoke of empathy, philosophy, and the importance of the humanities in the healthcare field. In addition, I wanted to bring the satellite back to my WIS roots, so I asked Dr. Lilly Campbell, Associate Professor of English at Marquette University and Director of Foundations Instruction, to speak on her recent research about empathy and working with simulations in healthcare settings. I also encouraged students to share their experiences with writing, focusing on how writing has affected them both as students and as current/future healthcare providers. Most importantly, I wanted the event to end with discussion, thought, and a collaborative sharing of ideas and ways to improve. My goal was to set up an event that focused on writing and the humanities in healthcare as ways to improve empathy, critical thought, and, as a result, healthcare outcomes.   The reactions to our satellite surpassed expectations, thanks, in large part, to the inspiring talks by Dr. Rentmeester and Dr. Campbell as well as the work done by our administrative assistant, Mary Roffers. The satellite allowed us to focus on the specific institutional needs of a college focused on healthcare during a 90 minute session, which could be attended live or virtually. The audience consisted mainly of students with several faculty and staff members, but it was a collaborative and energizing experience that will help change and shape our next generation of providers. Students talked about it for weeks afterwards, and I’ve had many students tell me that they thought they were merely healthcare students, but they realize now that they are also writers. "Blinn College in Bryan, TX IMG 1035" by Billy Hathorn at en.wikipedia is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. The Bellin College WIS satellite is just the beginning. Already, Jessie and her colleagues are planning the next one, and colleagues around the country have been considering how a WIS satellite might help them amplify ongoing efforts or jump-start long-time plans. There are many organizational offshoots that offer parallel opportunities, including National Writing Project sites, Rhetoric Society of America student chapters, and Council of Writing Program Administrators regional affiliates. We encourage Bedford Bits readers to connect with the organizations in your orbit and then dream big through small conferences, symposia, and professional meetings.   The theme for WIS ‘25 is mise en place, a culinary term for putting things in place before cooking, especially in a professional kitchen. For us, it’s a metaphor for getting ready to write as well as a pathway to exploring the interrelationship between writing and food. Join us online or in Milwaukee, WI, January 30-31, 2025. Proposals are welcome through 10/25 and, for undergraduate writers, through 12/13. Registration opens in early November.  ... View more

As educators, we are in the midst, or at least a mis-beginning of a paradigm shift. And, certainly, generative AI (genAI) is becoming a key part of the conversation, offering exciting opportunities but also raising important ethical questions. Recently, the Macmillan Learning community featured my blog post "Bits on Bots: Data-Informed Generative AI Practice: One University’s Journey", which lays a foundation for understanding how institutions like Kennesaw State University (KSU) are navigating this transformative journey. Today, I want to share the evolution of our AI literacy initiatives at Kennesaw State University and to illustrate how our Rhetorical Prompt Engineering framework has fostered a nuanced understanding of both the ethical and practical dimensions of AI usage among learners and professional writers at varying educational and skill levels. Our journey began with a central question: How can we empower students to harness genAI effectively while ensuring they remain critically aware of the ethical complexities it introduces? The answer emerged in the form of the Rhetorical Prompt Engineering Method, which was not only inspired by post-process writing practice but also the Markov Chain: a probabilistic model that predicts the next word or sequence in a conversation based only on the current state or previous word(s) without needing the full conversation history, which helps simplify and guide response generation. Initially implemented with both undergraduate and graduate students at KSU, this method prompted learners to engage deeply with their writing processes and AI-generated content. The aim was not only to improve the efficiency of their prompts but also to cultivate a conscientious approach that takes into account broader ethical implications. This approach is unique in treating prompt engineering as a rhetorical writing process—one that’s focused on audience, purpose, style, tone, and contextual awareness. Building on this foundation, the framework expanded beyond our campus to reach thousands of learners through a module on Coursera, where it continued to evolve and adapt. As a professor and curricular developer in these courses, I have been privileged to observe students from diverse academic and professional backgrounds explore the integration of genAI into their personal and professional contexts. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Learners have consistently reported that the Rhetorical Prompt Engineering Method not only improved the quality of their AI-generated outputs but also heightened their awareness of ethical concerns they may not have previously considered. Hundreds of learners have reported that this method assists them in developing clarity and specificity in their prompting and increased accuracy and usefulness of their outputs. This method is now a core part of graduate-level courses, including Prompt Engineering for Writers, grant-writing, Introduction to Professional Writing, and the proposed Graduate Certificate in AI Writing Technologies in our English Department's graduate curriculum. The implementation and iterative refinement of this framework have yielded demonstrable improvements in the quality of student outputs. Whether by clarifying the purpose, adjusting audience, tone, or ensuring that generated prompts avoid harmful biases, this method has had a measurable impact for learners training to be, or who are already, professional writers. Thousands of learners, both at KSU and across Coursera, have applied this approach to generate outputs that are more effective, ethical, and precise. To further support this process, we have developed a visual tool known as the Ethical Wheel of Prompting. This tool encourages learners to reflect on four essential criteria: Usefulness, Relevance, Accuracy, and Harmlessness. Each time a prompt is crafted or an output is edited, learners are urged to consider these criteria as a means of ensuring not only effectiveness but also responsibility in genAI use. We have had positive small-scale student response and continue to refine this method as we move forward with piloting. Below, I have included both the Rhetorical Prompt Engineering Method and the Ethical Wheel of Prompting. These visuals are intended to illuminate the process and demonstrate the practical application of human-genAI interactions. Whether you are composing a blog post, editing a professional communication, or generating content ideas, these steps can significantly enhance the quality and integrity of the work produced. Generative AI is a transformative tool, and with thoughtful, ethical engagement, it can serve as a catalyst for meaningful and impactful communication. I invite you to connect with me on LinkedIn or via email to continue exploring and expanding our understanding of both the affordances and limitations of these emerging technologies.             Jeanne Beatrix Law is a Professor of English and Director of Composition at Kennesaw State University, focusing on generative AI (genAI) and digital civil rights histography. Her AI literacy work has global reach, including multiple presentations of her Rhetorical Prompt Engineering Framework at conferences like Open Educa Berlin and the Suny Council on Writing. She has led workshops on ethical genAI for diverse institutions and disciplines at Eastern Michigan, Kent State, and CUNY’s Ai Subgroup. She and her students have authored publications on student perceptions of AI in professional writing. Jeanne also co-authored The Writer's Loop: A Guide to College Writing and contributed to the Instructor's Guide for Andrea Lunsford's Everyday Writer. She has authored eight Coursera courses on genAI and advocates for ethical AI integration in educational spaces in both secondary and higher education spaces as a faculty mentor for the AAC&U’s AI Pedagogy Institute. ... View more

This morning, a colleague shared an announcement with me via email. Embedded in the email was a comment about generative AI possibly taking over much of the routine work of scholarly editing and publication in the future. I closed the email, shut my eyes, and thought, I need a vacation from all things AI. AI is everywhere: the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Education offer AI-themed articles and advertisements daily, while various departments at my university are hosting brown bags on the topic. Our linguistics club hosted a symposium on AI, with two PhD candidates speaking on their research in AI and applied linguistics. Our department’s WAC/WID committee is hosting a series of Webinars on AI in college writing, and the administration sent a lengthy AI survey for faculty to complete. I follow colleagues who focus on AI, including linguists like Emily Bender, composition/rhetoric specialists like Marc Watkins, and my fellow Bits bloggers Stuart Selber and April Lidinsky. My first-year composition course this semester has focused on writing about AI. With just two weeks left in this academic term, I have reached AI saturation.  I am going to set aside—for a while—all the urgency surrounding AI and think about what has driven my teaching and thinking over 30 years: working with students at the intersection of applied linguistics and composition studies. Nothing has been so energizing and restorative as dialogue with these students as they explore concepts of language, rhetoric, or pedagogy—and discover those concepts as sense-making tools. This semester, I worked with five writing fellows at our university, and as part of an internship course, they completed annotated bibliographies, choosing articles from a list of journals and classic pieces that I provided for them. I sat down this week to read their summaries and reflections. Here’s just a sampling of some of their initial choices: Elizabeth Wardle’s 2012 piece, “Creative Repurposing for Expansive Learning: Considering ‘Problem-Exploring’ and ‘Answer-Getting’ Dispositions in Individuals and Fields.” Bruce Horner and Min-Zhan Lu’s 1999 article, “Representing the ‘Other’: Basic Writers And the Teaching of Basic Writing.”  A 2024 piece by Naitnaphit Limlamai, Emily Wilson, and Anne Ruggles Gere, “‘There are Other Ways to Answer This’: Development of pedagogical content Knowledge via Listening as a Benefit to Writing Fellows Across Disciplines.”  A 2024 pedagogy piece by Megan Heise, “Teaching Students How to Give and Receive Peer Review Feedback." Mark Blaauw-Hara’s 2006 classic, "Why Our Students Need Instruction in Grammar, and How We Should Go about It."  A 2018 piece by Elizabeth Busekrus, "A Conversational Approach: Using Writing Center Pedagogy in Commenting for Transfer in the Classroom." These writing fellows, who had been tutoring in literature, psychology, and corequisite English classes, bubbled with insight and questions:  I have never thought about this, but it makes so much sense!  I have seen this before… This explains why… I cannot wait to try this in my small group sessions… This reminds me of… So does this mean…? I remember reading about this in another class, but now it makes sense.  That is SO COOL. I know that I will eventually have to return to AI-related concerns. And the fellows have dealt with these concerns already (What do we do if we suspect the draft was AI-generated?).  But for this week, exploring these texts with my students was a welcome respite from all things AI. Have you experienced AI-information overload? What brings you energy and joy in those moments? ... View more

by Sonakshi Srivastava, Ashoka University This post is part of an occasional series affiliated with the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), a regional event with national reach that takes place annually online and in Milwaukee, WI. In 2024, Sona was a Bedford/St. Martin’s WIS Fellow. Learn more below and in posts tagged “writing innovation” and “WIS.” In July of 2023, I made my debut as a teacher in a classroom. Up until then, I had been comfortable with my position as a writing tutor—looking at students’ scripts, working with them on polishing their drafts, completing their essays and the like but the summer of 2023 warmed me up to a different experience and experiment in my tutor life. My duty as a teacher, then, included teaching English to a cohort of some twenty students as a part of my university’s pedagogical programme, the Academic Bridge Programme (at Ashoka University). As the name suggests, the programme is intended to help students transition smoothly from school to college and places particular emphasis on English writing and speaking skills. With this particular intent in mind, I curated a curriculum that sought to invite the young minds to a world of curiosity and critical thinking. And, as a scholar of reading and attention, I dedicated a whole module to this specific strand with readings taken from the works of Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein) and Sandra Cisneros. In total honesty, I was supremely proud of my curation—the naïve thrill of a first-time curriculum designer was hard to contain, so much so that I had already pictured my students smitten with the select excerpts, awed by the creative spill of words on paper. I was so read-y for this! However, as much as I was prepared to teach, I was also anxious about the reception and to some extent, my fear was founded. I had misread the class. In their seminal pedagogical work How to Read a Book, pivoted around critical reading, Charles Van Doren and Mortimer J. Adler regard the reader as important as the writer. They compare this relational importance through the analogy of a pitch, a ball and the players. They compare the pitcher to the writer, the fielder to the reader, and the ball to the text. In that, the text as the ball is passive, and it is the sum total of the activity between the pitcher and the fielder that gives meaning to the receiving or the missing of the ball. What is implied here then is that the ball may be missed or received – the onus of this acceptance or rejection depends heavily on the reader as the fielder. And this is what the act of reading eventually condenses to. The text is a complex object set forth in action by the writer. It is the task of the reader to “catch” the writer’s intentions. What if Adler and Doren’s intention, set for the reader-writer relationship, were to manifest in a classroom? What if the writer exchanged places with a teacher in this analogy? These ifs found an answer through me. I, the teacher, had the ball rolling by prescribing the readings. My students, the readers, had failed to catch them—and this fault here was mine to claim. It was not them who had misunderstood or misread the texts. It was I, who had failed them and the texts in a classroom by misreading them. I can talk about this failure of mine because my being as a teacher stood challenged that particular day. This challenge is further fuelled by my reflection on Adler and Doren’s analogy which gracefully saves the writers from the act of reading or misreading the text by their readers. What possibilities would emerge if a teacher recognizes their shortcomings in a classroom? What if it is not the fielder’s error but an error by the pitcher? Since time was limited, and the course set, I had to come up with an alternative approach to the text. Over the course of a week, we worked together in different languages—switching between Tamil, Hindi, Bengali, Khari, and English. We workshopped Cisneros’ story in our native tongues and connected it to stories that we had grown up listening or reading. Interestingly enough, the idea that the students are less “fluent” in English was also circumvented, prompting me to think if the assumption about their “fluency” was typecasted because of certain attributes (hailing from Tier-2 or Tier-3 cities, educated in state board schools etc.) that they had failed. The students were proficient in English—and where the vernaculars failed, English—no matter how “broken”, how “unpolished” brought our ideas and us together. Everyday, then, was a navigation through translation in that class, and that made all the difference. An initial challenge that channeled into a lesson for me not only as a teacher but also a translator. This was praxis. As I transition in my tutor role, from one ABP cohort to another, I cannot help but reflect how being in and reading with the classroom has influenced my perspective(s) on teaching. I think of it through the triad of the Cs—connect, correspond, and collaborate. To not think less of the students but to think with them and through them. A classroom is the most fertile field where a critical mind may flourish. And to think of it, perhaps this is what the pitcher and the fielder should do with the ball – approach it in the spirit of collaboration—one where we are not playing against one another but with one another. References Adler, Mortimer J., and Charles Van Doren. How to Read a Book. Simon and Schuster, 2011. The theme for WIS ‘25 is mise en place, a culinary term for putting things in place before cooking, especially in a professional kitchen. For us, it’s a metaphor for getting ready to write as well as a pathway to exploring the interrelationship between writing and food. Join us online or in Milwaukee, WI, January 30-31, 2025. Proposals are welcome through 10/25 and, for undergraduate writers, through 12/13. Registration opens in early November. ... View more

Mckenzie Bergan Mckenzie Bergan is a PhD student at the University of Connecticut studying gothic fiction, young adult literature, and the campus novel. She explores how students and instructors form their identities within educational institutions, both individually and in relationship to those around them. She is the Assistant Director of First-Year Writing and is writing a textbook with the Director of UConn's FYW program. In this role, she also plans professional development opportunities for instructors and helps plan and host the Conference on the Teaching of Writing. She has taught English 1007, Writing and Multimodal Composition over the past several years and in the summer. She is the co-host of the “Reading Shirley Jackson Podcast” and has published “Theorising the Uncanny Adaptation through Hamlet” in Adaptation.     What is the most important skill you aim to provide your students? The most important thing I hope to instill in my students is the ability to recognize and hone their own curiosity. For so many students, school becomes a series of check boxes, and they often don’t have time to linger on questions or ideas that excite them. And that’s not necessarily anyone’s fault! Of course, students become overwhelmed with all they are expected to do in order to gain entry into a university and to graduate from one, and educators have those same responsibilities, especially when so many students face gaps in access and instructional time from the pandemic. That's why I feel it is so vital to give students space to be curious, to recognize when an idea sparks something in them, and further, to give them tools to practice their curiosity. Google and Wikipedia are amazing resources that give us more access to information than anyone has had in the history of our world (!!!), but helping to guide them through the process of navigating those resources, how to be on the lookout for information, and how to process different information in intuitive ways are all skills I work on in the classroom. Further, exposing them to the resources they have through the university and how to use them while they can is central to my work in the classrooms.   What is your greatest teaching challenge? It might be cliche, but my biggest teaching challenge right now is how to engage with AI ethically. Not only is it a technology that will necessarily change the course of my teaching forever, but I struggle to navigate the ethical concerns I have about it, like the environmental impact it causes, and the lack of credit given to the writers and artists whose work AI uses to create its products. While I’m deeply interested in ways AI can be utilized in the classroom, I don’t feel comfortable asking students to play with AI or asking it to do the same thing multiple ways, as many class activities suggest, because creating one AI generated image is the same as completely charging your phone, according to the MIT Technology Review. In addition, AI draws from resources that it does not credit. How can I ask my students to think about ethical citation methods while using a technology that fails to follow the methods I teach? And yet, it feels like if I don’t embrace AI in my classroom, I’ll become a dinosaur and lose the opportunity to bring an exciting new technology into the classroom. It also obviously won’t stop students from using AI technology in a variety of ways. Is a “I’d rather you do it in the house” mentality a better way of teaching them how to navigate this development even with my ethical concerns? These are the questions that take up most of my teaching thinking at this point. And while they are difficult, it’s also exciting to be at an important turning point in the way we think about teaching, the composition classroom, and writing itself.   Mckenzie's Assignment That Works Below is a brief synopsis of Mckenzie's assignment. For the full activity, see the Freewriting Portfolio assignment prompt. For Assignments That Work, I shared my “Freewriting Portfolio” assignment. This assignment emerges out of a daily practice of freewriting that I do in my First-Year Writing classroom. For 10 minutes each class, students respond to a prompt I create. The prompt may be on the content of the class that day, a question about writing or composing, or a reflection on the project they're currently creating. Every student then shares one thing they thought about in the freewriting time, even if it’s just one sentence. I find starting the day with writing and sharing not only sets a concrete expectation of what class will be like, but it also helps to create a classroom community in which every student’s ideas are valued and heard. By the end of the semester, students have almost 30 freewriting responses. Our final project, the Freewriting Portfolio, asks students to create a multimodal collage of their freewriting artifacts. They must select 5 excerpts from their writing and then combine them with images that represent their thinking throughout the course. By combining visual and linguistic modes, students can reflectively think about their experience in the class in new ways. Students then create three footnotes that explain how their thinking has evolved throughout the course, and how their projects might have grown out of these preliminary meditations. It also asks them to consciously consider how they navigated their writing processes. I find reflective writing at the end of the semester to be very meaningful, and italso asks me to think about how I want to frame the course for future students. ... View more

I am definitely learning alongside my students as we consider the place of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the writing classroom. I’m not an early adopter — far from it. But I am certainly open to AI’s generative possibilities. I’ve enjoyed hearing how students use large language models such as ChatGPT in almost all areas of their lives. Some use it to figure out what to make from the weird collection of ingredients in their apartment fridges. Some use it to find less confrontational ways to phrase difficult messages to friends. My nephew used it to generate on-the-spot ceremonial language for his sister’s wedding. He’s a coder with a realistic sense of what AI does and doesn’t do. He made an assessment: Wedding ceremonies are largely formulaic, and using AI got him out of a tongue-tied spot so that he could embellish with some personal touches. Writing in our classrooms, though, has different purposes. I’m learning a lot from instructors in the “Bits on Bots” series, including Jeanne Beatrix Law’s recent post about the energetic student engagement she has witnessed with some generative classroom uses of ChatGPT. In another post from that series, Jennifer Duncan proposes an annotated bibliography assignment that guides students into meta-analysis of AI research results that moves students’ thinking to higher levels in Bloom’s Taxonomy, and pushes them into deeper thinking about how and why to use sources in their papers. That certainly seems like using AI as a “tool, and not as not a crutch,” as her students observed. And yet I’m also learning from AI insiders how to explain to students some of the serious limits of AI, including the crucial insight that the “I” in AI is not “intelligence.” A machine learning algorithm can predict the next words in a standardized sentence, but it is not grounded in reality, in culture, or in the network of creative meaning-making that humans bring to the task of interpretation and argument. Helping students understand this can guide their decisions about how and when to use AI. So, I highly recommend bringing into your classroom the student-friendly, accessible and very funny blog by AI researcher Janelle Shane, AI Weirdness.  Shane also has a TED talk, “The Danger of AI is Weirder Than You Think” that could be 10 minutes well-spent as a conversation-starter in class or as a spark to reflective writing.     Shane consolidates her argument in these “Five Principles of AI Weirdness”:             * The danger of AI is not that it’s too smart but that it’s not smart enough             * AI has the approximate brainpower of a worm             * AI does not really understand the problem you want it to solve             * But: AI will do exactly what you tell it to. Or at least it will try its best.             * And AI will take the path of least resistance.  Shane illustrates these principles in ways that will likely catch your students’ interest. For example, she experiments with AI to generate pick-up lines, including, “You look like a thing and I love you,” which became the title of Shane’s 2019 book. On her blog, she collects hilarious examples of the ways AI cannot replicate human creativity and experience when it comes to designing Halloween costumes (“Spartan Gandalf,” anyone?) or ice cream flavors (care for some “praline cheddar swirl”?). Keeping up with the value and the limits of AI might be one of the most important conversations we have this year — for our students, and for ourselves. ... View more

by Saurabh Anand, University of Georgia This post is part of an occasional series affiliated with the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), a regional event with national reach that takes place annually online and in Milwaukee, WI. In 2024, Saurabh was a Bedford/St. Martin’s WIS Fellow. Learn more below and in posts tagged “writing innovation” and “WIS.” "POETRY SOCIETY POSTCARD" by summonedbyfells is licensed under CC BY 2.0. Poetry and the topic of teaching poetry to multilingual writers are both very personal for me. As a poet and a person of color with an immigrant background, I often share my story with my students along with some of the poetry that is important to me. Recently, for example, I enjoyed reading Postcolonial Banter (2019) by British Muslim poet Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan. I connected in particular with her narratives of white supremacy (in her case, the U.K.). For example, in her poems "This Is Not A Humanising Poem" and "British Values," Manzoor-Khan resists positivist ways of thinking by showcasing the multiplicity of voices, experiences, and truths. The multilingual students in my classes have found her poems especially relevant. I think of one student in particular, Sonam (a pseudonym). After reading Manzoor-Khan's works, including her poem “A Cold Funeral of the Authentic Muslim Woman,” and listening to her TED talk, "I'm Bored of Talking about Muslim Women," Sonam wrote about her own journey. In a resilient reflection, she centered what it is like to be a Brown Muslim woman who wears a Hijab in the U.S. South, explaining her experience is an American truth, too. As Sonam confided to me, Manzoor-Khan's work gave her legitimation and authority to write about her own experiences. I cherish such moments, and the power poetry can have for multilingual students in my writing classes. However, I recognize that inviting poetry into the writing classroom can require strategic thinking. In writing courses I teach, I refer to exercises from Mike Palmquist’s The Bedford Researcher (2021) to introduce poetry as part of brainstorming activities for literacy narratives and other story-based genres. For example, I have assigned poems such as “Dhaka Dust” by Dilruba Ahmed, “Birth” by Fady Joudah, and “The African Burial Ground” by Yusef Komunyakaa. Then, as they develop literacy narratives, I ask students to respond to the following questions about what they read: What/who prompted you to think about in your life or someone you know based on what is happening in the poem? If you have to summarize the poem about the genre we are reading, how might you do that?  Similar to the poem, who are some people who play a crucial (positive or negative, you decide) role(s) in interpreting/receiving your experiences? Were there situations/people in the external world who influenced your experiences, and how? Have you read anything (across other languages/cultures) that has had a similar (or entirely different) perspective to the genre we focus on? What perspective do you agree with and why? The results can be powerful. I remember one of my students, Pablo (a pseudonym), with Bengali as his first language. During the outline stage of his literacy narrative, he wrote about how others assumed him to constantly need "English coaching" just because English is not his first language. In his draft, he described how he took a stand for himself as someone who had AP credit for an introductory composition class at the university. Utilizing poetry as a compositional tool empowered Pablo to express his resistance to native English fallacy and allowed me to better understand his challenges and triumphs. At times, at the beginning of a first-year writing or teacher education course, when I explain the overarching theme and the kinds of poetry-based activities and resources I’ll be using, I encounter resistance. I have had students who assume they cannot read or produce poems, and the prospect of doing so can be especially daunting for multilingual writers. To make my case, in such scenarios, I discuss the power of poetry and how reading and writing about it can help develop critical thinking skills. Providing students accessible ways to give poetry a try becomes even more crucial in such scenarios. In general, I have noticed that reading poems such as “March” by Ye Chun and “Poem for When You Want to Remember” by Mia Ayumi Malhotra can do more than enliven class discussion. Such poems can ignite brainstorming about personal storytelling and also influence students’ word choice and attention to details in their own writing. To enhance these effects, I often supplement poetry with the narratives of creative writers who write in a second or other language. Teaching “Embracing Imperfection: On Writing in a Second Language” by Kaori Fujimoto and “Born Again in a Second Language” by Costica Bradatan, I have seen my students' confidence grow along with their motivation to be future agents of the critical world. Sonam’s and Pablo’s stories are just two of the many examples I have collected of the power of poetry in writing classes. Again and again, it helps my students, especially the multilingual college students I teach, bring their own cultures and experiences into their writing. As a result, poetry fosters their sense of belonging in college and in English. It also strengthens their understanding of language and of themselves, including their cultural identities. The latter, in particular, is something I want to ensure I preserve as a multilingual writer and a writing teacher. Teaching Resources I Recommend Chamcharatsri, B., & Iida, A. (Eds.). (2022). International perspectives on creative writing in second language education: Supporting language learners’ proficiency, identity, and creative expression. Taylor & Francis. Link Palmquist, M. (2021). The Bedford Researcher with 2021 MLA Update (4th ed.). Macmillan Higher Education. Link Starkey, D. (2022). Creative Writing: Four Genres in Brief: Four Genres in Brief (4th ed.). Macmillan Higher Education. Link For Further Reading Ahmad, D. (2011). Dhaka Dust. In Dhaka Dust. Greywolf Press. Link Ayumi Malhotra, M. A. (2018). Poem for When You Want to Remember. SWWIM. Link Bradatan, C. (August 04, 2013). Born Again in a Second Language. New York Times. Link Chun, Y. (2005). March. The Bitter Oleander Press. Link Fujimoto, K. (January 27, 2021). Embracing Imperfection: On Writing in a Second Language. Literary Hub. Link Garcia, D. (October/November, 1995). Italicized Writings. The Writer’s Chronicle. Link Joudah, F. (2013). Birth. In Alight. Copper Canyon Press. Link Komunyakaa, Y. (March, 2014). The African Burial Ground. Poetry Magazine. Link Manzoor-Khan, S. (2017, November). I'm bored of talking about Muslim Women [Video]. TEDxCoventGardenWomen. Link Manzoor-Khan, S. (2017, October). Suhaiymah Khan performs at TedxYouth@Brum 2017 [Video]. TEDx Talks Link Manzoor-Khan: please add citations for works referenced, including TED talks. Sailer, T. (2021). Why Write in English? Non-Native Speakers and Their Love for a Language. Tinted Journal. Link Smith, S. (January 28, 2019). Writing in a Second Language. Common Thread: Stories from Antioch University. Link Warner, M. (March 13, 2012). English that's good enough. The Guardian. Link The theme for WIS ‘25 is mise en place, a culinary term for putting things in place before cooking, especially in a professional kitchen. For us, it’s a metaphor for getting ready to write as well as a pathway to exploring the interrelationship between writing and food. Join us online or in Milwaukee, WI, January 30-31, 2025. Proposals are welcome through 10/25 and, for undergraduate writers, through 12/13. Registration opens in early November. ... View more