Blog

The Harm We Can Do

by  • 

Pinocchio by Jean-Etienne Minh-Duy Poirrier, on FlickrSara Kadjer shared “Can Reading Logs Ruin Reading for Kids?” from The Atlantic. The piece dredged up some memories for me, good and bad.

I guess I am an oddity, but I always loved tracking what I read when I was in school. Reading doesn’t really come with a tangible thing to point to when you’re done, and those logs let me say, “Look, I did all this!”

I know there are problems with the pedagogy when tracking takes away from the joy of reading. It made me recall Troy Hicks’ recent blog post on the troubling need to quantify everything students do.

That leads me to my bad memory. On the first day of class in 9th grade, the teacher asked us to write down all the things we read over the summer. I busied myself with a list in categories: mysteries, biographies, historical fiction, and so forth. I had to think in categories to remember them all. As I scribbled titles down, the teacher moved through the classroom. She paused at my desk, and I expected her to be impressed with the list of all the things I had read. Unfortunately, she instead announced to the full class that I had to be lying because no one read that many different books.

I try to remember that moment to remind myself that the long-term harm of my comments as a teacher can last forever. After all, I was in 9th grade a very, very long time ago; and I still remember that moment of shame very well.

 
Image: Pinocchio by Jean-Etienne Minh-Duy Poirrier, on Flickr, used under CC BY-SA 2.0 license.

Blog, Teaching with Digital Tools

Alphabetic Text as the Only Text

by  • 

Page from a French ABC picture book for the letter A, showing asparagus and an ostrichI’m befuddled by this MLA call for proposals for a volume on the Changing Role of Writing in Composition.

Everything I understand about multimodal texts tells me that any alphabetic text is not tapping the linguistic mode alone; but from reading this CFP, you’d think that spatial and visual modes (for say a paperback book) weren’t a thing until this “turn toward multimodality.”

I’ve read and reread the call, trying to figure it out. I thought maybe I was just not getting something (blame imposter syndrome). For the life of me though, I can’t figure out how to respond to that while talking ONLY about alphabetic text (which is culturally limiting in addition to not making sense in a multimodal context). I’d really love to submit something to the call; but I can’t figure out how to work within such a limited vision of what it is to be multimodal.

 
Image: abc album p1 by patricia m, on Flickr, used under the CC BY-SA 2.0 license.

Blog

Free Access, If You’re Patient and Persistent

by  • 

Covers of the Journals with Articles included in the Rhetoric & Change CollectionRoutledge (Taylor and Francis) is offering a nice collection of articles to mark the RSA conference this weekend: Rhetoric & Change: A Free Access Article Collection in Collaboration with the Rhetoric Society of America (RSA).

It looks like a grand collection; however, the fact that you have to read and download everything one-by-one leads me to believe that Routledge is more interested in trying to keep you on their site than actually providing free access to key pieces.

A well-designed site would have a “Download All” option. I would have been willing to fill out a short survey and give them my email address for such access. Sure free != easy, but it could and often should. Shame on Routledge!

10-minute ideas

distinguished instructors?

by  • 

Filigree — Nicolás Paris (1977), by Pedro Ribeiro Simões on Flickr, used under a CC-BY 2.0 licenseToday’s news bulletin from Virginia Tech announced, “Two faculty members receive 2016 SCHEV Outstanding Faculty Award.” It’s a good and wonderful thing for the two professors: Jacqueline E. Bixler, Alumni Distinguished Professor of Spanish, and Michael F. Hochella Jr., University Distinguished Professor of Geosciences.

It also gave me a couple of ideas. One rarely hears of a “Distinguished Instructor.” If the academy really wanted to support and recognize the work of the best instructors, we would find a collection of Distinguished Instructors at every school. But we don’t.

Further down, the article mentioned that “Bixler is an inductee in the Academy of Teaching Excellence….” Now the ATE is a Virginia Tech organization, and instructors can be included. As my eyes wandered over that sentence however, I wondered why the discipline hasn’t created some national or international academy that recognizes excellence on the part of adjuncts and other non-tenure track faculty.

Since adjunct positions frequently require instructors to teach at multiple institutions simultaneously and/or to hop from one institution to another, as the job market requires, those in the adjunct category may not be able to build the recognition at one institution to be recognized by its academy. Why not create something as a field that allows us to recognize the body of work across institutions and raise the profile of some of the hardest-working teachers out there?

 
 

[Photo credit: Filigree — Nicolás Paris (1977), by Pedro Ribeiro Simões on Flickr, used under a CC-BY 2.0 license]

10-minute ideas

just 10 minutes a day…

by  • 

Watch Face, by Chris Roach, on Flickr, used under a CC-BY-NC 2.0 licenseOn Wednesday, I happened upon Daphne Gray-Grant’s “How 5 minutes a day can revitalize your writing.” I am writing constantly, so I’m not sure how much I need revitalized. I do know however that I have lots of quick thoughts or ideas that I want to get down so that I might be able to expand upon them later.

I posted this thought about Gray-Grant’s article on Facebook that day:

Wondering about this gimmick as a writing strategy/resolution. I have so many one-off, short, undeveloped ideas floating through my head. What if instead of saving them for later (which almost never materializes) or giving them up because I don’t have time or the know-how to do the relevant research, what if instead of all that, I try to write them down in five minutes or so?

The 10 in tengrrl makes me feel like that should be ten minutes rather than five, but even ten minutes a day is probably doable as long as I don’t get it into my head that every day has to be a stellar accomplishment. Maybe it’s time to create a new five (or ten) minute blog. I just have to decide whether this is a silly gimmick or a strategy for publishing ideas and stories that I too often give up on.

 
 

[Photo Credit: Watch Face, by Chris Roach, on Flickr, used under a CC-BY-NC 2.0 license]

Teaching

Tools for Teaching Accessiblity?

by  • 

Look out! Blind People cyclingSo I’ve been considering some of the issues that have been raised at the 2015 Summer Seminar: Access/ibility in Digital Publishing, trying to figure out where I fit in. I have some experience with many different kinds of issues, but I haven’t completely figured out where I belong in the conversations the group has been having.

So I began thinking about how many students (and probably many authors) respond to concerns about making their work accessible. There’s push back, reluctance, and sometimes even refusal. It’s more than simply not wanting to do the extra work or not knowing how to do what’s necessary. I think it’s a failure to understand, even to recognize their privilege–and as a result, an inability to know what needs to change to make a project more accessible.

An example might help. Let’s say a writer adds a photo to something. She might understand that she should include an alt tag for that image, but does she understand how to write a rhetorically effective alt tag? Does she know about long descriptions? Has she ever interacted with a reader with low or no vision? How do you teach someone not to see so that she can understand the needs of her readers?

As I tried to puzzle out this complicated task of extending accessibility of a project (and we are talking about extending. These projects are already accessible. They are just not accessible to everyone or in every way possible), so as I was trying to puzzle out making a project accessible, I began wondering about the opposite (so to speak) of the task. Would I ever ask a person with low or no vision to make a project more visual by adding color, illustrations, and design elements? If I did, what kind of support would I need to provide her? How would I help her understand visual aspects that she (possibly) had never seen and might never use as she herself accessed a text? How would she know if she was meeting her goals?

A sighted writer who has never consciously worked to make a project accessible to someone with low or no vision likely feels she’s confronting similar constraints. She cannot see the absences in the project that she needs to fill out, and she doesn’t understand the extent to which she needs to fill them out. Her privileges as a sighted writer is not obvious to her.

So my question, or perhaps the challenge I’d love to address, is how do I find ways to help those who do not need alternate accessibility paths understand the task of adding them to a text? What tools are available to help such a writer understand the accessibility needs? I’m not looking for the tools to add accessibility, but teaching tools and strategies to help people understand why those accessibility tools are necessary and how they add layers of access to the project. What tools can help her understand the difference between simplistically making something accessible and making it deeply accessible?

I think there are some obvious strategies that people use, like trying to read a text with a screen reader and working to notice what is missing and what doesn’t work. There are accessibility checkers online that people can apply to their texts. I’m not satisfied that tools like these are the best solution. I’m not sure what is.