Some of us are old enough to remember library research, back in the days before “Google” was a verb.  Some even enjoyed the hunt for printed sources among the dusty shelves of old books in the library basement. I remember a library scavenger hunt in Intro to Graduate Studies designed to teach us how to find sources. How different from sitting at a computer and Googling, but also, how time consuming! Nothing can replace the feel of that original manuscript or book in our hands, but as more and more primary sources are scanned for online access, we have the next best thing to holding texts located in libraries or museums around the world.

Last week, Google “went black,” or at least its name on its home page did, shown covered with a black banner. So did Wikipedia, the massive online encyclopedia, and other popular search engines and information sources. They did so to protest the House of Representatives’ SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) and its Senate counterpart PIPA (Protect IP Act), both proposed as a means of protecting movie makers, music publishers, and others from having their creative works spread without their being paid for them. [read more]

Our ship, the MV Explorer, is beautifully maintained and outfitted for a floating college:  a library with over 9,000 books onboard; a computer lab; open spaces for conferences with students; nine classrooms plus a large lecture hall; and lots of places for students to get snacks, coffee, etc.  Early last week I settled into my cabin—compact, efficient, comfortable—and then began an intensive round of faculty orientation that lasted two and a half days.

During orientation, we read Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, about her home of Antigua.  At eighty pages, this brief text packs a terrific punch.  Defining “tourist” as “ugly,” “American,” and “white,” Kincaid lays out exactly what the process of colonialization has done to Antigua.  Written as a Jeremiad (in the style of Jeremiah and using Biblical allusions as well as paratactic syntax), Kincaid speaks directly to readers, addressing us much of the time as “you.”  This choice of pronouns brings the message up close and very personal:  we are implicated, strongly, in the destruction of this island, its people, and its way of life.  A Small Place is the first book that we will all read together; each faculty member will then lead discussions with a small group of students.  I expect these discussions to elicit a wide range of reactions from the students, who come from all over the U.S. and indeed many other countries.  We have some hot times ahead! [read more]

“Of course the Golden Globes are about the awards, but let’s face it: You really want to see who wore what.”

This is one of the headlines from aol.com’s coverage of the Golden Globe awards.

But no, actually: I didn’t really want to see who wore what. This annual cakewalk down the red carpet is obvious enough and does not require the peep-show promises leading up to the event to tempt viewers to watch. The event offers designers and fashion houses a chance for display that is no different than the ubiquitous celebrity photo-op backdrops plastered in corporate logos. I didn’t need to see what these human mannequins were actually wearing to know that.

What I did want to see was some sort of political demonstration, an Occupy the Golden Globes to match the Occupy the Rose Parade protest of a few weeks ago. But I didn’t see that.

I did see, after an online search using the phrase “Occupy the Golden Globes,” that it occurred to a few other people that such a demonstration would have been an appropriate juxtaposition to the parade of designer dresses, each worth more than an average annual American income (not to mention the jewelry displays). But I didn’t see a demonstration, and therein lies the significance of the Golden Globe awards (or the Oscars, or the Grammys, and so on). [read more]

Jay Dolmage’s recent post Favorite Week One Activity: Revisiting the Timeline (and his previous post on timelines) inspired me to share my notes on timeline tools this week. I’ve used timelines in the classroom to discuss what I’ll call simple historical events. Biographical details from an author’s life, publication dates of different texts, and the progression of plot events in a story all lend themselves to timelines.

I didn’t see the wide potential for timelines in the writing classroom, however, until I began gathering ways to use the Timeline on the ReadWriteThink site. After reading about how elementary and middle-level teachers used timelines regularly in the classroom, I realized the many options for similar tools. Students can use timelines to

• map progress on a project
• show any linear process
• plot historical or biographical events
• organize their own literacy narratives
• create a research log (like mapping an I-Search project)
• arrange notes for a draft in a sort of visual outline
• plan steps in a group project or research project
• build a narrative from photos or key statements
• organize a portfolio of notes, drafts, and polished text
• make infographics

[read more]

When I was in my late teens, in the midst of the transition to college and young adulthood, I read and fell in love with Albert Camus’s the Myth of Sisyphus.  Published in 1942, in the midst of the catastrophic events of World War II, Camus presented a lesson on persistence that I have never forgotten. This brief synopsis of Camus’s retelling of this myth sets the scene:

Condemned by the gods, Sisyphus is ordered to push a boulder to the top of a mountain. Each time, as Sisyphus neared the top, the boulder would roll all the way down to the bottom again. Sisyphus would head back down the mountain to retrieve the boulder begin the task again, only to lose the boulder each time as he approached his goal. According to Camus, the gods believed “that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.” Yet in the midst of his hopeless and absurd situation, Camus suggested that Sisyphus need not fall into despair.

“There is no sun without shadow,” he writes, “and it is essential to know the night.”

The present moment holds the possibility for change. The difficult hours prepare us for joy, just as joy remembered helps sustain us through difficulty. As a first-year college student living away from home, Camus’ essay moved me profoundly—not merely as literature, but as a lifelong lesson. Many years later, I shared this lesson with students in basic writing. My goals for presenting this lesson were twofold: first, I wanted the students to revisit their values and larger purposes for attending college. Second, I wanted to present Sisyphus’ dilemma as an analogy for the writing process. [read more]

As I was finishing up last semester and planning for this upcoming one, I decided to make some changes to my assignments. In particular, I resolved to abandon the personal essay, what one of my colleagues calls “my favorite cupcake.” Like many writing teachers, and for many reasons, I often use some sort of personal narrative or memoir as a first assignment. I received some wonderful student memoirs this past semester, as I usually do, but despite my pleas, I still read many essays on car accidents and dead grandmothers. In part, I believed these essays resulted from students’ failure to see the richness of their own experiences. There was a lack of perspective, the writer too close to his subject, like the Facebook self-portraits that so many adolescents insist on posting with pouting lips or flexed muscles or imitations of sultry eyes. I wanted to move the writer a bit further away from her subject, so that instead of the tight shot in the mirror the reader would get a whole person, not just face but arms and legs and clothing, a figure caught in the middle of some action, surrounded by some solid and colorful landscape. I would accomplish this, I thought, by switching my first assignment from the memoir to the profile.

Then, as part of the final exam, I asked four sections of my English 101 class for some advice about assignments: which should I keep, revise, and discard. By my rough estimate, 80 percent said to be sure to keep the memoir, for it was the piece of writing they cared about the most. So, after reading remarkably similar sentiments over and over again, I’m not yet willing to kill off the one assignment that gave some students their only sense of personal investment.

Instead, what I’ve decided to try follows up on my last post about having students choose their own themes for reading. I’ve selected ten broad areas for students to choose from, each with an associated reading list (I’ll write more about this process later): education, the environment, technology, medicine, sports, the arts, business and economics, food, crime and justice, and the family. Once students have selected a theme and done some initial reading, I’ll assign as a first full essay a memoir that draws on some aspect of their personal experience that connects to this theme. [read more]

Maria Lugones’s concept of “‘world’ traveling” has long been of interest to me as a feminist scholar and as a teacher.  I first learned of this concept around 1989 when I read Lugones’s essay, “Playfulness, ‘World’ Traveling, and Loving Perception” and then, later, her book Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions.  In reading these works, I found applications to my own life but especially to my teaching.  For in “world” traveling, Lugones outlines a way for us to be open to and to identify with one another.  Since doing so is a central goal of feminist rhetoric and writing studies, I was all ears!

To be more specific, Lugones argues that those of us who are willing to be “world” travelers will learn not only to see others in terms of their own worlds but, more important, to learn to see ourselves from the point of  view of other worlds.  In short, “world” traveling happens when our identity changes through a cultural shift.  Lugones speaks of such “world” traveling as “loving play,” a kind of game that is ludic but not competitive or agonistic; it aims to bring people together in trying to join hands between worlds—in a space Gloria Anzaldúa calls “the borderlands.” [read more]

Today we welcome guest blogger Michael Michaud. Michael teaches courses in composition and rhetoric at Rhode Island College, where he is an assistant professor of English. His current research investigates the role that professional or workplace identities play in adult students’ transition to academic writing. He has been experimenting with writing-about-writing pedagogies in first-year composition courses since the fall of 2008.

Michael interviews Hayden James, a junior studying creative writing at Rhode Island College. Hayden hopes to write fiction and continue to grow his career as a photographer when he graduates.

During the fall 2011 semester, I taught a new course at Rhode Island College, called “Studies in Composition”–a course intended to introduce undergraduate English majors to the work of the field of composition or writing studies. I decided to use Writing About Writing as the text for this course. It was interesting to use the book to introduce the students to the discipline without the usual purpose of preparing students for academic writing (i.e. first-year composition). I don’t think the field has, yet, devised a textbook intended to introduce English majors to composition. I found Writing About Writing to be a good start in this direction.

1. Can you talk about the coursework you have taken within the English major at Rhode Island College (RIC)?

When I enrolled for classes at RIC, I declared myself an English major but then switched to creative writing. Of the courses I have taken, most have focused on close reading and analysis of texts and then writing papers. Every course has been pretty much the same; only the time period or the origin of the course content changes. [read more]

If you want to encourage students to think about the symbolic nature of visual images, ask them to take the four icon challenge. I found this exercise on Johndan Johnson-Eilola’s blog, and I was immediately smitten. The idea originally comes from graphic designer and illustrator Kyle Tezak, who describes the challenge this way:

The Four Icon Challenge is my attempt at visually summarizing my favorite books and movies using only, that’s right, four icons. Boiling a story down to four elements gave me a surprising amount of insight into the author’s message and intentions, as well as the role recurring objects play in storytelling.

As Johndan explains in his post, Tezak reduces each text to four simple images shown in just three or four colors (including black and white). On his website, Tezak offers icon sets for The Great Gatsby, The Hobbit, Reservoir Dogs, and Romeo and Juliet.

Here are some student examples from Flickr, from an assignment to apply the four icon challenge to movies.

North by Northwest

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It’s common knowledge that many college students choose not to buy certain required textbooks, instead finding ways to obtain, share, or get along without. A widely cited study by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group published in April 2011 found that 7 in 10 students report having chosen not to purchase a textbook at some time. That’s only one way to ask the question, of course. Another way is reflected in the discussion during summer 2010 in the New York Times, which suggests that on average, 78 percent of students buy their textbooks. That leaves 22 percent who don’t, still a disturbing statistic.

Cost is the main reason students offer for not buying books. With Writer’s Help, we’ve tried to keep the cost reasonable—about $35 for a two-year subscription, which can be extended to four years for an additional $5. But I don’t think cost is the primary driver. It’s perception of value and likelihood of use. Students learn that they can get by in many courses on lecture notes or PowerPoint slides, course Web site materials, and class discussion. Students are also adept at finding e-versions of textbooks, quite a few of which float freely on the Internet and can be downloaded to personal devices. I find it hard to imagine reading an accounting or criminology textbook on my smartphone, but that is just what one student described in a panel discussion we hosted at last spring’s CCCC. His approach was to download what could be found online for free, and he noted he was successful with remarkable frequency. He admitted that reading on a small screen was not optimal, but he also noted that he lived his life in a balance between what was optimal and what he felt he could afford. This student was nontraditional, a tradesman and head of household, someone seeking a change to a more meaningful career. One had to be sympathetic. [read more]