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Letter to a Young Blogger

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Dear Young Writers,  I'm writing from Strum Hall at the University of Denver, after a day of attending lots of cool--or at least cool to me--presentations on how to create community writing projects that are reciprocal, meaningful, and promote a better, more just world.  View of University of Denver campus from Strum Hall (my photo) In between sessions, I started reading your summaries of the articles, stories, and TedTalks you'll be writing about in your first blog posts. And I quickly realized that despite your uncanny ability to quickly and fairly summarize events in your life, movies, and TikToks, when you are asked to write a summary of an article, or a TedTalk in the context of a school assignment, your writing muscles inevitably tense up, and your writing becomes as stiff as my forty-four year old right knee. It's not your fault. You've been conditioned to do what you are told in school, and so your problem-solving skills are a bit rusty. The summary is but one p...
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Notes on Literacy Narratives

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    This week, we are starting the literacy narrative project , and as you start exploring the path you wish to take I'm thinking there's a few things I could share with you to make your journey more enjoyable.  There are many ways to write a literacy narrative, and these are just a few of them: Memories O ne easy way to think about writing a literacy narrative is to create an inventory of moments or memories that you feel are relevant to the story you are trying to tell. If I were to write a story about how I learned to parent kids on the Autism Spectrum, I might spend a few minutes writing a list of important moments I'd like to share with my readers. The first one would probably be the day I was told they were on the spectrum. As a student suggested in class recently, I could open my narrative with a description of the room we were in, what I saw, heard, what I was feeling, etc. and go from there. In this case, vivid description will be a tool you can use to creat...
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Note to Self at the End of the Semester

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I hate annual evaluations!  Now that I've gotten that out of my chest, I can think of why I should not hate them. Hear me out. This is something I've been trying to do lately. No, I cannot think of a reason to love self-evaluations but I do appreciate self-reflection , and vulnerability , and transparency , and failure , and resilience , and self-evaluations are opportunities to experience and experiment with all of them. Some of these words have become rather popular lately, but that doesn't mean they are any less important. These words have changed me and the way I teach. The last two years have been fruitful because they have been "failurefull." Yes, I've just made that word up, and I'm proud of it. The rules are important, but sometimes we should break them. This is not something I could have written a decade ago.  That's why I'm writing this. FIU has asked me to use this system they call Panther180, and I'm sure they have good reasons to d...
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When Students Speak

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Photo by  Jason Rosewell  on  Unsplash Over the last few weeks, I've been thinking about your (student) feedback, and how it's affected me personally, and my teaching over the last decade or so. I have, let's say, mixed feelings about your feedback, ranging from anger to anxiety to guilt to shame to...well, you get it.  Mixed, strong feelings about your feedback. For sure. When I started teaching in 2006, the end-of-semester student evaluations mainly triggered feelings of inadequacy and anxiety. I vividly recall one student who confidently claimed that I favored Hispanic students or something to that effect. I went into total panic mode when I read that comment. I remember I emailed my program's director asking her if she thought I should send a mass email to the entire class explaining how this was not true, and how much I appreciated and valued every single student, not just those who shared my Hispanic heritage. I had taken, I told her, special care to never use ...
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Your Discourse Community is just the Starting Point

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This semester, I've asked you to choose a discourse community (DC)/community of practice to "investigate" for the entire semester, and I think most of you have had no problem finding a group of people united by some common goal or interest that you wish to learn more about.  As you start your research, I hope you don't get too caught up on figuring out whether the community you chose fits (or not) John Swales' definition of a DC, which seems to me helpful as an observation tool but also rather rigid.  Instead, I hope you use those DCs or communities of practice as the starting point of your research.  The community you choose will be the "place" you'll observe, the people you'll talk with (not at) as you gather data through interviews, observations, surveys, etc.  I've asked you start with a community because I feel research projects very often sprout from within communities of practice or discourse communities.  But I digress, today, I want...
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Location: Pembroke Pines, FL, USA
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Synthesis is the Mother of Invention

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For the last few weeks, we keep coming back to this "thing" we call synthesis, what it is and why we do it, or rather why we should learn to do it. And the more I think and talk about it with you, I keep coming to the realization that synthesis is the mother of invention, which is to say that synthesis is the difference between creating new knowledge and falling into the trap of plagiarism. As Steven Johnson puts it, synthesis is the collision of different hunches, which in turn give birth to a new hunch:  In academic lingo, we would say that synthesis is the result of a thesis that collides with an antithesis and gives being to a new idea or thesis--a synthesis. Now, there is one question that has come up a few times as we selected " Digitalk " and " Txtng is Killing Writing: JK!!! " for the synthesis project: Does synthesis presuppose the convergence of opposite ideas. If we look at the textbook definition of synthesis (thesis collides wi...
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Rhetorical Problems (Part 2)

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I just finished reading Joe's " The Marriage Blog: I put a ring on it" where he reflects on the memories of his recent wedding and how social media is changing the way he remembers--the ways ALL OF US remember. I found this blog especially relevant to the (sometimes tense) discussions we've been having about identifying and exploring rhetorical problems through research, reflection and writing. Honestly, any problem that prompts us to think about the ways we communicate, is a rhetorical problem.  Any problem or question that can withstand the embrace of Rhetoric , is a rhetorical problem. In this case, I'm talking about Rhetoric as a field of study , just like Math, or Chemistry, or Archaeology   Think about it this way, if your Math professor asked you to identify a mathematical problem that interests you and try to solve it, what would you do? In this case, I'm asking you to identify a rhetorical problem, explore it through research, write a...
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