I’m hoping things are budgetarily cheery in your world; here at my institution they’re looking a bit bleak.

In particular, we’re facing a lot of pressure for our summer classes. We’ve already raised the caps on our FYC course by four, and I’m not sure the administration is done yet.

These courses are nearly impossible to begin with: how do you squeeze sixteen weeks of writing into six? We generally cut out two papers, but even then the course moves at breakneck speed with writing due just about every class. With our caps up, we’re thinking about how to streamline the class even more.

It’s sad when pedagogy suffers because of budget.

But it has me thinking, how do other institutions handle the general challenge of delivering writing courses in the summer? Do your summer classes last as long as the classes in a normal semester? If not, how to do you compress all that learning into so little time? What do you keep, what do you sacrifice, and what do you change?

One of the classes I’ve been teaching this semester is Advanced Exposition. I’ve framed it, though, as Queer Composition. It’s been an interesting semester, in part because most of the students took the class because they needed to, but also because all of them have come to embrace explorations of rhetorical genres that emerge out of LGBTQ experience: everything from cruising to camp to disco.

The entire semester has been focused on identifying and analyzing the generic features of each of these rhetorical forms, but for our last week we’re turning that process around in a very special way.

Last week we looked at the “It Gets Better” video as a specific genre. This coming week, using what we learned, we’re going to make our own video for the project. I have to say that for me, personally, this is exciting. Not only do the students in the class get to compose for a real-world audience, and not only do they get to do so in new media, but I get to compose with them. More than that, I get the chance to make a difference.

Keep an eye out for our video on the It Gets Better Project’s website. Just look for ENC 3310 from FAU!

I just finished work on the Instructor’s Manual for the next edition of Emerging (thanks to the help of two teachers in the program here, Ashley Harrington and Michelle Hasler). Like everything else with the book, it represented a significant amount of work. Unlike the rest of the book, though, I often wonder about the value of this work, mostly because I’ve never really used Instructor’s Manuals before.

That, of course, has a lot to do say about my institutional and pedagogical histories. I grew up in a program that gave us all the training and encouraged us to craft our own assignments and class activities. I took that philosophy with me when I left.

But what about you? Do you use the Instructor’s Manual for the text teach with? What for? What do you look for in an Instructor’s Manual?

So I recently leased a new car before my old one died. It’s a Fiat 500 Pop, it’s red, it’s adorable, and it’s a manual. Funny thing is that I’ve never driven a manual transmission before—I’m an automatic kind of guy. But manual meant the best deal and the dealer was more than happy to spend some time giving me lessons until I got the hang of it.

I’m doing okay. I’m getting better. But there’s still a part of me that tenses up before I have to drive. There’s a part of me that’s actually afraid of my car. And the truth is that I don’t think I breathe until I’ve shifted into fourth gear.

I was thinking today that it’s funny how something so familiar (driving) can suddenly become so terrifying (driving a manual). I was thinking about how my students might feel the same way when they come to my FYC classroom. I mean, they’ve been writing for most their lives but suddenly I am demanding that they use new skills. I wonder if they tense up before writing a paper the way I tense before driving the car. I wonder if what looks to me like apathy is really just a thin screen covering a deep layer of fear.

With each drive I make, I get a little better. Same with writing, of course—the more my students write, the better they get. But what about the interim? Do you feel your students are sometimes afraid of writing? What do you do to address this fear?

(Please note that the video discussed in this post contains violence and offensive language. Many of the comments left on YouTube are also offensive.)

In thinking about a student’s recent outburst  outburst at my school, I’ve considered what it says about students’ digital literacy, what it says about race, and what I would do in that situation. For this last post, I’d like to consider the student herself.

There’s still a lot we don’t know. However, there are some things we do know. We know, for example, from the local CBC coverage:

Just 24 hours earlier, a calm Carr was captured on CBS 4 helping to organize a bus trip to central Florida for a rally to support the family of Trayvon Martin the unarmed teenager who was shot to death allegedly by the head of the neighborhood Crime Watch.

With this information, I am left thinking about students today. I think about the things they have to deal with that I never did, for example, privacy issues, violence, social pressures magnified through social media.

I often say that each year I’m one year older but students are always eighteen. I usually feel it when I realize deflatedly that my cultural references fall flat in the classroom. Today I am realizing it on another, more disturbing, level.

How do we build relations and connections to students today? How do I make my classroom the kind of place where a student can constructively relieve pressure? Any suggestions?

(Please note that the video discussed in this post contains violence and offensive language. Many of the comments left on YouTube are also offensive.)

When I watch the YouTube video of a student’s outburst at my school, there’s one question that I try to push to the edge of my mind: What would I have done if this occurred in a class that I was teaching?

The worst incident I’ve ever experienced in a class happened during my first semester of teaching. One of my students called me Hitler and stormed out of class. Fortunately, that ended well and the student ended up doing great in the class. But what would I do if a student “went crazy”?

At my school we actually have a flow chart—yes, a flow chart—on what to do under various circumstances: if a student seems depressed, if a student threatens violence, if a student disrupts class. But somehow that feels so woefully inadequate to me.

Have you ever had a serious class disruption? How did you handle it?

And how’s this for irony? Literally as I typed that sentence I got an e-mail from my department chair. Several of our teachers have now been asking what to do in such a situation. The answer, apparently, is call 911.

School and violence are words too often coupled these days, as far as I am concerned. Unfortunately, I’m not sure what I would do in that moment. How about you?

(Please note that the video discussed in this post contains violence and offensive language. Many of the comments left on YouTube are also offensive.)

In part two of this series on the viral video of a student disrupting a class at my school, I’d like to address what the video can teach us, and our students, about race. Looking at the comments on the YouTube video is a potent place to start.

What’s immediately apparent is that the comments focus nearly exclusively on race. Some are blatantly and disturbingly racist, using the “n” word in reference to the student. Others, though, make some attempt to unpack the racial issues in the incident.

I love teaching Steve Olson’s essay “The End of Race,” in which he argues that race persists even though it no longer has any biological basis. Needless to say, this video and the comments surrounding it complicate Olson’s argument, while also bringing his seemingly abstract discussion into the very real world.

I can imagine asking students to read through this conversation. I can imagine asking them to analyze the arguments being made—which ones are convincing? Who uses evidence? What counts as evidence? I can also imagine inviting them to contribute to the discussion, with civility.

Basic to this discussion is the question of what racism is. That is, is racism limited to whites? Should it be expected from historically oppressed populations? Should it be accepted? What do we do about it?

Here I am reminded of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s essays “Making Conversation,” and “The Primacy of Practice.” One of Appiah’s basic arguments is simply that we need to find a way to live with others different from ourselves, simply because in the world today we are unavoidably surrounded by those different from ourselves. He calls this cosmopolitanism. I’m wondering if the video comments reflect that in action, or breaking down.

(Please note that the video discussed in this post contains violence and offensive language. Many of the comments left on YouTube are also offensive.)

This past Tuesday, as I was getting ready to fly out to St. Louis for the Conference on College Composition and Communication, as I was polishing my talk on students reading and writing in New Media, a disturbing example of students’ digital literacies at my school went viral. During a discussion of peacocks in a class on evolution, one of the students became disruptive and violent. In a powerful example of unofficial digital literacies, several students used their cell phones to capture the incident, which ended up on YouTube.

As of this writing, the video has had over 195,000 views, and the entire incident has moved from student/citizen journalism to various online and mainstream news outlets.

There is so much packed into this incident that I’d like to dedicate a series of posts to it. I think it has that much to say. More importantly, I think we have that much to learn from it.

For starters, given the subject of my talk, I’d like to think about this in terms of digital literacy.  We live in a world not just of surveillance, with cameras watching us all the time and with Google or Facebook knowing everything about us, but of sousvelliance. The term comes from  “Sousveillance: Inventing and Using Wearable Computing Devices for Data Collection in Surveillance Environments.” In the article, authors Steve Mann, Jason Nolan, and Barry Wellman define the term:

One way to challenge and problematize both surveillance and acquiescence to it is to resituate these technologies of control on individuals, offering panoptic technologies to help them observe those in authority. We call this inverse panopticon “sousveillance” from the French words for “sous” (below) and “veiller” to watch. (332)

Sousveillance participates in what Mann calls reflectionism: “a philosophy and procedures of using technology to mirror and confront bureaucratic organizations. Reflectionism holds up the mirror and asks the question: ‘Do you like what you see?’ If you do not, then you will know that other approaches by which we integrate society and technology must be considered” (333).  Rather than regulate mechanisms of surveillance, reflectionism aims to increase the equality between the “surveiller” and the “surveilled” (333).

Generally, I am drawn to this concept of sousvelliance, both as an individual and as a teacher. But in this case my reaction is complicated. On the one hand, having students document what actually happened in the class feels important—for the teacher, for my school, for the public, for the students. On the other hand, it makes me wonder if sousvelliance is a remedy to panopticism or an extension of it. I don’t have an answer for this one.

I’ll continue to work through my thoughts on what happened as I finish up these posts, but for now I’d love your help and insight. What’s the effect of having this video on YouTube? Is this student digital literacy? Is this another kind of surveillance in a world that seems to have little privacy?

More simply, let me ask you: should this video exist?

I’ve been working on a paper for the NEXUS conference at the University of Tennessee–Knoxville. In a section my paper I consider the ethics of teaching technologies such as Blackboard and, in particular, their “panoptic” potential.  I try to avoid Blackboard whenever possible for a variety of reasons, but this same panopticism is sitting inside Microsoft Word when I grade electronically: I can see when a student last worked on a paper, how they formatted it (double-spaced or just a little extra to make the length?), and even how they revised (using Compare Documents with any earlier draft). The question I ask in the paper is one I pose to you, too: what are the ethical implications when we can see inside students’ composing processes? Any thoughts?

One of my favorite class activities is Draw the Argument. On the first day that we discuss a reading, I have students get into groups and “draw” the argument of the essay, locating quotations that support their visual interpretation. The activity is always a success, whether because it switches registers to the visual, draws on the power of groups, or simply feels more like art class than writing class I can’t say. I just know it works.

Last semester I created a new version of this activity using furniture assembly instructions from Ikea, the Swedish home furnishings giant. Because of Ikea’s global reach and “assemble it yourself” approach, these instructions are designed to be read by a global, polyglot audience. I begin by showing the class a set of Ikea instructions (usually the ones for the Billy Bookcase).  We “read” them as a class, interpreting the pictograms and the sequence of steps. Then students separate into groups and create a set of global “assembly instructions” for the reading we’re working on.

The activity is great for all the reasons that Draw the Argument is great—but it adds more. Students must think about organization and sequence, both within the essay and within their own writing. I’m planning on using this one a lot more in coming semesters. If you give it a try, let me know how it works for you.