Thursday, March 23, 2017

#4C17Link Collection and Drawing Winner

To help encourage folk who were at the recent Conference on College Composition and Communication in Portland March 15 - 18 to post links to their handouts or conference summaries, on Twitter, a contest evolved. It went like this:

Lauren E. Cagle tweeted:
 folks, please consider sharing links to your scripts and slides for  folks. For , include image descriptions!

That lead me to this idea:

 A contest for this. Use  & I will draw one name from a hat & send winner a copy of 's Mad at School: http://bit.ly/2nD0E7A

Margaret Price generously made it better:

 That is so exciting! I will sign it if you like. I have extra copies at home I can send out. Thanks for doing this! 

And so here we are. Ten folk jumped in and made links to handouts, websites, slides or blog posts about conference sessions they lead or attended.

The winner of the drawing is: Stephanie Wade of Unity College.

And here, in order of appearance, is the compiled list of links; to see them in their native Twitter habit, go to, visit https://twitter.com/hashtag/4c17link, and you can skim the hashtag thread. But trust me, this is faster:

1. @lecagle, Lauren Cagle: “How Can We Ethically Research Unethical Images” slides & talk script.  https://t.co/b4hqKqkfOO

2. @mintburlap, Dan McCormick: “Locating Queer Writing as Failure”
https://dtmccormick.wordpress.com/research/

3. @BenVilla4Real, Ben Villarreal‏: A Blog Post on His First 4C’s after 10 Years in the Field and copy of his handout on Introducing Students to Twine.
http://gamesandteaching.blogspot.com/2017/03/dissertations-digial-posters-on-my.html

4. @tgrett, Teresa Grettano‏: Slides from Cultivating Collaboration Between Information Literacy & Writing Instruction, fellow presenters Barbara D’Angelo, Michelle Albert, & Caroline Sinkinson
http://tinyurl.com/tgrett-slides

5. @invernessfalls, m∆tt gømes (Mathew Gomes): Slides from I.21, “Reframing Writing Assessment” w/ fellow presenters Catherine DeLazzero, Bridget Fullerton, & Dayna Goldstein
http://goo.gl/s1gjTb

6. @CSmithMo, Cheryl Smith‏: “Resources for “Social Annotation (SA) for Close Reading”,
http://tinyurl.com/CSmithMo-slides

7. @cwittig, Carol Witting, Slides from panel A.21 “The Future of College Writing, And How to Stop It” http://tinyurl.com/cwittig-slides

8. @stwade, Stephanie Wade, “Root Systems: Creating & Sustaining Community Connections Via School Gardens,” w/ co-panelists Veronica House, Carla Sarr, Kelly Shea, & Sarah Young
http://tinyurl.com/stwade-slides

9. @lygeia1, Ligia Mihut, Tweet included image of her handout —
https://twitter.com/lygeia1/status/843145603601260544

10. @cbdilger, Bradley Dilger‏ Included a link to The Corpus & Repository of Writing, http://writecrow.org/, which has summaries of session A.10 & H.47 on the homepage.

Tuesday, February 14, 2017

#worthassigning: Daryl Davis on Conversing with People Who Hate

Conor Friedersdorf, a conservative opinion writer for The Atlantic has a new post up (2/13/17) titled, 'Every Racist I Know Voted for Donald Trump' at http://theatln.tc/2kOWZEd.

It's worth a look.  Friedersdorf's title comes a quote by the man he profiles, Daryl Davis. Some of you might be familiar with Davis, but this is the first I ran across him and his project. He's a black musician who tries to persuade members of the KKK to leave that group. Friedersdorf provides a transcript of some of what Davis said in an interview with Love and Radio (http://loveandradio.org/2017/02/how-to-argue/). 

Here's a snippet of that, via Friedersdorf:

A Davis do:

“Look for commonalities. You can find something in five minutes—even with your worst enemy. And build on those. Say I don't like you because you're white and I'm black. You disgust me … And so our contention is based upon our races. But you're like, ‘how do you feel about all these drugs on the street, and all these meth labs that are popping up?’ And I say, I think the law needs to crack down on things that people can get addicted to very easily and it's destroying our society. So you say, ‘Well yeah, I agree 100 percent.’ You might even tell me your son started dabbling in drugs. They don't discriminate. So now I see that you want what I want, that drugs are affecting your family the same way they affect my family, so now we're in agreement. So let's focus on that. As we focus more and more and find more things in common, things we have in contrast, such as skin color, matter less and less.”

A Davis don’t:

“You can become argumentative but don't become condescending. Don't become insulting. You're going to hear things that you don't like. You're going to hear things that you know are absolutely wrong. And their opinion may be ridiculous. You will also hear things that are not opinions that they're going to put out as facts. ‘There are more black people on welfare than white people.’ Well, that's not true. And you should counter that and correct that. But don't do it in a manner that is insulting or condescending because you know they're wrong, and you're going to beat them over the head for being wrong. Show them the data, or tell them you'll get it, or if they really believe it, say, I know you're wrong, but if you think you're right then bring me the data.”

A lot of what Davis says you can find in a good argument or rhetoric textbook. But hearing someone say it who practices it, and speaks in a contemporary voice from compelling experience, might be useful. This is lived argument and embodied respect. Note how much of Davis's work centers on listening and accepting the other person as a person. It's not that one accepts a vile idea, or a bad reasoning, but that before moving to disagreements, one listens with respect. And patience. And then responds with respect and reason and persistence, but not rancor.

I can see using the Friedersdorf piece, or the link through it to the full Love and Radio interview, as preface to a conversation about how class discussions might go, especially in courses that will be touching on contemporary political policy issues or themes.  Or it might be used to supplement an argument course, or a course on civic responsibility or critical thinking or courses touching on things like fake news and media literacy.

Friday, March 11, 2016

Thoughts on HBCU and PWI Writing Centers After Reading Karen Keaton Jackson's WCJ Post

Thanks to Karen Keaton Jackson for contributing to The Writing Center Journal's Community site as a guest blogger.

In a post at http://www.writingcenterjournal.org/new-blog//why-have-hbcus-been-absent-from-the-writing-center-party called "WHY HAVE HBCUs BEEN ABSENT FROM THE WRITING CENTER PARTY?," Karen writes about how work loads and lack of funds make it hard for writing center directors and tutors in HBCU's to get active on a national scale. 

The following response to Karen, which I could not manage to get to go into her post's comments, doesn't answer the national question directly. It does the opposite; it looks at more local and smaller possibilities. But what I hope is that by doing, when and where possible, more local conferences and writing projects that may require less time to complete, may create more entry into the field's national discussion.

Karen,

My job at Bedford/St. Martin's brings me to HBCU's once or twice a year, and so I've seen some of what you describe about work loads, lack of travel support, sometimes lack of professional development support. Those issues are not unique to HBCU's, but given that HBCU's, as you note, make up only 3% of U.S. higher ed institutions, the impact weighs more heavily for HBCU's overall than PWI's overall.

Time and money are hard challenges to overcome in an era of still-shrinking and ever more scarce resources. So I’m writing really to brainstorm some things that might help address that. These aren’t perfect ideas, and won’t work for all people in all places, but they might help.

The ideas build on your step #1: communication.

First, on travel support, I wonder if this might work to build HBCU and PWI writing center families’ interactions: where a PWI with faculty active in Writing Center scholarship and community is near an HBCU with a writing center, meet for lunch, or arrange for tutor swaps or cross tutor visits. 

Perhaps it would be possible to hold a local, one day or half day writing center symposium. Or perhaps a joint tutor professional development.  

An off shoot of these local meetings, HBCU&PWI DIY Conferences and Professional Development, to give it an abbreviation heavy name, might lead to more writing. 

You wite honestly about getting writing done, sometimes sadly only in your head. You wrote too about being the last person on the team to turn in edits on two of three of your collaborative projects. 

As hard as it is, you are finding a way to write. I would guess, that it might be easier for others to make time if they too could find ways to do more collaborative projects. Working with someone to reach a goal, whether it’s an exercise buddy, a book club to sustain reading, can help in many ways. 

Collaborative writing is social, and for that perhaps restorative in a way that writing alone may not be.  Also, it’s possible to choose writing projects that might be easier to complete, genres (the interview, the lesson plan, the description of practice or policy) that because they come from lived experience and insights might come to fruition more readily than pieces, like a formal longer form journal article, that usually take more time to not only write, but work through the peer review process. And a lot of these kinds of pieces, like your own blog posts on WCJ site,  Karen, can find their way into the national discussion.

And so one can imagine too a combination of conference/meet up and the writing. Two centers  -- maybe both HBCU's, maybe an HBCU and PWI in the same town, get together to not only share insights and begin a collegial conversations, but maybe just using the time together to write together, perhaps with fun food and drink so that the finding of words happens with the breaking of bread.


Thursday, December 17, 2015

My Grandmother's Courage and Using Writing to Reveal Different Truths

For me, the story starts May 6, 1929, when my grandmother, Frances Corridino Carbone, appeared before the Board of Pardons to plead for my great grandfather's release from prison. Research from my Aunt Fran discovered that Victor R. Le Valley, writing in the Hartford Courant on May 7, 1929, had the following item among a list of pardon reports he filed that day:
Pleads for Father. 
Flushed with a girlish beauty, Frances Corradino of 48 Morgan Street made a tearful plea for the pardoning of her father, Gaetano Corradino, alleged member of black hand gang and charged with luring one Saladino to his death in Suffield nine years ago. 
“I’ll be 15 years old next Sunday,” she cried, “and it would be a real pleasure to have my Dad home again. Daddy,” she said, turning to the fair-haired, handsome man she so much resembled, “do you want to say something? 
Corradino spoke in spread-eagle fashion of his life before the crime, and Assistant State’s Attorney Donald A. Gaffney replied with the concluding statement, “I don’t think his family needs him so much.” 
Frances flared up at this. Undaunted by the presence of the august board of pardons, she stood up and retorted, “Well, I still think I need him. I ask you to put yourself in our place and ask yourself if you wouldn’t want him back. My father is no murderer.”
She went away weeping on her sister’s shoulder, and her father went back through the door he had come, to resume the drill and discipline of his weary prison life.
Isn't that language something? You don't hear or read phrases such as "flushed with girlish beauty"; "handsome man she so much resembled"; or "resume the drill and discipline of his weary prison life" all that much anymore. They were commonplace for a daily paper in 1929 but sound poetic now, or maybe even overly sentimental and melodramatic.

And so the writing teacher in me imagines an exercise where students draft a similar small piece, just a few graphs, describing some small human interaction -- a conversation at lunch, a meeting, a disagreement over a bill. They might draft in their native vernacular, just to get something down, and then be asked to revise using more, florid?, melodramatic?, fictional?, poetic?, language. The exercise would be one, perhaps, in shifting the purpose of the story telling for a different effect or audience. And maybe for contrast from to the other, since we'd be playing at an imitation game, students might also recount the same event using the language and tropes of police report, or insurance investigation report, or some other account that generally affects dispassionate (so called) tone.

The idea in all this imitation is simply to play, but also to explore, in the play, what is true, or rather what truth is emphasized and in what way for what purpose.

For there is truth in the words Le Valley used.

Here are two pictures, my great grandfather and my grandmother, so you can see why she would be described as having "girlish beauty" (though the portrait of her is well after the parole hearing, we think a high school class photo) and he as a "fair-haired, handsome man."  You'll certainly see the resemblance of her to him.

The photo of her, I believe, is from her senior year of high-school, when she would have been 18. In 1929, when she marched into the Board of Pardons hearing, she was only 15.  When her father was arrested in 1919, she was five. As my second cousin Nick recounts here, in a speech about his grandparents given at a Toastmasters event, the family believed our great grandfather was framed. Nick recounts how gangsters threatened Gaetano's family, specifically to kill his wife, my great grandmother, if the family spoke out in his defense at the time of trial.

Gaetano Corridino, my great grandfather, 1885- 1935

His daughter Frances, my grandmother, 1914 - 1990

What went unseen for years in my family was this story. My great grandfather died in prison, despite my grandmother's persistence in trying, before she was 18 even, to prove his innocence.  My second cousin Nick's grandfather, Nick, (whom Nick was named after), was Frances's brother. In his speech, my cousin Nick recounts his grandfather describing how shortly after the police stormed into their home to arrest his father, two members of the mafia came to the house and threatened to kill Gaetano's wife, our great grandmother, if she spoke to his innocence.

Gaetano was convicted.  Gaetano had been a master mason, and because he could read and write,  was a masonry foreman on the building of the G. Fox Department store in Hartford. So while not rich, he earned enough income to support a family six children. After my great-grandfather's arrest, the family had no income. This was before the New Deal, so no welfare, no aide. As my cousin recounts, his grandfather Nick dropped out of school at 6th grade to work. My great grandmother went to work in menial service jobs, and the older kids watched the younger kids. The family was ostracized, the children taunted at school;  they grew up either in or barely out of poverty for many hard years. And memories in the neighborhood lingered, the story stayed current, and even after 10 years, my grandmother heard taunts. Still, she persisted, going to the parole board with her sister, speaking for her family where he mother could not (Nonny spoke the same very broken English Gaetano spoke).

Still, despite the setback described in the item above by Le Valley, my grandmother persisted in her father's defense. This is from a May 8, 1934 round up of board of pardon hearings:
Daughter Makes Plea 
When the young daughter of Gaetanno Corradino, who has been serving a life sentence since October 29, 1920 for a murder committed in East Hartford, appeared for the sixth time and made a sympathetic plea for her father, State's Attorney Alcorn replied that he would not accept any responsibility if the board released Corradino. He denounced the crime as a brutal one and said the man was killed because he knew the facts of another murder. Mr. Alcorn said he sympathized with Corradino's family and praised the girl for her loyalty but told the board, "You are asked to endorse a particular form of favoritism."
Writing teacher aside: You'll note the above item, written just five years after the first item by Le Valley, comes closer to a contemporary newspaper idiom. It is more dispassionate. Yet there are details that hint at the emotion exposed in Le  Valley's account: "made a sympathetic plea" and "sympathized with Corradino's family and praised the girl."  But the repeated use of  'sympathy' in root form requires readers to supply their own details, or at least more details than Le Valley's account.

So the writing above tells as much about the outcome, but reveals less about the flavor and emotions of the hearing. Contrasting these kinds of passages, or having students create their own variations and making their own contrasts, helps get at the one of the delightful things about writing -- the choices writers make about tone, details, voice, point of view. Those choices empower writers, and for student writers especially, who often feel insecure and unsure of power they do have, learning to engage these small sentence level choices is offers them a chance to write, for a passage or two anyway, with some power. Now the writer may not succeed -- the choices made, the attempt made may fail. But that's okay; the value is in the freedom to try.

Meanwhile, back to truth. There is truth in the sympathy attributed to Mr. Alcorn.

My grandmother told my father that Mr. Alcorn later offered to pay her way to law school, so impressed was he with her poise and preparation. I don't know if my great grandfather was ever pardoned; I find no record of it, but his obituary from February 5, 1935 indicates he died at home.
Gaetano Corridino of 611 Wethersfield Avenue died Monday at his home after a short illness. He was born in Palazzolo, Italy, and was 50 years old. He leaves his wife, Mrs.  Frances (Zgro) Corridino; three daughters, Mrs. Mary Maltese, Miss Frances Corridino and Miss Rose Corridino of Hartford; three sons, Nicholas Corridino, Thomas Corridino and Bruno Corridino of Hartford, and a sister in Italy. The funeral will be held Wednesday at 8:30 a.m. at his home, with a solemn high mass at 9 o'clock at St. Augustine's Church. Burial will be in Mt. St. Benedict Cemetery.
The above obit notice possibly obscures a truth and reveals a desire. My great grandfather's death certificate showed his place of residence at time of death to be a state prison that was in Wethersfield, CT.  The funeral notice above was crafted with the aide of  funeral director. It's short, and sad on its own -- 50 is young, even back in 1935 it was young. But it also hides as it was intended to do, by averring death at home, the larger family tragedy and trauma. Because the truth is saying that he died in prison would have caused more pain and embarrassment, more taunts at school, and opprobrium from neighbors.

And so it is that sometimes we need and want writing to hide certain truths. The important facts in the obit notice are not where Gaetano died, but that his wife, sister in Italy, and children had lost a husband, brother and father. What matters is where the funeral, mass and burial will be, so those who care about Gaetano's survivors can offer their support. The death notice, as an act of writing, is a turn to something more normal: more families are absent fathers and husbands from death than imprisonment. It must have, on some level, become easier for my grandmother and great aunts and uncles, to say, "I am a widow," or "my father passed away," as a means to address his absence as life moved forward.

It certainly seemed that way for my grandmother.

Over time my grandmother and great aunts and uncles managed to pull themselves and their mother out of poverty. My great Uncle Nick became a successful business man, and his brothers Bruno and Tommy worked with him before Nick moved to Arizona. Bruno and Tommy served in combat in World War II. My grandmother met and married Carl V. Carbone, who became a successful restaurateur, and started her own family.

She worked at her father's innocence as though a lawyer, doggedly, doing the leg work. But he died in prison, and the shame of his fate, that she couldn't win his release was a personal humiliation despite her courage and pride, her willingness to stand up before the justice system on his behalf.

And so she never spoke of her father to her children.

Until one day my father came across a bible that was hidden away in the attic. He saw the name Gaetano, the dates and newspaper clippings, not only of the parole hearing, but from years before that, at the trial. For though she was a newborn at the time of his arrest, and a toddler when her father was convicted and sentenced to life, my grandmother, in her early teens, researched the case, the law, and gathered news accounts, trial transcripts, police reports. She talked to lawyers and judges looking for a way to overturn the conviction or to win his parole. She wanted back the father she mainly came know from prison visits.

My father, of course, asked her about the bible, and she told him under the condition that he not say anything to his siblings, my aunts and uncles. The bible had been my great grandfather's prison bible, his consolation and stay against "his weary prison life." My grandmother kept it hidden, stored and saved. I imagine she kept it as a touchstone, and perhaps a token of memory she could return to when the house was otherwise empty, or think upon knowing it was stored when she tended to her siblings, and later her children and then her mother, who came to live with her after she married.

I wonder if my great grandmother and she sat over it together, or if they spoke of Gaetano, or whether both women kept their thoughts and longings silent.

Still, for all her shame, my grandmother, as the court reporter's sketch shows, was also proud and determined, keenly intelligent.

And the writing I wish the family had, and surely it existed, would be the writing my grandmother did in her pursuit of her father's exoneration -- letters to pardon boards, drafts of appeals, petitions to the courts, notes from her research.

I wonder what truths, and despite her anguish, what determination, her words would reveal.