Blogging Pedagogy blogs

A Canvas Tutorial, or, How Not To Enforce the Digital Divide

Scott Garbacz — Tue, 16 Jun 2015 02:28:11 +0000

Author:

Scott Garbacz

Image Credit:

In my E314 course, I need to teach a wide array of skills, ranging from academic research to close reading, from composition to the Oxford English Dictionary. Balancing these priorities against each other, and all of the skills against the need to provide students with a basic background for some demanding books, makes for an interesting challenge. Yet after a few semesters of teaching similar courses, which provided me with plenty of opportunities for fine-tuning my organization, I was surprised to hear one student make a rather basic observation to another:

“You’ve got to click, like, a lot if you want to see the comments on your paper.”

It was a bit of a revelatory moment for me. As someone who’s been using various forms of commenting software for the last decade or so, I never thought that the Canvas course management system posed any difficulties for students. I’d even prized myself on making a rather extensive and well-organized private course site, with various assignments, explanations of grading rubrics, links to important resources, and helpful hints tied together and always just a click or two away. But when I looked at what students actually had to do to see my comments, forcing myself to forget the basic assumptions I’ve internalized over the years, I realized—yeah. Maybe Canvas could be more easy to operate.

Or, more to the point, maybe I should be more proactive in providing my students with the tutorials and information they need to succeed in my class, rather than making it an impromptu computer-science flunk out class.

Below, I’m posting a series of images (along with comments, in a purposefully informal style that matches my classroom ethos) that walk through the process of accessing marginal comments in Canvas from a student’s perspective. I’d love these images to be shared; the more students are familiar with how to view their annotations, the better, and I’d like to think my effort provides benefit for more than just my students. In short, please adopt and adapt this tutorial at will.

But I also hope that the tutorial replicated below can give us a chance to think about the role of technology—and digital literacy—within classes that don’t have any particular digital focus. It’s tempting to blame students for failing to meet our arbitrary standards for technical proficiency. Yet leaving students without crucial instructions (even for tasks I find to be second-nature, and that seem to draw on a rather basic level of digital know-how) seems a betrayal of my role as an educator. Indeed, considering our growing awareness of the ways that the “digital divide” involves not just sheer access to web-based resources, but also an array of soft skills that may be disproportionally distributed among our students, it is crucial that we maintain awareness of our technology’s ability to throw unnecessary hurdles in the way of otherwise promising students. If we don’t consider the usability of our classroom technologies, we really are just policing the already problematic digital divide.

Looking at the Comments on Your Paper

I am a fan of Canvas. Unfortunately, sometimes their userface can be a bit ... disorientating. Here, therefore, is your Official Guide to Seeing the Comments I Gave To Your Paper(TM)!

Step 1: when your paper is graded, the course homepage should look something like this. Click on the link in the green circle (I expect you already knew this.)

Step 2: Click on the "View Feedback" tab circled in GREEN. Not the friendly-looking link to your paper that seems so inviting and linkish. (Yeah, Canvas's UI could probably be better here.) Note that it is circled in red. Do not click it. It will not help you.

You will also see overall comments on the right of your screen.

Step 3: Here things get a bit tricky. Some parts of your paper will be highlighted. There will be dotted lines going off into the right margin (circled in yellow). You also might see some comments at the end of your paper, and you will still see the general feedback on the right (both circled in blue). However, here you need to click on the minus sign (circled in green) a couple of times to get my many specific comments on your paper!

Step 4: Now you can see all of my comments (especially the ones circled in blue)! Congratulations! This will really help you in revisions.

Anonymous Whispers: Silence and Voice in the Digital Classroom

Jeremy Smyczek — Wed, 10 Jun 2015 19:49:30 +0000

Author:

Jeremy Smyczek

Image Credit:

Halycon450, "Silence!" Deviant Art, n.d. Web. 2 March 2015. <http://halycon450.deviantart.com/art/SILENCE-305428310>

I owe particular thanks for this post to Beck Wise, who gave me the this idea in the first place. This post is also in part a response to Sarah Riddick, who posted to Blogging Pedagogy recently about maintaining a safe space for students to articulate viewpoints with which they disagree.This latter concern reminded me of a more basic problem that I and many other instructors have faced: the reticent class that is, for whatever reasons, unwilling to articulate much of anything at all.

Because teachers tend to be voluble sorts and problem solvers by nature or nurture, we tend to take long silences personally, often suspecting that they represent indifference or hostility on the students' part. We then “solve” this problem through a variety of measures designed to get the class talking: prewriting activities, calling on students directly, or, worst of all, from my perspective, chattering on endlessly ourselves, hopeful that our next sentence will be the magic bullet that invites response, until we are all mercifully saved by the bell.

That my motive attributions are probably wrong is fairly obvious. Students remain silent for a huge variety of reasons that probably have nothing to do with me or my class: personal preoccupations, honest shyness, developing language skills, cultural aversions to drawing attention to themselves, fear of peer disapproval, and the feeling that they just don't know enough or haven't concretized their thoughts enough to make them public.

But the second part—the solutions—may in fact overlook a more pragmatic approach: perhaps the problem isn't silence specifically but lack of communication generally. The question then becomes: how can we communicate as a group without speech? How can we address the impediments to communication in a broader sense, while still maintaining a sense of real-time discussion?

I found a remarkably easy answer in the concept of anonymous, collaborative documents such as Google Docs with open-invite participation policies. It works like this: I build either a totally blank doc or one with specific questions or instructions for the topic under discussion, put it up on the projector screen, and let students write their contributions in a real-time, collaborative exchange. Since the invite is open and requires no Google login, students are represented by anonymous animal (e.g. “Anonymous Antelope”) icons as they participate. The icon follows around their cursor as they respond to various other student comments, creating a visual map of student responses as they literally “move” from one topic to another.

Anonymity can be tricky, of course, and sometimes it seems that the entire internet and its oft-noted incivility testifies to that. But the fact that the students are in the same room with one another seems to exercise a check on rudeness and cheek that posting from home in asynchronous forums does not. At least, it hasn't been a problem so far into this fairly new experience. One principal benefit is that I may compliment a particular contribution and then have the student verbally claim ownership of it.

As such, these silent and anonymous conversations can often drift back and forth into hybrid spoken-written affairs, and managing them is more art than science so far. But what I think that they do is take some of the best qualities of the MOOC without the worst, i.e. huge class sizes and a tenuous access to the course instructor and the particular expertise she or he brings to the table. Also, challenges remain for students with basic or developing written language proficiency, who may be as hesitant to write as they are to speak. But the technique in general promotes group conversations that avoid many of the traditional obstacles and workarounds that occur in the absence of computer mediation.

pedagogy; class discussion

Reflections on Racist Comedy in the Classroom

Sarah A. Riddick — Tue, 09 Jun 2015 21:35:12 +0000

Author:

Sarah A. Riddick

Image Credit:

Post Memes. "One of My Favorite Moments From Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt." Flickr. Flickr, 23 Mar 2015. Web. 17 Apr 2015.

Since I’ve begun teaching, I have frequently described moments in the classroom in terms of trains. A lesson depends upon organic human interaction, and sometimes the best laid plans can produce unexpected results. So, when it comes to lesson-planning, I tend to be an overplanner as a means of minimizing the chances of derailment. That said, asking students to rhetorically analyze a deliberately racist yet humorous text is about as high stakes as this risk of derailment gets.

That said, asking students to rhetorically analyze a deliberately racist yet humorous text is about as high stakes as this risk of derailment gets. Knowing this and knowing that for a number of reasons I believe it is important to ask them to do so, I went about structuring this lesson with caution. First, I selected a timely, accessible, and frankly funny text that is in the midst of making some waves in the media—the new Netflix sitcom produced by Tina Fey called The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. This show seemed to me like an ideal entry point for analyzing and discussing sensitive material because it is a colorful, fast-paced, and somehow thoroughly lighthearted sitcom that directly takes on dark topics that range from kidnapping and PTSD to 21st-century racism in the US.

For this lesson (which we resumed intermittently with different purposes throughout the semester), I had students first read a brief online article that softly critiques the show’s deliberate racism. Next, I had them view a few brief clips that best represented the argument that this author was making. In groups, I then had them identify the main claim in the article that they read, as well as respond to that claim with their own reasoning and evidence.

My purpose in doing this activity was fourfold. First, I wanted the students to practice creating a rhetorical analysis between a primary and secondary source because they were currently in the midst of revising a written, individual analysis of this kind. I also wanted the students to experience how others would go about assessing the same two texts so that they could reflect a bit more critically on changes that they might make in their own writing. Third, this lesson ideally would demonstrate to the students that it is possible to thoughtfully talk about sensitive topics such as racist comedy, and a great way of doing so is through rhetorical analysis. Lastly, I hoped that my students would see that performing such an analysis can be interesting and fun, as evidenced by the combination of a Netflix sitcom and a brief critique from a website that they probably visit on their own time.

Like I said, my students were on-board with all of this. They loved the show, and they gave interesting and thoughtful responses from start to finish. Nevertheless, I found myself combatting an everpresent fear throughout the lesson that at any moment, it would become clear that I had put us onto a train with no brakes, and we’d all soon be hurtling down an unfinished track to a messy, (thankfully) metaphorical demise.

What I have realized upon reflection is what I have known all along: the track is always unfinished. As we who research rhetoric know, invention is a core feature of the discipline. Everyday we are inventing in the sense that we are adapting our responses to different circumstances, needs, and goals. As an instructor, I want to give my students the tools that they need in order to respond well to those circumstances. As my students have shown me, they are certainly capable of doing so.

Yes, asking students to discuss racism is going to be uncomfortable on some level because racism is no light matter, and we should not take it lightly. Yes, I will continue to be on high-alert for the moment in which a class discussion might be getting onto the wrong track. However, that possibility is always present in the classroom. What I’ve seen wonderfully demonstrated through this lesson is that my student-passengers are there because they want to get to the destination, too, and I can trust them to get along with each other as we make our way down the track that we are creating together.

rhetorical analysis

Online Reviews Part II: Reviews as Interpretive Communities

Jeremy Smyczek — Fri, 22 May 2015 17:44:55 +0000

Author:

Jeremy Smyczek

Image Credit:

"A Community Library in Ethiopia" by Robert Joumard, 2010. Reused with permission. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bibliotheque_Awra_Amba.jpg

As many literary archivists know, reading societies were a prominent feature of the 19^th and prewar-20^th century American social scene. They provided a valuable and oft-overlooked service giving women and people of color a voice in literary and cultural affairs in the days before the academy had been more fully opened, and, the story goes, largely faded away once it had.

Or did reading societies just have a technology problem? Anyone with an Amazon account can see that book reviews there don't look much like other product reviews at all. They look much more like what goes on more politely at Goodreads, an online service specifically meant to function the way that reading societies once did: to let people whose cost of membership is no more than access to the book in question debate the form, function, and merit of every literary genre imaginable.

So what does this have to do with pedagogy? I think that online reading societies exist because, academia's romantic ideals about individual relationships with text be damned, they provide a dinner-table form of textual mediation that can bridge the gap between personal experience, classroom discussions, and professional criticism. This service is specifically applicable to introductory literature and composition courses in which students are asked to make the step from summary to response.

Asking for response from students is asking them to make a leap of faith: the faith that, in transitioning from finding out what the important bits of the text are to responding to them, they have something appropriate and interesting to say, even in principle—that their experiences and insights contribute anything of worth. Classroom discussion only puts them in a boat with everyone else in the same situation (frankly, a captive audience), and professional criticism puts them in touch with people whose engagement with the primary texts assumes all the knowledge that intro students have yet to acquire—at the added cost of often taking longer to read than the primary literature itself.

I call Amazon and Goodreads “dinner table mediation” because, like conversations at the traditional family dinner, the best reviews assume several things: there will be a range of expertise and maturity in the room, there are rules of decorum, and only certain subjects have the potential to be of mutual interest to everyone. Like the reading societies of old, membership is strictly optional and so the perspectives are of those legitimately interested in the books. For our first-year forum (the required introductory composition class at Texas) this year, we used Emily Brady's Humboldt: Life on America's Marijuana Frontier. A range of Goodreads reviews will demonstrate the range of interests at play in responding to and evaluating the book: geography, economics, law, ethics, and, really, how much people like getting high.

I like online reviews as a research and modeling tool for first-year students because they can contribute to a desirable shift in students' reading habits. Students looking at the bewildering array of means by which they might respond to texts often either conclude that there are objectively valid answers to the question or, just as problematically, assume that anything at all is fair game. Reviews allow people to narrow their options by a definitional shift that looks like the following. Q: What are interesting issues in a text? A: What other people already find interesting about the text. It's something of an intro to what Stanley Fish calls “interpretive communities,” an idea that the meaning of texts isn't hidden within them, but is constructed amongst writers and readers.

Practical downsides to this approach are, of course, that students might just decide to borrow what they see, either outright cut-and-paste plagiarizing or mimicking the structure so closely that they might as well be. Luckily, these reviews rank high on Google's search priorities, so if the students can find them, so can the instructor. All technology, alas, comes with a price.*

*A footnote: when I wrote this, I had completely forgotten that I had already blogged about this topic once. However, I think it's different enough from the first post to justify its own existence, and so let's think of it as a sequel.

RHE 306; epideictic; rhetorical analysis

Learning How to Teach Tech

Casey Sloan — Thu, 23 Apr 2015 20:02:11 +0000

Author:

Casey Sloan

Image Credit:

Samuel M. Livingston

I’ve moved through several pedagogical zones of affect and modes of thought concerning the implementation of new technologies in the classroom. Curmudgeonly Luddite (“turn off that cell phone! It’s unnecessary and confusing!”) gave way to Controlling Enthusiast (“Look at this website! I am so impressive and tech-savvy!”) which yielded quickly to Good-natured Bungler (“Let’s play with these shiny things I don’t understand!”). Good-natured Bungler, captured in one of my former blog posts, saw some encouraging results when she counted on students to dive into new technologies, flail about and, essentially, teach themselves proficiency with unfamiliar tools. Now, I like the Good-natured Bungler. I think the Good-natured Bungler destabilizes the instructor/student power dynamic in productive and enjoyable ways. The Good-natured Bungler encourages students to count on themselves, to embrace inevitable failure, and to find learning techniques that work for them.

Lately, though, I’ve started to worry that being a Good-natured Bungler when it comes to technology might mean ignoring the real needs of students who have not developed the necessary skill set to dive, flail and teach themselves, at least where the digital is concerned.

I have always worried about presupposing that students come to my class with particular tools in their kits. From the definition of “thesis” to how to log in to Canvas, I have been foiled time and again my assumptions of shared experience and knowledge. That’s part of the reason the Good-natured Bungler appealed to me. Doesn’t the Good-natured Bungler take it for granted that skills have to be actively acquired before they can be used? Doesn’t she encourage students to try new things?

My first semester using Canvas, I urged students to try to solve their technical issues on their own before emailing me. Would a “Frequently Asked Questions” page or section answer their query? Had they tried uploading several different formats? The idea that they could figure out a program or a problem on their own honestly seemed novel and wicked to some. “Did you Google it first?” became a veritable refrain in my interactions with students.

But what about students who lack the basic digital skills to even begin to conceive of finding answers to their issues?

I’m wary of giving up on my current tactic of encouraging students to use unfamiliar programs and actively seek out the acquisition of new technical skills, but I also worry that I am unwittingly embracing the myth of the digital native.

I think I’m going to focus on teaching digital skills necessary for acquiring new digital skills. Digital research skills, if you will. That nested idea will probably involve a workshop on how to use Google efficiently and an overview of what sorts of digital learning tools, like the Lynda videos and Youtube.

April is the Cruelest Month: Crisis and Mental Health Resources

Lauren Grewe — Thu, 23 Apr 2015 19:49:11 +0000

Author:

Lauren Grewe

Image Credit:

Liam Moloney

Remembering Mental Health Resources During Finals

As T.S. Eliot puts it in The Waste Land:

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

For academics and students alike, April is one of the hardest months of the year, falling as it does in the midst of preparations for final exams and essays, and the grading that goes along with them.

At this stressful time of the year, it is more important than ever to refer our students and ourselves to the mental health resources that the University of Texas provides for employees and students. The UT Counseling and Mental Health Center provides help for students in crisis through a CMHC Crisis Line (512-471-CALL (2255)) and offers $5 individual, psychiatric and couples counseling.

While this information is important to provide to our students in crisis, the CMHC often gets busier at this time of year as well, so including their information in our syllabi and talking about their services before a crisis develops can be an important step. I just looked at my own syllabus, and, while I provided the Behavior Concerns Line, and the emergency evacuation information, I neglected to reference the CMHC. I plan to change this on my next syllabus.

Many psychiatric illnesses occur during the time students are in college, in men during the late teenage years and early twenties, and in women a bit later. The more we can give our students access to support during these difficult times, the better.

Moreover, by putting the CMHC on syllabi and discussing it with students, we are also fighting the stigma of mental illness in this country. At this time of the year, it's important to be aware of that stigma and work against it by providing information about counseling and mental health.

Video Feedback for Advanced Students

Kate Stevenson — Tue, 21 Apr 2015 19:56:27 +0000

Author:

Katharine Stevenson

Image Credit:

Wikipedia, uploaded by Afrank99

I knew as soon as my students turned in their first papers this semester that I would need to come up with a new style of feedback for them. The juniors and seniors in RHE 309: The Rhetoric of Tourism write very differently from the freshmen and sophomores I worked with in RHE 306. I've spent very little of this Fall semester working on MLA format, grammar, and organization, and lots of time being impressed with how insightful, critical, and articulate these older college students are about the complex issues that come up in discussions about travel and tourism. Line editing and basic revision techniques were out in this class from day one.

After my students turned in their first drafts, we met for individual "paper conferences." When asked what they liked and didn't like about the course so far, almost every student said something along the lines of, "I like how small the class is. I like how we really get to talk." In many cases, this class--at twenty-one students--was the smallest they had ever been in at UT. It was obvious that they valued and enjoyed the intimacy of the course. I decided that they needed feedback that extended the atmosphere of the classroom to the work they completed outside it.

When I first saw my digital classroom this semester, I was sure that the computers would reduce this kind of personal attention and make it harder for me to get to know my students and for them to get to know each other. But there are so many ways to turn the digital classroom to our advantage, and video feedback is now one of my favorites.

I switched to Canvas as soon as UT started offering it a few semesters ago, but this was the first semester that I asked my students to turn in all of their work digitally and began using the "Speed Grader" system online. Canvas has a "Media Comment" option build into this Speed Grader, in the form of a little webcam button in the bottom right corner:

videocomment1.png

A pop-up appears, and after checking the "allow" button, you're recording an audio and video comment on your student's paper, which Canvas then saves for them to view later:

videocomment2.png

At first, I was wary of making a video recording of myself talking about my students' work. What if they didn't even watch the videos? Worse, what if they did watch them and decided that they were hilarious? But I decided to give it a try and see what happened.

My students loved it, and so did I. Instead of a sentence or two of praise for their writing and a couple of questions for them to consider in the future, I actually discussed all of what my students had written, in much greater depth than I would have in the little text comment box that I usually used. Instead of making some general statements about a whole paper, I also brought up specific sentences and phrases that I liked or had questions about. The feedback was both more specific and more holistic than when it was put into writing. My students felt like their papers were part of ongoing discussions inside and outside of the classroom, and they liked being able to tell that I had "really read" their work.

This is a fantastic tool for more advanced writing students, one that's worth getting over the embarrassment inherent in recording yourself speaking!

"Don't Feel So Down": When Your Students Don't Understand Your References

Jeffrey Boruszak — Fri, 10 Apr 2015 18:30:56 +0000

Author:

Jeffrey Boruszak

Image Credit:

Flickr, wumpiewoo, 2010

I recently had a teaching experience I could only compare to being on a sinking ship—like the band on the Titanic, I played my song dutifully as I sunk into the murky waters. With every word I spoke, attempting to explain the material I prepared, I could sense the students’ disinterest, disengagement, and utter confusion. This wasn’t the first time I experienced this sinking feeling of a total misfire while teaching, nor do I expect it to be the last time. And do you know whose fault it was? Julian Casablancas.

Well, let me clarify—it was not Julian Casablancas himself that sunk my lesson, but rather the expectation that my students would know that in the early 2000’s there was a popular band called The Strokes. You see, I was in my introduction to rhetoric and writing class, and the topic of the day was identifying different kinds of evidence and relating them to the main argument. The centerpiece of my lesson was a group exercise involving an op-ed in The New York Times earlier that week. In “Brunch is for Jerks,” David Shaftel argues that Manhattan’s indulgent brunch atmosphere has hit a critical mass, and that the meal’s ubiquity is evidence of widespread gentrification and the failure of the ultra-hip millennial lifestyle. Or, in the words I figured wanted my students to get—“People may think brunch is still cool, but really it’s just two-thousand and late.”

The key to Shaftel’s argument about the hip-ness of brunch is his use of a Julian Casablancas quote at the beginning of his article: “I don’t know how many, like, white people having brunch I can deal with on a Saturday afternoon.” Shaftel comes back to Casablancas two more times in the piece, representing him as an arbiter of what is cool. “Perfect!” I thought, while preparing the lesson. “This example is straight out of the textbook’s chapter on evidence, and between talking about brunch and referencing a hit rock band, I can keep a fairly dry topic upbeat and engaging.”

WRONG. Once we were in the actual class, my students didn’t seem to really be getting to the “cool” part of Shaftel’s argument. I slowly tried maneuvering them to the paragraphs where Casablancas is mentioned. Still nothing. Finally, a student brings up brunch’s cool factor based on another paragraph. Here is my moment—I ask them to find evidence for the article’s argument on brunch’s coolness, but they can’t find it. As the search gets more and more drawn out, I eventually write Julian Casablanca’s name on the board. Crickets. They’ve never heard of this name before. “He’s the lead singer of The Strokes,” I tell them. Then came the moment I hadn’t been prepared for—my students had never heard of The Strokes.

I had been told this would eventually happen. Another professor told me that his students no longer understand his references to The Matrix, and that one day I would struggle after making what I thought of as a still-contemporary pop culture reference to something my students had no idea about.

And so there I was, caught entirely off-guard by a reference that my students just didn’t understand. And in this critical moment, I fumbled the ball. How do you explain what “cool” is, especially when your reference to what is cool is a rock star whose hit songs you suddenly realize came out over a decade before? Now my students seemed more lost than ever. I wanted to just move on—what I had prepared as the crown jewel of my lesson was a total wash. But there was nothing to move on to—I had to deal with “cool” on my students’ terms, not my own.

And so they left the class with bewildered looks on their faces. It didn’t help that my other examples besides Shaftel’s article also failed to hit their mark (one of these exercises was staging a debate over which Austin burger is better—Whataburger or P. Terry’s…except none of my students had been to nor heard of P. Terry’s). The next class I picked up the shattered dregs of my dignity, and gave them a boring Powerpoint reviewing kinds of evidence to reverse the effects of a disastrous lesson.

And so I am left with numerous questions: What do we as teachers do when we fail to connect with our students, especially when it comes to pop culture? It is something that will only get worse as time passes. But more importantly, what do we do when our references fail? How do we recover? For me the answer is now contingency plans—from this point forward, if I use a pop culture reference as a focal point in a lesson, I need to prepare options so that I don’t leave my class confused and bewildered.

But like I said before—despite my best intentions, this will not be the last time I have a lesson that falls apart in front of me. Maybe it won’t be from pop culture references next time. I’m sure that any teachers reading this have had their share of misfires in the past, and the fear of a bad lesson plan is a constant source of anxiety. So maybe the only option is to take a deep breath, and know that no matter how bad any individual lesson goes, there is always room to recover. Just remember to listen to Julian Casablancas: “Oh baby, don’t feel so down…gonna be alright.”

Practicing Rhetorical Analysis with Music Videos

Deb Streusand — Thu, 02 Apr 2015 23:24:52 +0000

Author:

Deb Streusand

Image Credit:

Screenshot by Deb Streusand from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-ORhEE9VVg, Taylor Swift's video for "Blank Space"

In my Rhetoric of Performance class, we begin each class day by watching and discussing a brief performance a student has brought in to share with the class. Since these performances are supposed to be 3-5 minutes, students frequently bring in music videos. With each performance, we do an informal rhetorical analysis.

First I ask the students what they noticed about the performance while they were watching. They frequently make note of things like symbolism and imagery – in other words, they tend to close read the videos. The goal of my line of questioning after that, however, is to bring them away from that tendency and into the world of rhetorical analysis.

I ask the students what they think the argument of the performance is. The argument of a performance is not like the argument of a written piece. With a good piece of persuasive writing, as a rule, everyone should come away from it with the same general idea of what the argument was. With a performance, it’s not a bad thing if we come away with some disagreement as to what the argument might be. The students often debate what the argument is, or bring in a multiplicity of answers, but they never have trouble finding some argument in the piece, even though music videos aren’t necessarily designed to make and defend a claim. One of the principles I put forth in teaching this class is that every performance has an argument. I believe this is true, but making the claim makes me a little nervous, because defending it is inevitably inductive – I will never conclusively prove that every single performance has an argument. However, each class day, my students add credence to my gradual inductive proof of this claim, because they have never failed to find an argument in any performance we’ve watched.

After we’ve wrangled over the argument for a while, we start talking rhetorical appeals. They don’t know that’s what we’re doing yet, though. We haven’t actually entered the rhetorical analysis unit. But we’ve been doing this all semester, from the second class day. By the time they get to rhetorical analysis, they’re already going to be pros at doing it – all that will be new to them is the terminology.

Every day, I ask them: what kind of persona does the performer present in making this argument? What is the intended audience, and how are they supposed to feel? How is the argument supported? What are the current social conversations to which this argument is contributing? Ethos, pathos, logos, kairos – all in a 4 minute video. My students practice rhetorical analysis 10-15 minutes per class day, all semester long. And because music videos are fun to watch and take apart, they have a great time while they’re doing it.

We don’t always watch music videos. Some students bring in short dance pieces, or political rants, or slam poetry. I mention music videos because they would be easy to incorporate into a non-performance rhetoric class as a warmup for rhetorical analysis. To make it simpler, the professor might choose them instead of having students bring them in, to make sure there’s lots to talk about – I always start the semester with Beyoncé’s video for “Flawless,” which has never failed to spark dialogue. The main point is to get the students used to doing rhetorical analysis while talking about something that’s fun.

Digital Feminism and the Bachelor

Lauren Grewe — Thu, 12 Mar 2015 16:34:50 +0000

Author:

Lauren Grewe

Image Credit:

Scott Smith

Can tweets about The Bachelor be feminist?

Throughout the Bachelor Finale and the "After the Final Rose" episode, Chris Harrison promised us, the "Bachelor Nation" an "unprecedented announcement." After much speculation on Twitter and at home, Jimmy Kimmel's gift of a steer named Juan Pablo and the coerced promise that Ashley S. would appear on Bachelor in Paradise, Chris Harrison revealed the big announcement: there would be two Bachelorettes next season instead of one, and the men would get to vote which Bachelorette would stay to the finale based on who would be the best wife. Supposedly this was because the "Bachelor Nation" was divided between Britt and Kaitlyn.

On the couch, my friend and I gasped. That's horrible! It's giving the men all the power! The point of The Bachelorette is that the woman gets to choose the men. Alas, Chris Harrison did not agree with us.

We quickly took to Twitter to read what the "Bachelor Nation" really thought. What we saw was horrified tweets from women about this new turn in The Bachelor's history. Many women saw this as a betrayal of women, letting the men be in charge yet again.

You might be wondering what The Bachelor has to do with pedagogy. Let me explain.

My experiences with using Twitter in the classroom have been decidedly mixed. I found that my students were hostile to the idea of more homework in the form of tweeting and that many of them did not already possess the social networking knowledge of how to use Twitter.

I want to use the feminist tweeting about The Bachelor as an example of the way that Twitter can build community, raise issues and promote discussion. Although there are many other examples of this that relate more closely to social justice, I think that The Bachelor tweeting will help students relate to social media in a more everyday manner.

To practice this kind of tweeting in the classroom, I will have them live tweet a short video clip like an advertisement. By honing their observations down to 140 characters, the students will learn to be precise.

While The Bachelor might not be all that pedagogical in itself, the lessons tweeted from The Bachelor may prove more instructive in the classroom than at first appearance.