Blogging Pedagogy

What is the purpose of peer review? Whom is it meant to benefit? 

Over my years of teaching Rhetoric and Writing, I have learned through repeated student feedback that peer review (student-generated feedback on student writing) doesn’t work. My students tell me their peers are “too nice” or “too vague” and that they prefer “more teacher feedback” since I’m the one “giving them a grade.” In the past I’ve tried to fight this trend with highly specific and focused peer review instructions, to improve the quality of student-generated feedback  But lately I’ve shifted my focus from the peer review benefits for the “reviewee” to the benefits for the “reviewer.” I’ve cut out the feedback stage of peer review for one major assignment because I’ve realized that the greatest benefit of peer review can actually be exposure to other student writing and the recognition—and incorporation—of successful writing strategies.

I have come to this realization by encouraging public writing on a class blog. In my Rhetoric of Health class, we use a class blog as the repository for most major writing assignments, including a research summary, a rhetorical analysis, and a persuasive essay. By the time we get to our second unit and our second assignment—the rhetorical analysis—the blog already has an archive of material, and students are already accustomed to posting on and following it. (See my Distributed Peer Review lesson plan for more information.) When they write their rhetorical analyses, rather than trade papers with one partner, students post their papers (as blog posts) for all to see. Furthermore, students have staggered due dates for these blog posts, so most students get the chance to read several student examples of the assignment before they even begin their own. As students read each others’ posts in order to leave required comments, they begin to notice how their peers have handled the assignment and which strategies are more successful. To encourage this kind of recognition, we spend some time in class examining those different strategies.

For example, one day we took a sample of blog posts to examine different types of introductions. The five posts due that day had used three different kinds of introductions: some students had offered an anecdote, some had provided background information, some had introduced a problem. We used these student examples to begin a discussion of the advantages and uses of each type of introduction. For instance, we noted that an introduction with a personal anecdote can quickly establish the writer’s ethos as someone close to, and passionate about, the issue at hand.  We then used this conversation as a spring board to consider other types of introductions, and their respective advantages and uses. And this in-class discussion reinforced what most of the students had already realized: that they could learn from each other’s writing.

As the unit progressed, I saw student writing consistently improve, due to simple exposure to many examples and from active experimentation with strategies that students saw working in their peers’ work. One obvious disadvantage of this plan is that some students will have the benefit of reading many student examples before they write their rhetorical analysis, while some will see few or none. But this disadvantage could be mitigated by giving the stronger writer earlier due dates or, as I did, giving all students the option to revise their work at any time during the unit. This organic, distributed peer review resulted in improved writing across my entire class. And no one told me that peer review “wasn’t working” or that their peers’ feedback “wasn’t helpful.” They weren’t getting feedback; they were generating it and applying it to their own writing.

It's the end of the semester, and across the nation an all-too-familiar sight is littering the hallways of English departments: the box of student essays.  Sometimes it's an envelope, sometimes it's a stack of papers half-shoved into a mailbox or under a door.  But the sight of these final papers abandoned by their students and/or professors reinforces my conviction that it's time for us to move to digital submission.

While assessing student essays on a computer screen isn't without challenges (I find myself making many fewer positive comments in the marginal remarks, for example), there are a lot of good reasons why I made the decision to go digital. And I encourage you to consider making the switch for the semester ahead.  First and foremost, digital submission improves work flow - for everyone. 

No more misplaced assignments: word processing software has its risks regardless of how the final product is formatted. Students will inevitably forget to save documents or suffer computer crashes and viruses before an assignment is due.  But digital submission means that once an assignment is turned in (via e-mail or the class wiki or website), there's no longer a risk of any assignment going astray.  With the date and time stamping of any digital platform, there's also never any question of when an assignment was submitted.

Coursework isn't restricted to class time: when assignments can be turned in from a computer, the time-frame for submission is opened up well beyond the one hour window two or three days a week.  This expansion can benefit both students and instructors. Digital submission gives you the freedom to allow students extra time to revise after Thursday's useful class discussion, but they can still get their papers turned in before your weekend grading binge.  It can also reduce turn-around between assignments. You can ask your students to submit short papers each Tuesday, but you won't have to kill yourself to get them graded by Thursday if you can provide your feedback over the weekend.

Feedback becomes a semester-long process: when your comments are stored in a digital file, you (and your students) can access your feedback at any time.  You can say farewell to the days of file folders filled with multiple drafts and assignments (which often go astray or unexamined).  When grading a student's essay 2, you can look back at essay 1 to see how they've improved (or if they're still struggling with the same problems).

Grading revisions is a lot easier: when you have digital copies of both the original and the revised version of an essay, comparing the documents is a snap with Microsoft Word's "compare documents" function.  The changes a student has made will be highlighted, and you can quickly discover if they followed your suggestions and how rigorously they revised.

Smaller environmental impact: this might go without saying, but digital submission is obviously a way for composition instructors to feel better about the environmental impact of their assignments.  Given that the U.S. paper industry (alone) consumes 83 million tons of paper each year, requiring 40.5 million trees, and "clear cutting an area half the size of Texas" - I like to think I'm making some small effort to reduce those numbers.

All this being said, I do agree with my colleague, Jay Voss, who argues for the value of seeing one's writing in print.  While I encourage digital submission for my students' final assignments, I always hold peer review workshops in print.  Though I'm dubious about the efficacy of the feedback they receive, the physical act of marking up a paper (whether their own or a fellow student's) has proved extremely valuable for my students.  

No system is entirely perfect.  Digital submission means that I can't generally grade papers on the bus, and I'm less prone to use Word's comment function for positive feedback.  But in the age of e-readers and social networking, I can only think that asking students to submit assignments electronically is an exercise that better prepares them (and me) for the times to come.

Teaching is an art and teachers, like other artists, run the risk of valuing their performance too highly and overlooking their faults and mistakes. But as the true artist must ever abhor complacency, and tirelessly seek new angles on his or her work to spot frailities that can be avoided or improved in future, so the true teacher must resist the allure of self-sufficiency. 

Teaching, even when successful, leaves no monument but in the student's mind. After the semester ends, many students we will never see again -- and if we do, rarely will we see them exercising the skills we taught. In short, our work is generally inaccessible to retrospective critique. 

The worst vein of pollution I have witnessed in the graduate student experience -- and fortunately only infrequently -- arising perhaps from a combination of little sleep, long study and public irrevelance, is a kind of condescending or (in the worst cases) deprecating attitude some instructors take toward the undergraduates they teach. As if the dearth of post-modern continental theory among the undergrads were some kind of fault, rather than a token of good health and sound mind. The truth, as many of us continually re-learn, is that most of our students are delightful people, with a variety of interests and skills, and often with a fair degree of knowledge in their chosen fields, from whom, if we listen, we may learn. 

Student evaluations of teacher performance have fallen under corrosive political debates about the nature of accountability and its role in the education system. Partisanship has made some teachers cynical about teacher evaluations in a society made cynical about teachers by partisanship. And even for those of us -- many of us -- who look forward to student feedback at the end of the semester, at least some anxiety about the outcome of the surveys lurks, born of the remembrance of one or two biting critiques from the past. If only we had known of that one student's gripes earlier, we could have done more to answer them, and perhaps made the class better for everyone. 

Because I recently returned to teaching after three years in a different line of work, and this semester tried for the first time teaching Rhetoric and Writing, I doubted my performance perhaps more than usual. The idea of having students participate in a voluntary mid-term survey about my teaching performance struck me as a way to get a sense of students' assessments of my job at a point in the semester when time remained to correct myself if necessary. Anonymity would secure their sincerity. I went to SurveyMonkey and, with no prior experience of the site, quickly wrote up a survey with the following three questions: 

1. How specifically could the instructor in RHE306 improve?

2. Is the instructor fair in leading class and grading assignments? Are assignments and the instructor's expectations clear?

3. Is RHE 306 an effective course? Are your writing skills improving? What would you change about the course, if you could re-design it?

Of eighteen students, only seven filled out the survey. The low response probably reflects the fact that the email they received said the survey was informal and optional. And I offered no incentives for taking the survey other than my gratitude, less than a pittance considering that it must be distributed anonymously. Perhaps in future I will make the survey mandatory. Nevertheless the seven responses I received were sufficient to teach me at least two important lessons, which I shall relate. 

Most of the responses, whether from students' generosity or politeness, indicated general satisfaction. In response to the second question, several students said that the instructor "is fair," "does a good job," and that "assignments are very clear." To the third question, students said that the course is "effective," "a good challenging college course that makes a student think critically," and that the "workload is not excessive." One said it was becoming "easier to sit down and write papers faster and more clear" -- a positive assessment vitiated, given the purpose of the course, only by its grammar. 

The teacher's duty is to smile and move on from these niceties. The purpose of surveys lies not in replenishing a self-esteem withered from excessive exposure to the Pierian Spring. Rather it is to discover our faults that we may amend them. My students' answers to the first question served this purpose. I framed the question in a way that would force a critical response: how specifically could the instructor improve? Each of the seven students concurred generally on the need for greater clarity on assignment expectations. The instructor could improve by "stating specific objectives and requirements of certain assignments," and giving "a clearer explanation of the assignments," and providing "more example essays." Though some of these comments flatly contradicted answers in the second question, the fact that they came first gave them priority -- students must have felt no need to repeat the same criticism in question two. 

This survey therefore provided me with a student consensus that I needed to provide clearer explanations, examples and expectations for assignments. Because I already devoted what I considered excessive class time to explaining assignments, "teaching for the test," I felt some annoyance after reading these comments. But upon more mature consideration, a means of resolving the problem occurred to me. It was a low-fi, low-tech solution. 

The next day in class I gave a pop quiz about the requirements for the upcoming assignment. Students had received warning from time to time since the beginning of the term that I might give pop quizzes, but to this point no occasion had arisen, as I had thought to spare them. Now I gave a quiz testing their comprehension of the essay soon due. After they took the first quiz, we graded it in class, giving students a chance to ask questions and learn answers from each other. Then I told them this surprise would not count toward their grade, but that the next one would count. 

Few performed well on the pop quiz. Exposing their apparent lack of attention to the details of the approaching assignment must have stung them into paying more attention, since the essay results bore a much closer resemblance to the prompt, and similarity in form to each other, than previously. Before the next essay came due, I quizzed them again. Most students performed very well on the quiz -- they had studied the assignment -- and the essay's results corroborated this evidence. Most of the students even seemed to enjoy the quiz this second time -- they seemed to relish what they viewed as earning easy points. 

Thus I learned of a danger of my own teaching style -- lack of clarity, and sometimes downright confusion, about the nature of assignments -- and students learned of their responsibility to understand assignments and to ask for clarification if they do not. 

I shall quote only one other student's comment in the anonymous survey: "Make the course a little more interesting. I know that's every student's dream, but that's all we can ask for a class that early." This I have attempted to do by introducing more multimedia into lesson plans than previously, though I still resist any drift toward college class as variety show. 

I’m teaching an upper-division rhetorical theory course about legal rhetoric in which I specifically focus students on the forensic rhetoric of adjudicating particular cases in dispute. Accordingly, among other subjects of the course, one of the units focuses students on the casuistic or “case method” of reasoning from precedents in judicial rhetoric, a mode of reasoning often simply called “rhetorical reasoning” in recognition of its inherently rhetorical quality. My goal in the unit is not only to illuminate certain defining features of legal rhetoric but also to illuminate the nature of rhetorical reasoning. Critiquing as it does principle- or rule-based reasoning, such casuistic or case-based reasoning claims analogical reasoning as one of its central methodological tenets, and analogical reasoning is often simply called “legal reasoning” given its importance to the appeals lawyers and judges make to precedent.

I wanted to design an in-class exercise for students to engage in this form of reasoning at its most basic level and developed an exercise the details of which may be found here: http://www.dwrl.utexas.edu/content/analogical-argument. In a nutshell, after breaking students into several small groups, I asked them to formulate four analogies that favored or praised Bob in the hypothetical scenario below and four analogies that tended to disfavor or blame Bob, dividing their analogies equally between those using real and those using fictional sources:

Jack, Jill, and Bob were members of a gang. They went broke and decided to commit a robbery. They decided that the easiest way to go about this would be to wait on a certain street corner in a rich neighborhood until it was mostly deserted and rob the wealthiest-looking person left once the crowd thinned out. They agreed Jack would get a fake gun to use to intimidate their victim so they wouldn’t have to use violence, and Bob would pull the gun while Jack and Jill collected the money and valuables from the victim. The next night the three set out to execute their plan. They hung around the street corner until there were only a few people left, then approached a wealthy-looking man and woman walking down the street and demanded the couple’s money and jewelry while Bob pulled the gun and waved it at them threateningly. The couple initially reacted with shock and did not respond to the demands for their money and jewelry, so Bob waved the gun at them some more and again demanded money. The man made an aggressive motion toward Bob, and Bob pulled the trigger in surprise, which to Bob’s surprise discharged a real bullet. The shot killed the man, who fell into the woman’s arms as Jack, Jill, and Bob fled the scene. When they had gotten far enough away to stop running, Bob demanded to know why the gun was real. Jack told him he could not find a good enough fake and decided a real gun would be much more believable. Jack claimed he thought Bob knew the gun was real.

Although this hypothetical scenario invites analogies that specifically address legal topics, similar exercises could use hypothetical moral or ethical scenarios in the tradition of a casuistic case method.

Students in each of the groups began slowly, one group even complaining after a few minutes of considering the assignment that they found it difficult. By 10 minutes into their discussion, however, all of the students were rapidly developing analogies to satisfy the assignment. Once they began to invent analogies, they quickly discovered there was no end to the possibilities and they enjoyed selecting particularly creative and entertaining analogies from those that came to mind. All of the groups completed the assignment within 20-30 minutes. After they were finished, we reconvened as a class and compared and contrasted each group’s analogies on a multimedia screen, considering what the various analogies suggested about the issues each group identified as relevant to the hypothetical scenario and the experiential quality of analogical reasoning as they experienced it. They immediately realized, among other things, that the sources they used for their analogies might not be appropriate to all audiences, depending as the sources did on cultural experiences that only some audiences would share.

I pointed out to the students as we compared and contrasted their analogies that the analogies developed by all of the groups focused on a consistent set of common topics, including the element of mistake involved in Bob’s claim that he believed the gun was fake, whether Bob was lying about his belief that the gun was fake or whether such a belief was reasonable, whether Bob was more or less to blame than Jack and Jill given that they were all engaged in a joint enterprise and that Jack gave Bob the gun under apparently false pretenses, whether Bob should be held accountable for any harm that occurred given that waving a fake gun while claiming it to be real could foreseeably result in violence, and class issues regarding whether the group were preying on innocents or righting an economic inequity along the lines of Robin Hood. I found the class issues raised by several of the analogies particularly interesting. Simply put, the students raised a host of common topics basic to allocating responsibility to people for past events, and I used this to discuss the topical tradition of rhetoric with the students. We also discussed what audiences the various sources they drew upon in their analogies might appeal to given the experiences those sources assumed to be held by the audience, and we discussed more broadly the differences between analogical reasoning and inductive or deductive reasoning. The exercise proved helpful for all of these purposes.  

The assignment not only helped me illuminate the basic premise behind legal reasoning by analogy in the development of judicial precedent and the rhetorical quality of such discourse, but was surprisingly well-received by the students. After the assignment, numerous students referenced it both in later classes and on a course blog as particularly impactul in their thinking about analogical reasoning and its rhetorical qualities. Several students remarked that the experience called to their attention how ubiquitous analogical reasoning is and how readily they develop analogies for persuasive purposes. In sum, asking students to develop analogies regarding a particular moral or legal scenario based on their own experiences in this way appears to have helped students understand the experiential and rhetorical quality of this sort of reasoning in ways assigned readings and lecture alone could not. I also suggested to students that the exercise should prompt them to reflect on how they use other forms of exemplary reasoning, and I think similar exercises could possibly require students to engage in other forms of argument from example with similarly beneficial results. 

In the last three decades, our understanding of early modern literature and culture has been enriched by a renewed attention to data that might be called "archival."  Because of the proliferation of digital repositories such as Early English Books online, scholars and teachers have increasing home access to resources previously restricted to on-site consultation.  While such archival material is often incorporated into graduate and advanced undergraduate teaching, there is also significant opportunity to employ it in the instruction of early-major and non-major literature students.

For teachers with access to EEBO (http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home), early modern printed documents provide an obvious way to supplement introductory class lectures and readings.  (I routinely ask non-major students to read packets of "microtexts"—short, targeted selections from unedited early modern texts.)   But in addition to such instructor-driven usage, I've had great success having students seek such data themselves.   To conclude a unit on Hamlet, for example, I ask groups of students to brainstorm thematic clusters (revenge, ghosts, suicide, etc.) of contextual relevance; they employ these terms to search out EEBO documents that shed light on our understanding of the play.  Initially, many students struggle to make sense of what they find—but the challenge is a productive one, and they ultimately seem to enjoy the experience of such detective work.  The subsequent presentations and discussions enrich our collective understanding of the play, while exposing the class to a representative sampling of early modern documents.  (For more on this lesson, see http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/content/eebo-show-and-tell.)

Though less widely available than EEBO, Gale/Cengage State Papers Online (http://gale.cengage.co.uk/state-papers-online-15091714.aspx)—a vast collection of manuscript documents from the early modern period—is a digital archive that offers similar pedagogical opportunities.  Because of the difficulties of reading early modern manuscripts, the students' use of this database requires a much higher degree of instructor-mediation—but, when documents are properly vetted, groups of students can enjoy a similar (and amplified) detective experience by attempting to transcribe material of low-paleographical difficulty.  For instructors without access to State Papers Online, many suitable manuscripts are freely available elsewhere on the internet.

The increasing digitalization of documents from the early modern period has been crucial to scholarly production.  It can also help enliven our teaching, at any level of the curriculum.  

(Image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/58558794@N07/5381054196/, under the Creative Commons 2.0 license.)

This blog post is a “coming-out[1]” story—the story of teaching in a classroom of hearing students as a Deaf[2] teacher and what that means in terms of methodology. It is a “coming-out” story because it involves processes of choosing to “come-out” (as Deaf identity is invisible until some aspect comes to play to disrupt the “hearing line[3].”) This blog post also aims to make clear the abilities of D/deaf teachers, to explain the differences (small from my perspective) between Deaf and hearing teachers, and to detail the benefits of the Deaf teacher in a hearing classroom with regards to power dynamics.

I also aim to lay out questions of embodiment and how the choices of the D/deaf teacher affect, rely on, and consider power dynamics not only between the teacher and the students, but also with relation to the cohort of teachers within an institution. As I do this, I hope to answer common questions about my pedagogical choices (with regards to questions of abilities and implied commonplaces about teaching hearing students). I have asked several of these questions of myself as my teaching practices evolved and as I developed more confidence as both a teacher and a graduate student without a cohort who could fully relate to or understand my position as a Deaf teacher.

On the most basic level, the difference between hearing teachers and myself is one of language modality—it is a difference that relies on questions of access and language dominance. My first language, American Sign Language (ASL), is a minority language. Yet, I teach and talk about the dominant language of English, the language of our institution, of our department, and of our course content. I can do this because I am bilingual. However, because I am Deaf, I must consider my options for teaching hearing students. Because I speak English well enough to “pass” as a hearing person (with most audiences), I must choose when to “come out” as a Deaf person. And, because I do not hear well enough to understand everything that is spoken—especially in large group settings—I have full access to language only when it is visual. Hence, on the most basic level, I require, or have the most access to what is said in a classroom when I either read or see the words spoken. Having tried CARTs, or Communication Access Real-time Translation, in a few lecture classes and in a conference setting, I find that I prefer seeing language on the hands, and I work with ASL interpreters who sign what my students say and speak what I sign.

Returning to the idea of “coming out” and questions of abilities, the way I present myself when I first meet a person sets the expectation for the remainder of our communicative interactions. When I first began teaching—way back in high school—I strove to mold myself in such a way as to fit my students. This chameleonic work meant that when I taught hearing preschoolers and middle school students, I did so without interpreters. I “passed” as hearing and never came out as a Deaf person. The mentor that I worked with might perceive me as deaf because she knew me as a deaf student from her other classes, in which I had interpreters, or I might “come-out” to my mentor as a hard-of-hearing (hoh) person, but I would never come out to my students. I thought it most important that I focus on my students’ needs and that I appear like them. Conversely, when I tutored D/deaf high school students in the writing center, I signed and presented myself as a Deaf/hoh student like them. But, when a hearing high school student came in, I switched right back to spoken English, and if they did not already know me, they saw me as another hearing tutor who worked in the writing center. However, even as my Deaf identity was invisible to most, it was never invisible to me, and I had to work harder than my hearing colleagues to understand the hearing student and to speak in not only a second language, but in a second language mode. I was most comfortable and at most ease when teaching in ASL and teaching Deaf students.

From high school onwards to my current teaching position with the Department of Rhetoric and Writing, however, I have more experience teaching hearing rather than D/deaf students. Other than tutoring Deaf students, I interned as a high school English teacher at the Model Secondary School of the Deaf in Washington D.C., which required more thought on questions of pedagogy as English is most often a second language to D/deaf students, and one that we do not have full access to. I also had to reflect on the best ways to teach a dominant language via a minority language that is not often appreciated as a separate and complete language with grammatical rules different from the rules in English that they were expected to be proficient in. These pedagogical questions require a completely different mindset than do questions of teaching hearing students English via ASL because these students are not expected to be bilingual or to understand what I’m signing. The ASL interpreters are there to provide them with access to my instruction and to provide me access to their questions, comments, and insights. Hence, pedagogical questions of teaching hearing students are much more focused on the teacher-interpreter-student dynamic and facilitating communication in the most efficient way.

In order to do so, I include visual text as much as possible, and I share my lesson plans with the interpreters in as much detail and as early as I can. The interpreters that I work with have said, at times, that they love the “script” that I provide them. My lesson plans are probably more detailed than most, and I strive to provide my lessons as early as possible so the interpreters have more time to review and prepare for class. I think of teaching with interpreters as working with a team, and I need to take them into consideration as well as questions of translation and provide instruction to the interpreters as well as the students. These interpreter instructions most often relate to the signs that we should use—especially when certain English words are fingerspelled. I will create a sign whenever possible so that we do not need to repeatedly fingerspell lengthy English words.

Some people ask why I choose to sign rather than speak directly to my students. This question is one that I asked of myself when I began to teach at the college level. Before coming to the University of Texas at Austin, I had some experience teaching hearing students with interpreters, so I was already trained in advocacy and had instruction on best practices when working with interpreters under the “team” mindset. However, on a one-on-one basis with students or the primary teacher, I would often speak. I carried this practice over to my work as a Teaching Assistant at UT, and I would alternate between signing and speaking when students asked me to speak. But, I realized, over time, and as I developed more confidence, that I was just as effective as a teacher when I signed as when I spoke. I also realized I was doing a disservice to myself and to my community when I adhered to audist norms that privileged speech over sign. I was operating under the commonplace that students learn best from those like themselves. I was also teaching under audist pressures that prevented me from asserting my position as the one “in the front of the classroom”—or, as the teacher, the one who could determine the pace of the class. I was comparing myself to my hearing colleagues and feeling, like I did in high school, that I should “blend in” and be like them, or that I might be putting my students at a disadvantage if I was not like the other TAs.

However, I learned to put more trust in the team of interpreters that work with me, and I’ve worked on improving the teacher-interpreter-student dynamic by being more assertive and instructing my students on this dynamic from day one. I’ve found that by being straightforward and providing a simple clause about turn taking and participating in a class with interpreters, students are able to quickly adjust to the different communication dynamic. Several students are also fascinated by the different dynamic, which has worked to my advantage at times. In my years of experience thus far, I have not had troubles with classroom management or respect. I also feel that I connect more with minority students or with students for whom English is also not a first language.  So, even though I’m not hearing like them, in another sense, I am like them, and I do a service to students and teachers—both hearing and Deaf—who are typically underrepresented in the educational establishment when I assert my identity and refuse to “pass” for someone other than who I am.

And, for full transparency, I should also disclose that I am fully aware of the ways that I am perceived as a role model, and that I knew I served as an ambassador to the D/deaf and hard-of-hearing community even before that role became official. Hence, as I considered the pedagogy of the Deaf teacher, I was thinking on a global scale and not only of myself. I believe in the abilities of all D/deaf and hoh teachers who are qualified to teach, yet, at the same time, when I first started teaching at the college level, I questioned my own best practices when it came to my specific group of students as their concerns and needs were utmost in my mind as well. With experience, and with the knowledge that other D/deaf teachers and academics work to teach hearing students, I came to the conclusion that I could both serve my students and my community in a way that benefitted us all—with the backing of the university, interpreters, and laws that protect the civil rights of deaf people—laws that recognize interpreters as professionals who provide a service that accommodates the communication needs of both hearing and deaf people. In the end, I will continue to refine my teaching methods along with my hearing colleagues, but I will also continue to refine my skills as a Deaf teacher so more articles like “Miss Deaf America Raises Awareness” and “Sound Teaching” are published and so less discrimination occurs—as detailed in an article published last year titled “Silence and Solitude,” for one tragic example.

---A side note: UT Newscast has produced a video of an interview with me as well as clips of my teaching, and an interview of one my students. I’m still waiting for it to be captioned, but I’ll post the link as a comment once it is captioned so you may have a brief, “inside” look at my teaching.

Here's the captioned version of the video.

---Please feel free to post questions if I’ve left any unanswered, and I will answer them either as they appear, or in a future blog post on a more specific pedagogical topic.

[1] See Brenda Jo Brueggemann’s article, “The Coming Out of Deaf Culture and American Sign Language: An Exploration into Visual Rhetoric and Literacy.” Also see Brueggemann’s chapter, “On (Almost) Passing” in Lend Me Your Ear: Rhtetorical Constructions of Deafness for her discussion of “coming out” as a deaf person (82).

[2] There are two current general understandings surrounding the sign/signifier DEAF. The use of the capital “D” Deaf signifies Deaf culture and a person who identifies as culturally/ethnically Deaf. The use of the lower case “d” deaf signifies physical impairment, pathology, and the general audiological perspective on deafness as signifying lack—the loss of hearing.

[3] Christopher Krentz theorizes the hearing line in Writing Deafness: The Hearing Line in Nineteenth-Century American Literature; he defines it as “…that invisible boundary separating deaf and hearing people” (2).

Digital literacy is an essential component of education today. Middle- and upper-middle class students throughout the United States can expect some element of computer education throughout their learning careers. It shouldn’t be news to anyone that such skills will be considered elementary by the time younger generations are commuting to work (if this isn’t already the case). And given that there’s a long history in American higher education of teaching students with the aim of preparing them for the workplace (stretching back, at least, to the eighteenth century, and a reality that we sometimes like to pretend doesn’t exist in the humanities), the necessary aspects of digital education shouldn’t be disconcerting to anyone. I don’t doubt any of this in my own pedagogy one bit. I encourage my students to make every use digital resources, and am constantly reminding them how relevant our discussions about rhetoric are to the types of media they surely experience on the web. And yet, amidst my wholehearted embrace of everything technology has to offer, I almost always insist that my students do not submit their writing in hard copy.

It is a serious challenge for some students to show up for class with the day’s assignment printed and stapled. This is not a result of my institution’s services adapting to the needs of digital submission – there are plenty of printers in computer labs across campus. There’s even a computer lab open Monday through Friday designated specifically for students in classes such as mine. For these students alone, who struggle merely bringing a printed copy of their work to class, requiring hard copy seems worth it. By no means am I self-righteously trying to teach these students a “life lesson.” But rather, if I’m going to ask them to write in Standard Written English because similar standards will be required of them when they submit reports or write to clients in the business world, it seems only fair that they’re also paying tuition for the rigmarole and inconvenience that sometimes occurs when trying to submit work.

Also, I happen to believe that the process of seeing one’s writing in print encourages students to take their revision more seriously. When one sees their writing in print, it’s very hard to deny the fact that what you have created is a product. Printed writing is not only a point within a series of revisions, but it’s also a clear demarcation of where an author stands at a given moment. While this may also be true to a lesser extent for digital submissions, nothing beats the manic pressure of knowing that one only has a clearly measured amount of writing time left, after which what they’ve composed will endure physically as long as someone values it enough to keep it.

Certainly I allow exceptions. Once a student was recovering from a serious illness, and it only made sense to let her submit an essay from bed. I often allow my students on sports teams to submit electronically, almost always when they’re otherwise on the road for a given due date. But these exceptions aside, it seems to me that students have much to learn from all the inconveniences of submitting something in person.

According to legend, the Athenian orator, Demosthenes, overcome a speech impediment and a weak delivery through a practice of filling his mouth with stones and speaking through them. One might argue that Demosthenes was ahead of the curve in his use of technology. Others might suggest that my example is perverse, since 1.) the stones impede his natural ability to speak, and 2.) they were removed when he spoke in public. But what if we compare Demosthenes’ stones to our current use of loudspeakers, microphones, and PA systems, which achieve a similar end as long as the electricity is running. The individual speaker, however, experiences no benefit from these technologies once they no longer have access to them. To put it another way: instead of thinking about how technology expands our capacity to perform specific tasks, I’m trying to think about technology as an interface that actually develops a proficiency to do something we could not do before (amplifying the voice, in Demosthenes’ case). Blogs, for instance, might be thought of (on one hand) as a forum for advertising our day-to-day thoughts and activities to an audience that isn't immediately present. Blogs might also be thought of, however, as a means of improving our formal academic writing. I argue that the "form" of blogs might benefit writers at every level if we think of their formal demands. While a majority of the population treats blogs as a more “natural” form than the critical essays, many English teachers have a unique perspective into the blog's technical and stylistic demands. 

I should make two points about what I’m not interested in here. First, I am not trying to pose questions about whether we should expect students to devote their limited time to one task or another (as in, should they express their ideas in twitter posts versus five-paragraph essays). Instead, I’d like to ask how a semi-trained academic writer might improve his or her craft by means of a blog. I’m less concerned here with the concept of feedback and sharing ideas than I am invested in questions of individual writing style. Second, I am not questioning whether new technology makes specific tasks easier (it obviously does in so many cases). It is more than likely that new waves of technology will continue to be promoted and implemented as long as we continue to teach. What I’ve been thinking about is the potential for a new technology to help us re-think (and not replace) old ones. I’m also addressing a subsection of literature teachers who may be ambivalent about this constant stream of technology (and what it does to the future of their book-based pedagogy). Below, I’ve posted a video that demonstrates one gross abuse of technology as a replacement for “old” models of instruction. Watch from 4.30–6.00 min., and scoff at Tim Pawlenty’s proposal for “i-College” (a downloadable app.): “[TP:] Do you really think in twenty years, somebody is going to put on their backpack, drive a half-hour to the University of Minnesota from the suburbs, haul their keester across campus and listen to some boring person drone on about Spanish or Econ 101? [JS:] “Isn’t that what college is supposed to be, sir?” When Pawlenty talks about how “technology can help a lot,” we can seriously question his priorities and motives. I raise this example not to stoke quasi-Luddite/real economic anxiety, but to point out a pitfall in thinking about technology. Although I would have classed myself as a sort of Luddite in the past (and somewhat still in the present), I can attest to having had a positive experience when in my recent use of the new forum and form of “blog” writing. 

When I first encountered blogs as a contributor to the DWRL's viz., I did not feel liberated by the interface or form of online writing. Many people think this is an “easier” form than that of academic essays, but I did not. I contacted my sister, Meghan (who had already worked as a blogger for ONEin3 Boston), and asked her for advice. She taught me the basics of the blog “form,” and urged me to think about how I might develop a rapport with a hypothetical audience of readers. This is Rhetorical Appeals 101, but in an unknown world without clear boundaries or editorial policies. How to enjoy (and respect) my own blog posts and still appeal to some normative impartial spectator? My sister had expressed that it is important to come across as a “natural” writer and likeable person, who could be trusted for regular/readable updates. The idea is that, in blog posts, one really has to aim for clarity (somewhat more faithfully than in “academic” writing). Many blogs also seem to shift the emphasis from specialist expertise to a criteria based on approachability. I interpreted the undertaking as one in which I might experiment with different combinations of style. As it turns out, I have come to the decision that “academic” and online writing share about as much DNA as a great ape and a human do. Depending on how one looks at it, they share almost everything and nothing in common. The crossover between the two, however, produces interesting hybrid effects. For example, I decided that any research I introduced into my blog would need some veneer of storytelling, mystique, or performance. At the same time, I would need to write direct and honest statements, which might be read by someone with no idea about my topic or interest. The practice of shifting between registers of storytelling and personal clarity has benefitted my “academic” writing, and I have a will continue to have a good impression of blog-form even if the forum were to disappear tomorrow. I hope it doesn't, because blogging has become an exercise that I very much enjoy. Thanks for the helpful advice, Meghan. Check out her posts at ONEin3 Boston!

I like to discover and play with digital humanities tools. One I recently discovered is Voyeur, which creates word clouds and word frequency graphs for texts you provide it. Despite the warning by Jacob Harris that we should be wary of word clouds, they can serve as a gentle introduction to automated text analysis for students. While experimenting with Voyeur, I wondered how I could best use this tool to expose my students to the ways the digital humanities are transforming how we interact with and study literature. Rather than explore a literary text, however, I decided that it might be interesting to see if textual analysis can help with the process of revision. My hope is that this exercise might make students see the value of such tools in a different way and see their own writing as texts available to (and requiring) interrogation.

Voyeur is an easy tool to use. You simply upload or paste a text and click “Reveal”. You’re then provided with a workbench-like screen that starts with a word cloud and copy of the text you submitted. You can also upload multiple documents in many common file formats such as Microsoft Word or PDF. Doing so allows Voyeur to create a corpus of texts that it can then compare for word frequencies. Voyeur also provides two pre-defined corpora: one of Shakespeare’s plays (which would be fun for a course on his works) and another of a humanist listserv archive. The initial word cloud includes every word in the document, which is often not very useful because of common words like “the,” but the tool provides a pre-programmed list of “stop words” that will cause Voyeur to redraw the word cloud with those words omitted. Clicking on any word in the cloud will provide a graph of the relative frequency of that word. The tool also provides information about vocabulary density, distinctive words, length of documents, and a number of other statistical details worth investigating.

Rather than delve into the possibilities some of the more advanced statistical measures provided, I decided to focus on word clouds and word frequencies when I use this tool with students; those two elements seem the most accessible to students who probably lack experience with automated textual analysis. I also want to focus on seeing if this approach can help address one of the biggest and most prevalent problems I encounter in student writing: the difficulty stating a clear thesis and then staying focused on that thesis throughout the paper. I wondered, then, if a word cloud and graphs of word frequencies might allow a way to visualize the actual (rather than implicit or imagined) topics of a paper and their appearance and disappearance in different sections. I came up with this exercise as a result of these ideas. Note: I teach in a classroom that provides a computer to each student. Still, this exercise could, with only a little effort, be repeated with laptops or outside of class time. Voyeur does allow users to export all data, so it would be fairly simple to share work.

First, have students upload their papers to Voyeur. If they have multiple revisions of a paper, all the better, as it allows a comparison of the iterations of their writing. After setting the stop words and exploring the different word frequencies of their own work, students should then trade and look at a peer’s work. This switch allows the students to avoid being biased by what they think the paper is about and instead focus on what Voyeur shows. Here are a few instructions I have come up with for students to ask:

Use Voyeur to see if you can get an idea of the paper’s thesis and how the argument progresses without reading the paper.

• What can you determine about the paper's organization?
• What words are most common? What words would you expect to be most common based on the thesis?
• What words rise and fall (or do not) in frequency together? Would you expect them to do so?
• How can you revise your paper so that the most important words to the argument appear more frequently or in more effective combinations?

I have tested this technique on some of my own writing and found that it does, in fact, reveal some interesting patterns. For example, in one essay I wrote, I juggle three major topics, which rise and fall in sequence through the paper. It was surprising to me to see just how regularly the paper followed that pattern, in fact, and confirmed that I had organized it in a logical manner that accords with my argument. What other uses might you suggest for Voyeur? Are there other questions you think I could pose for students as they use this tool to analyze their own writing? Do you know of other tools that might be useful for this exercise?

Screenshot of my class blog, The Rhetoric of Suburbs & Slums

As a student myself in Dr. Faigley’s Visual Rhetoric class four years ago, we used Blackboard’s “Forum” feature to initiate online discussions about our readings while sitting in front of computers in the same classroom. I remember how invigorating it was to respond to my classmates’ posts as they wrote them. I also found that having a written record of my thoughts on the readings served as great review for when I wanted to refer to theories from these readings later in the course. In Dr. Faigley’s course, our class forum was a way for a shy, novice graduate student (i.e. ME!) to contribute to the discussion without feeling overwhelmed.

Now, years later, I’m experimenting with a course blog in my Rhetoric of Suburbs & Slums class. I’m already quite happy with the results.

At first, I envisioned the blog as a place for students to share their research with other students, but after a few days of mulling over using a new pedagogical tool in my class, I quickly realized that the blog could do much more than function as a mini-version of Facebook’s “Share a link” feature. Not only could I get students to share their research with their peers—with a blog, I could get them to work on their writing!

After their initial blog post where they introduced themselves (and became familiar with the idiosyncrasies of Wordpress), I’ve had students write two longer blog posts. The first was a rhetorical analysis paragraph (on one appeal from the source that they’d be analyzing in their first paper). The second was a criteria list based on a category of evaluation of their own choosing (related to the source that they’d be evaluating in their second paper).  For both blog posts, I’m impressed at the level of engagement and effort that students put into writing and conceptualizing their posts.

I’m equally impressed by the careful and astute comments their peers left them. After each post was due, I asked students to post comments on the posts above and below their own. They wrote these comments in class as I walked around the room listening to their keys clicking and their videos playing (in their posts, many students included the videos or the images that they were going to analyze/evaluate). For each blog post, I asked students to watch for common setbacks, such as not tying audience to the appeal (for the rhetorical analysis post) or coming up with too-broad criteria (for the criteria list post). In both cases, students were able to alert their peers of potential problems with short comments (I asked for 6 sentences). After reading her peer’s criteria post on a music video, one student wrote “You could make [your criteria] clearer by mentioning which of these criteria are specific to which aspect of the video (images, music, lyrics, etc.) since it is a little confusing if you are evaluating a video or a song or the text of the lyrics.” Another student saw a problem in his peer’s too-general criteria and let his peer know that “The criteria of visual elements is also a little vague. Visual elements can range from camera angles to color use to computer generated elements like change is saturation and use of negative, so being specific on exactly what kind of visual elements you are referring to would be helpful.” And another student brought in prior knowledge to help her peer enlarge the scope of his criteria: “Also another thing you could talk about for visual style of a drama is lighting. In a film class I recently took my professor discussed some of the differences between sitcoms and dramas. He felt that sitcoms consist of generally bright lighting. Is this the same for dramas? Or do you think there is contrast with varied lighting techniques? Just something to possibly think about if you feel that you could add more to the explanation of that criterion.”

Of course, with this blog posts, as with any peer review, my students also gained a deeper knowledge of how they should proceed in their own writing. One student, after reading her peer’s criteria list, wrote: “I also like the way you pull direct examples from the show for your blog post (I probably should have done that for mine….oops!).” Another student told her peer that she used his post as a guide in writing her own criteria list post by writing “I actually used yours to write mine! THANKS!” Because I’m using the Learning Record, my students can document the moments that they gained confidence through the comments they both received and left for others.

An added benefit to all this blogging is that my students end up learning about each other. The camaraderie in my class is one that I would like to recreate in my future classes. Now students know about each other’s interests outside of class. After reading a blog post on a specific category of movies, one student exclaimed: “You seem to be very excited about this particular category and I feel like the information you have written just flowed out of you while blogging!” Another student, who especially appreciated her peer’s detailed justifications of her chosen criteria, happily admitted that “The way you wrote about the criteria that you’ll use to evaluate this source is really interesting. Your detailed writing makes me want to see the video now!”

In general, I’ve loved using blogging in my course. I will continue to ask students to compose mini-writing assignments for the blog. But most importantly, I will definitely make sure that they comment on their peers’ posts.