Tag: teaching

Run-up to Theories of Written Communication 📆

/ Derek Mueller
A black and white photograph of a row of old desks topped with typewriters in a desert.
Photo [I’m retitling “Bloom Spaces”] by Matt Artz on Unsplash

A full month has blinked by in this run-up to the start of classes on August 26. That’s the day of our first meeting in ENGL6524: Theories of Written Communication. Recent weeks at the end of Rosemary Road included welcoming four new pullets, building a new coop and run, welcoming a rooster, hosting A’s friend from Minnesota, hosting Is. and then driving her to Michigan for her birthday, completing the final external promotion review letter of the season, and keeping aging grandpa’s pace with the rest of it all. This week I picked back up with class preparations, and I am making headway on the online hub for the class and the documents that will live there: syllabus, schedule, project descriptions, and bibliography. Here, for example, is the elaborated course description I settled on well enough to plug it into the landing page and syllabus:

Our seminar-styled study of theories of written communication this semester will begin with 1) considerations of what theory (ΞΔωρέω, theĂłreĂł, 🔭) is and what it does, 2) how/why to engage with the theorizing sojourns and sightings of others, and 3) how this “bloom space” called theory has made us feel, especially as it hands a bouquet of possibilities to writing and rhetoric. Together we will read articles and chapters, book intros, and dissertation intros grouped with selected theoretical antecedents, thereby listening carefully for how theory circulates. Themes among these small sets include -isms and -graphies, root metaphors, academic writing and its alternatives, intellectual genealogies, expertise, rationalism, literacy development, and how we write. Readings will include selections by Gloria AnzaldĂșa, Mikhail Bakhtin, Deborah Brandt, Michel de Certeau, Manuel DeLanda, Yrjö Engeström, Harvey Graff, Joy Harjo, Cynthia Haynes, Julia Molinari, Beverly Moss, Stephen Pepper, Louise Phelps, Michael Polanyi, Malea Powell, Paul Prior & Jody Shipka, Jenny Rice, Jacqueline Royster, Kathleen Stewart, Eve Tuck & C. Ree, and more. Class activities will include weekly writing, discussion, a substantive project (Theory Deck/Microanthology), a presentation, and a course reflection.

For five or six semesters I have focused weekly writing on delimited increments called Nineties, which are ninety word flash responses later tuned stylistically because a ninety must have ninety words (allowing ±5) or a multiple of ninety. Like with The Hundreds, the incrementalism tends to elicit intensities, touched nerves, goose bumps, books thrown across the room, PDFs dragged to Trash, the felt weight of worlding now. So, 185 words is okay, as is 87 words. But 200 words is a bust. Although it may seem at first wrapped too snugly in a quantitative obsessiveness, it abides the principle of liberation by constraint, providing one less thing to think about, encouraging stylistic precision, and implicitly inventing an economy of intentional scope (favoring neither reductionism or expansionism by default). I continue to think there is value in a short planning pitch around Week Four or Five, and a share-out pitch nearer to the end of the semester, but then again, the schedule is busting at the seams and the readings and step-back readings will have to be cut back if there are two pitches. The larger project is also taking shape, though I have not written a prompt yet. I foresee it living up to the title Theory Deck/Microanthology, and assembling through defined sections: cover, frontmatter/intro, three articles, chapters, or excerpts, each with two theoretical antecedents (so six nine pieces total), and a glossary of 6-8 elaborated keywords. Each section will have a suggested deadline, and then the eleven seminar participants will alert me to what sort of feedback they would like to receive: conference, audio comments, written comments.

I am still sorting out the order of readings and project pieces, and I am fairly sure I will have to scale back a bit (to say nothing of whether I have the willpower to stand at the scanner for hours getting this into accessible shape). I have already begun to understand that the book and dissertation intros will have to scale down from four of each to “choose one” from a set of four options, but even this might turn out to feeling denser than we’d like. Cake sponge needs air bubbles. And some class meetings will give us 30-40 minutes at the end for returning to the in-progress projects and for pace-keeping check-ins. Allowing for that possibility, here are the readings I am, for now, feeling good enough about and taking steps to assemble. Weekly placeholders are lightly and noncommittally noted, and second tier bullets are the corresponding step-backs:

  • Eve Tuck and C. Ree, “A Glossary of Haunting” (2013) (Week2)
  • Stephen Pepper, World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence (1942) (excerpt) (Week3)
    Julia Molinari, What Makes Writing Academic (2022) (excerpt) (Week3)
  • Jacqueline Royster, “Academic Discourses or Small Boats on a Big Sea,” AltDis (Week4)
    • Deborah Brandt, Literacy as Involvement (1990), excerpt
    • Beverly Moss, “Creating a Community: Literacy Events in African-American Churches,” Literacy Across Communities (1994)
  • Malea Powell, “Listening to Ghosts: An Alternative to (Non)Argument,” AltDis (Week5)
    • Michel de Certau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) (excerpt)
    • Joy Harjo, “The Woman Who Fell From the Sky” (1994)
  • Jenny Rice’s CE article, “Para-Expertise, Tacit Knowledge, and Writing Problems” (2015) (Week6)
    • Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (excerpt)
    • Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (2007) (excerpt)
  • Cynthia Haynes’ JAC article (later updated in The Homesick Phone Book (2016)), “Writing Offshore” (2003) (Week7)
    • Gerald Graff, “Hidden Intellectualism” (2001)
    • Manuel DeLanda, “Extensive Borderlines and Intensive Borderlines” (1998)
  • Paul Prior and Jody Shipka’s “Chronotopic Lamination” (2003) (Week8)
    • Mikhail Bakhtin’s The dialogic imagination (1981) (excerpt)
    • Yrjö Engeström. From Teams to Knots: Activity-Theoretical Studies of Collaboration and Learning at Work (2008)
  • Gloria AnzaldĂșa, “Putting Coyolxauhqui Together: A Creative Process,” Counterpoints, 1999, Vol. 90, How We Work (1999), pp. 241-261 (Week10)
  • Louise Phelps, “Rhythm and Pattern in a Composing Life.” Ed. Thomas Waldrep. Writers on Writing, Vol. 1. New York: Random House. 1985. 241-57. (Week10)
  • Book intros or first chapters (Choose one.) (Week11)
  • J. Logan Smilges’ Queer Silence (U Minnesota P, 2022)
    • Manning, Erin. The Minor Gesture. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016. (excerpt)
    • Malhotra, Sheena, and Aimee Carrillo Rowe, eds. Silence, Feminism, Power: Reflections at the Edges of Sound. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. (excerpt)
  • Debra Hawhee, A Sense of Urgency (U Chicago P, 2023)
    • Fukushima, Annie Isabel. Migrant Crossings: Witnessing Human Trafficking in the US. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019. (excerpt)
    • Vivian, Bradford. “Witnessing Time: Rhetorical Form, Public Culture, and Popular Historical Education.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 44, no. 3 (May 27, 2014): 204–19.
  • Jennifer LeMesurier, Inscrutable Eating (Ohio State UP, 2023)
    • Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. (excerpt)
    • Oum, Young Rae. “Authenticity and Representation: Cuisines and Identities in Korean-American Diaspora.” Postcolonial Studies 8, no. 1 (2005): 109–25.
  • Eric Detweiler, Responsible Pedagogy (Penn State UP, 2022)
    • Arendt, Hannah. “Reflections on Little Rock.” Dissent (Winter 1959): 45-56.
    • Ellison, Ralph. “Leadership from the Periphery.” In Who Speaks for the Negro? by Robert Penn Warren, 268–354. New Haven: Yale UP, 2014.
  • Dissertation intros or first chapters (Choose one.) (Week12)
  • Walwema, Josephine. Tactile Interfaces: Epistemic Techne in Information Design (2011, Clemson)
    • Buchanan, Richard. “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking.” The Idea of Design. Ed. Victor Margolin and Richard Buchanan. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995. Print.
    • Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge, 1982. Print. (excerpt)
  • Sackey, Donnie. The Curious Case of the Asian Carp: Spatial Performances and the Making of an Invasive Species (2013, MSU)
    • Mol, Annemarie. (1999). Ontological politics: A word and some questions, in J. Law and J. Hassard (Eds.), Actor network theory and after (74-89). Malden, MA: Blackwell and the Sociological Review.
    • Callon, Michael, and Law, John. (1982). On interests and their transformation: Enrollement and counter-enrolment. Social Studies of Science, 12(4), 615- 625.
  • Faris, Michael. Rhetoric, Social Media, and Privacy (2012, Penn State)
    • Cooper, Marilyn M. “The Ecology of Writing.” College English 48.4 (1986): 364-375. Print.
    • Wysocki, Anne, and Johndan Johnson Eilola. “Blinded by the Letter: Why Are We Using Literacy as a Metaphor for Everything Else?” Passions, Pedagogies and 21st Century Technologies. Eds. Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe. Logan: Utah State UP, 1999. 349-368. Print.
  • Carr, Allison. Negative Space: Toward an Epistemology of Failure (2014, Cincinnati)
    • Rose, Mike. Lives on the Boundary. New York: Penguin, 1989. Print.
    • Stewart, Kathleen. (2010) ‘Worlding Refrains’ in M. Gregg & G. Seigworth (eds) (2010) The Affect Theory Reader. London: Duke University Press, pp. 339-53.
Eleven books are piled on a desk. Titles correspond with readings in ENGL6524: Theories of Written Communication at Virginia Tech, Fall 2024.
Heap for scanning selections.

I glance it and see a heap of a list, with pairings or trios matched with ten of the fourteen weekly meetings. I’ve opted for no readings ahead of meeting one, the 26th. And I want to hold as a clearing Week Nine for project starts and for a round of dialogue focused on one well-begun component. Readings fall away at the end of the semester, too, allowing space in the two meetings after the late November break for short form presentations about the projects and for reflecting on what theories of written communication amounted to. My hope as I continue planning is that by the end and all throughout, ENGL6524 will feel like something we’ve been in, recalling that line I can’t stop thinking about from Kathleen Stewart’s “Worlding Refrains,” “Anything can feel like something you’re in, fully or partially, comfortably or aspirationally, for good or not for long” (340).

Theoroses 🍎

/ Derek Mueller / 3 Comments
Photo by Nazarizal Mohammad on Unsplash

In what will be the fourth new grad class prep for me in two years, in seven more Mondays, I will begin teaching ENGL6524: Theories of Written Communication. 6524 is one of four required core courses in VT’s rhetoric and writing PhD program. The course description, which I would carbon date back to the program’s launch in 2007, reads, “Studies in theories applied to written communication. May be repeated twice for credit for a total of 9 hours when the topic varies.” Two sentences. The first sounds quite a bit like tautology, or maybe even doublespeak because the repetition isn’t varied enough: theories of written communication is a class that promises studies in theories applied to written communication. Notable here is that this graduate program also features an MA-level (5xxx-numbered) class called “Composition Theory,” and by implied design, I guess this means that theories of written communication and composition theory are demarcated well enough that these are two classes but not one and the same. The second sentence from the course description suggests that the class could be repeated not once, but twice, for a total of nine graduate credits. Trouble is, the class is only offered once every other year, or one time in each two-year cycle of coursework. So it hardly seems possible to repeat it even once, much less twice.

As I’m prone to doing with most classes I teach, I have been mulling over possibilities for several weeks albeit in a low-key, backburner sort of way. I notified the bookstore on Tuesday that I will not be ordering any books for the class. Instead we will sift then trace theoretical antecedents from shorter units of scholarship: 1) published articles, 2) book introductions, and 3) dissertation introductions (or first chapters). In practice, several weeks (~9) of the semester will entail reading the article or chapter along with the theoretical referent and, as such, learning to alternate similar to the way theater-goers might, between actors and props, and a cyclorama, or backdrop. Finding and following theory’s antecedent traces should, if things go well, reward us with a repertoire for theory-finding and, in turn, for theorizing. The approach is similar to the one taken in Cultural Conversations: The Presence of the Past, a textbook that I happen to be familiar with not only because I taught with it a few times but also because a professor and mentor in my MA program at UMKC, Stephen Dilks, was the book’s co-author and co-editor. Cultural Conversations laid out a two-step archeology: a historical-archival text, a contemporary uptake, and then contextualizing pieces that drew connections and filled in gaps. Our upcoming fall semester is fifteen weeks long, but some of the weeks will focus on short-form presentations, or pitches, conferences, workshopping one another’s work, and so on. The class will include weekly writing and a larger project designed in the spirit of anthologics, or assembling and introducing an album of theoretical favorites, influential and inspirational beacons for scholarly offerings students one day hope to create, whether with their own dissertations, with articles or chapters, with teaching materials, with all of it, and so on etcetera.

I want to begin the class with some consideration, together, of our experiences with theory, especially if there are any adverse reactions to theory. I am thinking here both of fear and loathing. Under what conditions, if any, has theory been scary? Are there theories that you loathe? That elicit worry? Why? Like distasteful foods, how many times would you suggest trying a theory before disqualifying it, ruling it out, casting it aside, or dismissing it altogether? This opening segment, then, points to the title of this entry. With theoroses, or something like theory’s neuroses, we might begin to parse why and to what extent theory designated as such may be offputting, difficult, time-consuming, perhaps even abruptive, steep, hazardous-seeming, or even upsetting, dare say violent. Part of this line of inquiry is meant to open up a greater awareness of our dispositions toward (or against) theory and what has formed that disposition. And part of this line of inquiry is meant to reset theory with a light-admitting aperture of possibility. If there is a third part to this line of inquiry, it rests in a few questions I don’t know the answers to yet: Must theories be named to be useful? Must theory be communicable to be useful? Can scholarship proceed with unnamed theories, and might there be any advantages in (or rationale for) shedding antecedents? Can scholarship in rhetoric and writing be theoryless?

Paired with the theoroses check-in, I want us to read Eve Tuck and C. Ree’s “A Glossary of Haunting.” The glossary is a list of keywords, and these keywords are followed by vignettes, images, and microhistories/microanalyses. The set is referential, naming other texts, but it is also personal, heeding gravity in the co-authors’ standpoints, which intersect in their collaboration but also outwardly to their respective and sometimes overlapping ways of being, knowing, and acting. So I am imagining this as an imitable text; each project (theory microanthology) will include a custom glossary of haunting and an introduction to the contents, including some engagement with the question-led threads above: fear? loathing? named? unnamed? possibilities opened? foreclosed?

Some of what I’m sorting out includes, Where to start with theory? And, How well-formed a grounding case, or object of analysis, will serve us well in coming to terms with any theory? There is of course the French critical deck with cards featuring major figures from the 1960s and 1970s. There is, alternatively, a cluster of more contemporary theorists who have given language to deleterious and destructive -isms, late Capitalism, the Anthropocene, climate collapse, globalization, and colonization and its aftermath. And, too, there are earlier models, like Stephen Pepper’s World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence , which looks into root metaphors for formism, mechanism, organicism, and contextualism, notably nodding toward but then leaving out animism and mysticism. In yet another deck, we could have theories that direct us to consider phenomena differently still, such as with CRT, standpoint theory, intersectionality, and misogynoir, though this might also include Polanyi’s The Tacit Dimension (1966). Whichever thread I begin to work with, it pulls the others, and eventually what surfaces returns to the other part of the course title, written communication.

I would like our step-back antecendent throughlines to follow a narrowed few specific choices. Early maybes are from Alt Dis, such as Royster’s “Academic Discourses or Small Boats on a Big Sea,” stepped back to Deborah Brandt’s Literacy as Involvements (1990) or Beverly Moss’s Literacy Across Communities (1994), or Malea Powell’s “Listening to Ghosts,” stepped back to de Certau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) or Harjo’s The Woman Who Fell From the Sky (1994). Another possibility is Jenny Rice’s CE article, “Para-Expertise, Tacit Knowledge, and Writing Problems” (2015) stepped back to Polanyi or to Stewart’s Ordinary Affects (2007). Another is Cynthia Haynes’ JAC article (later updated in The Homesick Phone Book (2016)), “Writing Offshore” (2003) stepped back to Worsham, “Writing Against Writing” (1991), Graff, “Hidden Intellectualism” (2001), or De Landa, “Extensive Borderlines and Intensive Borderlines” (1998). Another is Paul Prior and Jody Shipka’s “Chronotopic Lamination” (2003) stepped back to Bakhtin’s The dialogic imagination (1981) or Engeström for a check-in on CHAT. And for the book introduction step-backs, I am thinking in particular of the winner, runners-up, and perhaps a few other nominees for the RSA Book Award this year: Hsu’s Constellating Home (2022), Hawhee’s A Sense of Urgency (2023), Smilges’ Queer Silence (2022), LeMesurier’s Inscrutable Eating (2023), Detweiler’s Responsible Pedagogy (2022). And this leaves as yet-to-be gathered a small set of dissertations whose introductions and/or first chapters we’ll read similarly.

I’ll pause here, this entry vining long enough and several other to-dos lingering. But I hope to return to this, to say more about the short-form weekly writing, the intervals of pitches and workshopping, the build-ups to the larger project, which I hope will find synchrony with lead-ins to our exams process at VT. I would also like to work back to first principles, to say a bit about what I understand theory to be and do in the context of research, scholarship, teaching, and writing, both within and beyond the academy, and also to revisit the commonplace in rhetoric and composition that theorein requires practice, or application, that theory without practice is baseless, harmful, chaotic-evil, etc.

What’s the Word? ?

/ Derek Mueller

For a few years, maybe more, I have at times in my teaching practice opened a class session with a round of “What’s the Word.” “What’s the Word” is a segment from ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption, a sports talk show featuring broadcast journalists Michael Wilbon, Tony Kornheiser, and, when one of the two of them is traveling or vacationing or otherwise unavailable, a substitute counterpart who balances the exchange and the screenspace. For 30 minutes in the 5 o’clock hour out east, the show is led along with a ticker-tape and marked by time intervals; clock-keeping governs the otherwise spirited dialogue. This clip will give you an idea:

It’s a toss-up whether students in classes I teach know the show or have any frame of reference for the premise. We watch the video, and proceed thereafter, usually with some solo word-whatsing, which then gets transferred to a marker board or Google Slide, and after this, we read them, and we talk about our neologisms, puns, and coinages. It’s not as if streamers and confetti fly from overhead, but it’s usually fun to play with words.

“What’s the Word” can with brevity open and span worlds1Similar to Thich Nhat Hanh on mantras, which are magical (or rhetorical) for how they can instantly transform reality., querying how the week is going, how a project (or some dimension of it) is unfolding, or how a reading resonates or fails to resonate, what instigates a click or a eureka. It sits in a single class meeting, so it’s not quite ENGL1999: Writing One Word, which I have (only half) jokingly pitched as a prototype for self-set minimalisms with labor and workload. “What’s the Word” fits into the discursive-unitroscope, which runs from the small to the large, and these measures include the Four Word Funk Review (variation on Four Word Film Review from back-back in the day), Fives, or lists of five what’ve-you-gots that then play into ranking and re-ranking, sharing out, writing rationales, and so on, and Nineties, which are a micro-genre adapted from Berlant & Stewart’s The Hundreds, and which amount to 90-word clips, give or take five words, that can, if they must, jump to the next multiple of 90. In other wordcounts, 85-95 is permissible, but above 95 the writer has to take it to 175-185, and below 85, it’s not a ninety because that’s where the cork edge of the dart board ends and you’ve dinged the drywall. I’m two years along in fairly routinely layering nineties into my teaching practice, and the results have been positive enough to continue, sometimes prompted, sometimes unprompted. I have yet to incorporate the indexing moves that elevate The Hundreds from distinctive and memorable to a book I consider truly one of a kind. Could be that’s what the future is for.

I’m thinking about “What’s The Word” this afternoon because we’re reading the first 28 pages of Han’s Non-Things for Monday evening, a book, which, in itself and in translation blooms a terminological cornucopia. We’ll have just an hour on Zoom for discussing the opening section, before we switch to open review of in-progress blog carnival entries. “What’s the Word” seems to me right-sized for the hour, for sorting out de-fleeification, or digitombed rhetorics, or smart-phoniness, or like-iod addiction.

Notes

  • 1
    Similar to Thich Nhat Hanh on mantras, which are magical (or rhetorical) for how they can instantly transform reality.

Comfort Inventory 10 ?

/ Derek Mueller
Shadowy paths near the Sycamore (is it?) between Henderson Hall and Squires Student Center, Blacksburg, Va. (37.229927, -80.416902).

Funny in a way not funny that the last in the series of comfort inventories was titled Discomfort Inventory and posted two years ago in April, a run-down of WTF holy-smokes how the heat then was a’rising. That playful inversion, comfort marked dis-, fuckered the numbering system so now it’s unclear whether this one is CI 9 or CI 10. Executive decision consulting with the EWM advisory board: I’m going with CI 10, so let the footnotes resolve that Discomfort Inventory Unnumbered also was counted. 

  • Owing to an upcoming WPA hiatus (or, more technically true, indefinite but careful and non-harmful evacuation of the role) I am at the end of June transitioning to the first email-unencumbered and otherwise work-appointment-free summer months in more than 14 years, the last ten of which were lurched along with one foot snagged in that bottomless and unpredictable quicksand of administrative responsibilities, late July surprises, and then some. Feels like something…different. Notably I would’ve thrown a handful of confetti for myself on-around May 12, but I was told I must oblige an unwritten rule that pins switch-over date on The Calendar at and only at June 30. Pope Gregory sighed in relief. 
  • Is it possible at the age of 48 to have (meaning host) new feelings, or feelings unfelt before? If so, I have and am in that standing aside from writing program administration has elicited the faintest of mixes. Not bitter+sweet only, though that’s a familiar sentiment and not entirely distinct from this particular structure of feeling. Easier to name, the bittersweet. We have the word for this paradox. Oh, your feelings are crossed up? But right now, these work-facing feelings are curiously small, faint, light, but also complexly mixed and parts wow-wonderful with parts whoa-startling—sort of like at the froyo bar where the eager but ascetic everything-topper only takes the smallest unit possible: a shred of coconut, a violet petal, a fragment of toffee bar, a speck of syrup-soaked strawberry, one boba tapioca, a sprinklet, sugar granule, a raisin if you must. Don’t overdo it. Let me not get too too too lost in these feelings. 
  • But then again I did order a chicken coop today to make better on a commitment to a different kind of holler life here in SW Virginia. I have the good fortune of working with a few chicken enthusiasts who are sharing with me and A. every possible angle to consider, from the hazards of automatic door closers (remember that Jim Johnson article?!; it’s sort of like that one fused with this one) to the predator barriers, to the problems and opportunities with chicken trucks/mobile coops, and so on. Get the heated water vessel, I’ve learned. Expect rodents to nosh the feed off-shed, I’m told. Park them under a canopy tree in the hottest heats of summertime. And so on.
  • We’ll start with six chickens. ??????
  • I received a Red Bubble take down notice the other day because the “rights holder” complained about one of my illustrations, from the Pandemic Bestiary, #18 Write (turkey hunched at a keyboard). The takedown notice, according to Red Bubble, was initiated by Virginia Tech. I contested it, of course, because I happen to have the Procreate file, which can play back the production process, and it includes the stroke count (1,082) and the time I spent on that drawing (3 hours, 13 minutes). I suppose it must be some sort of lax image-matching AI running interference on this sort of thing, and it turns out that it can be difficult to convince an AI that you are human, or that you, as a human, made something that to the AI’s still sort of iffy matching operations presumes your “original work” to belong to someone else. So it’s not possible for now to purchase a Pandemic Bestiary #18 Write sticker for under two dollars at Red Bubble. World turns. Loss of side-hustle counter-claim pending for .35 USD. Maybe I’ll follow-up on this, continue to chronicle the very low-level hijinks. Or maybe right along with that drawing everything pleasingly digressive and light-hearted and playful will be disappeared. Fun while it lasted!
  • For Monday’s Food Writing class we’re leafing the last of the semester’s readings, one from Savor, on apple eating, and another from A Pebble for Your Pocket, “Eating an Orange.” We’ll have apples and oranges. Write a 90. And maybe I’ll go one step farther, time allowing, with “Four Mantras,” because the opening line is in itself a simple—perhaps the simplest—theory of rhetoric: “A mantra is a magic formula. Every time you pronounce a mantra, you can transform a situation right away; you don’t have to wait” (111). 
  • In January, on a phone call (following an email exchange) with longtime mentor LWP, I mentioned this line about mantras. She reminded me that the most reliable mantra she’d been advised to recite as an administrator came from one of her mentors: Be kind. Be fair. Be brave. Even as my WPAing decade winds down, perhaps this one can continue to transform situations. Teaching preparation situations. Absurd takedown notice situations. Chicken tending situations.

? Wonder Bouquet ?

/ Derek Mueller

Slow to catch on but oh howdyboy now I get it what with confetti popping re growth mindset not as wonder bouquet but as sardine-canning certain meatpacker programs so they are crowded spilling SCH profit-marginalia troughs oink!, irresistible course cap headfakes and Canvas viewport salvifics, the market has intuited what they wantneed, what was once only needs discourse now more suasively reframed as wantsneeds discourse, millready but who has the grain enough for bread alone teaching+learning when the engines theatrical and merciless have supply chains so stopped. #ninety [Carol Dweck, Sharon Crowley, David Noble, Geoff Sirc, “Supply Chain Pressure”]

Try This

/ Derek Mueller
Figure 1. Try This: Research Methods for Writers book cover.

Quick entry—it’s late and kale sweet potato soup is bubbling. And I’m still in the late stages of moving, turning in keys and parking passes at the old place this afternoon, scooping expired field mice from the attic of the new place, fetching groceries, hooking up laundry machines, chopping onions, and so on. But a project several years in the works dropped yesterday at https://wac.colostate.edu/books/practice/try/: Try This: Research Methods for Writers, a textbook we hope sees uptake in rhetoric and writing classes. I could say A LOT about this book’s development. Once it was in the hands of Mike Palmquist and the editorial team at WAC Clearinghouse, its shape and timing were never clearer or crisper. I didn’t realize it, but I read today that this book is the 150th free, open access publication of the nearly 25 years WAC Clearinghouse has been operating. So it’s an honor and a wonder and a credit to so many that this book is circulating now, as it is. [N.b., not a ninety, but hope to get back to a few more of those soon, like tomorrowsoon, or the nextdaysoon.]

Nineties

/ Derek Mueller

Synaptic, the Berlant-Stewart exchanges, base 100 writing, volleys dealt in increments (or multiples thereof). For the spring grad class, maybe 90s or within five words. An 84 word blurb is not a ninety. At 96, it must reach elastic band to 180. Or 175. A ninety can be one sentence. Or up to 90 sentences. It is meant to conduct a tiered practice. At once, measured habit, self-aware; at once, expressing questions as questions or connections as connections. Woe omicron variant whispers, though, What even is teaching now?

Shifting Online

/ Derek Mueller

The global pandemic (COVID-19) has universities deciding to shift classes from in-person to online quickly—quickly ranging from overnight to something like three weeks. Shorter than a couch-to-5k, in other words. As rapid changes like these spread through higher education, people speculate, wondering what it means, how long such changes will last, whether anyone (students and faculty alike) is really prepared, and so on. Everyone’s doing their part to make sense of an unfamiliar phenomenon, and that sense-making takes a variety of shapes–blobby, tentative, many temporary. A medical doctor in this coffee shop just walked in and said to me oh, hey, VT (coffee mug gifted from a former grad student gives it away); “this is gonna be okay; there’s a 97% survival rate.”

Insofar as the generally altruistic goal of social distancing as a measure to reduce human to human contact and thereby to slow rates of transmission, campuses are un-bunching themselves, emptying the dorms as much as possible, interrupting residential and study abroad programs, adjusting. Just yesterday afternoon I was emailed a fair forewarning heads-up–come up with a plan for supporting teachers in the Composition Program if and when this shift happens. I had a call with the program’s associate director, opened a Google Doc, and we generated with help from others on the leadership team a six page document: 1) key principles guiding modified teaching in Spring 2020, 2) reasonable and appropriate curricular adjustments, 3) allowances for the labor involved with adjusting a class initially designed to happen in-person, 4) a caveat about how this is not an effort to forge at overdrive clip through elaborate training in Online Writing Instruction, and 5) a modest collection of resources for re-orienting instructional staff to the university’s LMS. I don’t know if this is the right approach. It is a lean approach–minimalist, humane, focused as narrowly as possible on the problem before us as an eight-week problem, a getting-to-May-6 problem. COVID-19 and social distancing efforts may continuing into summer and fall, but we will think together about appropriate pedagogical responses to those terms later. If and when we get the email to go ahead, we will circulate the Spring 2020 plan with what we believe will suffice for now in its honoring student and instructor well-being; urging flexibility and direct, timely communication; and extending again the forms of support we can make available (responsiveness to questions, openness to working through specific problems, general and continuing availability, administrative reassurance, etc.). No magic beans; no more warrants for drama or anxiety than the pandemic has already touched off.

In talking through the shift to online and upon witnessing quite a bit of buzz about what such a shift presumes about the work of teaching and learning, the planning involved, or the nimbleness of faculty–conceptual, communicative, and technological nimblenesses varied and intersecting as they are–there’s been a (at risk of sounding mildly judgmental, I’ll say it) clumsy differentiation between face-to-face and online teaching. True, at its crudest, some teaching happens with human bodies in the same room at the same time and some other teaching happens with human bodies not in the same room at the same time. We’re at the cusp of a pivot from one model to the other. But that other model–the one where human bodies are not in the same room at the same time–need not measure itself against the intricate and expert apparatuses now long established informing online pedagogies. That is, for now, in this switch-over, we don’t have to lug out the longest-scrolling web pages or the heaviest volumes on online instruction. We don’t have to school everyone new to teaching in online environments about the intricacies and affordances; getting to May 6 is a make-do goal. With this in mind, I’ve been partial to framing this not as a full, frenzied move to online writing instruction (OWI in a hurry), but instead as an ad hoc Spring 2020 modification in which we do our best to solve a short-term problem, respecting novice-ness as genuine (and vulnerable) and exercising scope restraint. Rather than touting this as a full and comprehensive shift online, I’m advocating for something more like online-lite, a minimalist approach cast perhaps a bit more in the shadow of correspondence courses than media-rich and daresay over-produced LMS-sparkled palaces. We can in time make sure everyone knows about the scholarly traditions informing such well-designed, well-made online courses, and, to the extent that pandemic-motivated social distancing becomes more world feature than world bug, we can get better at tying in our programs with that important body of work. But for now, for this moment, a spare approach will suffice:

  • communicate with students (promptly and supportively)
  • express clear and as-stable-as-possible dates and times for drafts and intervals of drafts
  • let existing course materials (curriculum maps and textbooks) do the work they were set in place to do
  • build in constructive interactions, focused as much as possible on uncertainties, opportunities for developing the draft (feedback-oriented stuff whether with peers or instructor led). Also, check out Bill Hart-Davidson’s “Feedback Cultures – A Guide For Teachers Thinking about Moving Student-Centered Learning Online” at https://youtu.be/B4Fe_rS8208
  • err on the side of being positive, constructive, encouraging, and reassuring with students, with colleagues, with administrators working fitfully to unpick snarled problems, but especially with students.

For right now, for this moment, that’s enough.

Marking the Semester’s Enough

/ Derek Mueller

I’ve asked students to write a semester-capping reflection in-class, today marking the end of the Winter 2018 semester at EMU and, with it, the final session of WRTG121: Composition II: Researching the Public Experience. The prompt occasions a letter noting takeaways in terms of attitudes and habits relating to writing, command of language, and grasp of research processes, although it’s a stacked ask insofar as its privileging ground and anchorage qua affirmations of footing, solidity, presumptions of growth that value lodging over dislodging, mooring over unmooring. Another way: might just as well be asking about attitude-habit upheavals, a churn of language, ungrasp of research processes. Whatever of the teaching-learning paradoxes, here are a few of the takeaways for me:

  • Our curriculum moves swiftly from establishing researchable questions and attempting, with the aid of systematic note-keeping, a brief proposal and cursory lit review, next to carrying out a microstudy documented with research memos that adheres to an appropriate research method, and finally to a pair of presentational moves, one in-class (elevator pitch to peers with careful consideration of slidecraft), one at the Celebration of Student Writing. Much of the semester felt to me to be balanced and right-paced, although at the end, two presentational gestures left one (the CSW) lagging secondarily a bit, without enough time to develop it fully.
  • That said, the curriculum remains promising in that there surfaced (for most?) a more obvious and followable connection among an evolving researchable question (or series of questions), sources gathered and annotated in association with the question, the enactment of methods chosen as ways of following rigorously the question out into the world, and the variations on presenterly circulation that care for translation of a nuanced research process into something shareable. Obvious and followable: this, according to students who informally related not having especially much experience with being guided to undertake research writing this way.
  • Our program’s bundle, Understanding Rhetoric and EasyWriter, primes this approach, introducing key ideas and standing readily by as consultatory resources for reminders and support, though at moments this reminding and support isn’t quite enough due to my assumptions about everyone’s remembering these materials as backdrop. I forget to say, use these books in this way (even after reading selections or pitching and modeling usefulnesses at the semester’s outset). Thus, the consultatory function of these books, this semester, seemed to fade, seemed to follow a declining use-trend, when I’d imagined an increase, expansion, uptick.
  • In future semesters, when teaching a class like this one, I may try to do more to poll students before the semester begins, to think together and ahead about thematic orientations. We ventured into environmental justice this semester, but I’m not convinced that the explicit and direct attention we devoted to EJ at the outset sustained as the semester wore on. It felt to me like the most prominent concerns of EJ quieted as our efforts shifted to more tightly tailored research projects; with this is that inevitable tension between the general and the acute, between the frame and the pixel.
  • Early-semester one on one conferences continue to be tone-setting for interpersonal rapport that builds as a semester goes. This practice is reasonably enculturated in the FYWP at EMU, carried out section for section for section, but it’s a practice I’d like to extend with focal intention to other classes I teach, doing more with these scheduled conversations while also thinking about how to keep them student-led and only in minor ways repetitive.

That is it. Enough for forty minutes of in-class writing. Enough to say the semester that was, was. Enough to mark even lightly a few of the details I’ll carry for a while hereforward.

Join Us in Ypsilanti on March 23

/ Derek Mueller

EMU’s First-year Writing Program invites you to join us in Ypsilanti on Friday, March 23, for the 2018 Winter Colloquium. Dr. Melanie Yergeau  will present  at 10:30 a.m., “Black Mirror Meets the Classroom: Neurodiversity and Social Robots.” After lunch, at 1 p.m., she will lead a writing pedagogy workshop, “Disability, Access, and Multimodal Pedagogies.” For more information, contact Derek Mueller, Dir. of the First-year Writing Program,  at dmuelle4@emich.edu, or Rachel Gramer, Associate Dir. of the First-year Writing Program, at rgramer@emich.edu.

Promotional flier for Dr. Melanie Yergeau's presentation and workshop at EMU on March 23, 2018.
Promotional flier for Dr. Melanie Yergeau’s presentation and workshop at Eastern Michigan University’s Pray-Harrold Hall, Room 219, on Friday, March 23, 2018. Free and open to the public. The presentation, titled “Black Mirror Meets the Classroom” is at 10:30 a.m.; the teaching workshop, titled “Disability, Access, and Multimodal Pedagogies,” is set for 1 p.m.