Plug and Play: My Much-Anticipated Proclamation of Love for Rubrics

Grab your colorful writing implements! It's rubric time! Photo by @alyssasieb.

In the Spring of 2017, long before I ever thought about becoming a CITL grad affiliate or even particularly understood my own interest in teaching, I participated in the "Four Friends and a Book" reading group hosted by a CITL grad affiliate. We read parts of Ken Bain's What the Best College Teachers Do and discussed how Bain's ideas related to our own practices and disciplines. I recently rediscovered the discussion questions and my answers that we each prepared in advance of these sessions, and realized with a start that this was the beginning of the story I promised to tell you so long ago, about how I became a rubric enthusiast.

In the Beginning: A Skeptic

A selected excerpt from my notes on the Pre-Meeting Assignment for Meeting 3, in response to a question about whether rubrics were the tools of excellent teachers or merely time-consuming busywork:

• I’m struck by “Students focus on grades. Sad, but true” (7)

• I think this could have potential usefulness for conveying some of those learning aspirations that Bain references repeatedly, though the rubric’s obsessive focus on the grade is why I have shied away from using them before. They always seem to be something that promises to make the subjective objective by putting it in a chart—“mastery of material” or “effective use of evidence” is now clear and undeniably interpretable because it’s in a table!

• I do like the idea of students helping to create these—that would give me a sense also of not only what they expect but what they know and what I could work on explaining.

This list of reactions struck me as interesting for a few reasons.

• First, I am notorious (with myself, at least) for taking notes that have no content other than the quotation I thought was "interesting." Can you elaborate, past Leanna? No, I could, apparently, not.

• Next, wow, was I skeptical! Rubrics "could have potential usefulness"-- that's Leanna-speak for "I guess you may have a small point and I don't like it."

My referenced qualm about the concept of rubrics, meanwhile, now strikes me as being a super-real critique of many rubrics I'd seen as a student and in teaching workshop examples, which I found impenetrable and not very specific, likely because they were trying to be all things to all graders--vague enough you could use them for many different projects or pieces of writing.

What is a rubric?

There are a few different styles of rubric, the most common three of which are well-described in Know Your Terms: Holistic, Analytic, and Single Point Rubrics. I tend to be most comfortable with an analytic rubric, which breaks down criteria of an assignment and helps the grader look at each in isolation to arrive at a total score. For example, the rubrics I’ve featured here previously in posts about teaching The Underground Railroad and The Crucible have been analytic rubrics. 

However, rubrics don’t have to be so detailed to be useful. My simplest "rubric" was one I scribbled quickly on every one of the weekly reflection papers for my Fiction and the Historical Imagination class. It began from the instructions from a document called Weekly Response Expectations:

 

• Comment thoughtfully on reading.

• Use evidence from reading.

• Tie readings together, either within week or with previous weeks.

Which turned into a little abbreviated list that I added to the bottom of each paper with a brief comment about each:

 

• Content

• Analysis

• Connections

 

If you had all three, you had full points. If you missed one or two, I noted they were missing. If you could have done more, I noted which needed a little attention. It's not that this is an example or perfect or ideal rubric making-- this could have been a lot better! But for a frequent and low-stakes assignment, it made life quite a bit easier to organize my thoughts in this way, and it seems to lead students toward some quite intriguing and freeform thinking, which was my hope and my goal.

What Changed?: Why I Like Rubrics

As you can probably tell, my feelings about rubrics changed from the time I was writing about their “potential usefulness” to the time I was creating a new and tailored rubric for every assignment I graded. This moment of reflecting on and talking about rubrics in concert with other teachers set off a chain reaction– I tried it, I liked it, and I didn’t want to go back. So, here's the verbs that rubrics help to do:

Refining

One of the critically helpful things about getting into rubric construction was how it forced me to refine how I was conceptualizing the assignment before grading it-- indeed, before I even assigned it. I wanted students to know how they were going to be graded before they started working on their assignments so that they knew how to prioritize their time and attention, what I was looking for, and so that they had the best chance of actually succeeding at that assignment's goals. So, I needed to figure that out, and often breaking things down into the rubric forced me to clarify my instructions and reflect on what was actually important-- every single one of four criteria cannot be fifty percent of the grade, so how much, exactly, should each be worth in the final score? How can I best express success in each criterion via words on a page to actually make them specific and helpful, rather than leaning on a vagueness like "mastery of material"-- what will showcase that they have mastered the material well, and can I just straight-up tell them to do that in the instructions and isolate it in the rubric?

Prioritizing

Past Leanna was affronted by how rubrics focused on the grade, whereas I apparently saw the process as being more about the mystical process of providing tailored feedback, with the grade hinging upon it but incidental to "the point." I now tend to see "the grade" and "the feedback" as two aspects of the process of grading (which is, obviously, not universal-- if you are ungrading or teaching in an ungraded context, great!). If you can simplify "getting to the grade," you have more time to tailor your feedback. This is something I mention frequently in my current role-- it's not that you are skimping on grading by doing it more quickly; rather, you're making more efficient the parts that are not personalized so that you can spend your time tailoring the more individualized feedback to the student, instead of just writing "Remember to proofread your paper before submitting" on thirty-seven separate papers and trying to ascertain after reading whether this feels like a B+ or an A- paper. 

Guiding and Aligning

When I was a teaching assistant, there was quite a bit of uncertainty regarding the role of the teaching assistant. In many ways, our sections were like our own class, and we ran them in fairly individualized ways. In others, we had little power to craft the class in our own image. The result was quite a lot of inconsistency, as an assignment you interpreted as being "about" one skill or content area might be interpreted by another teaching assistant for the same course to be "about'' a different skill or content area, and the professor leading the course might have still another take. Now that many of the folks reading my blog are likely professors or teachers of some type themselves (hooray!), you have the power to help the folks you are supervising or may one day supervise in your courses figure out how the heck to grade student assignments by creating a rubric and collaborating on minor edits as each assignment approaches in order to align assignment expectations between sections. In an individual way, making rubrics also helped me create consistency across assignments-- is there a reason why I think organization should be thirty percent of this project but only ten percent of the last one? If so, I should make that clear; if not, I should try to figure out how important organization should be to this type of project.

If you have strong feelings about rubrics (positive or negative), you’re obviously not alone. If you want to share them with me, feel free to drop them in the comments! 

Enough About Me: Using Interactive Fiction Tools for Source Analysis, Part II

    

The time has come: It's part II. In my last post, I introduced an activity made in Twine which can be adapted for various sources, allowing students to undertake a source analysis. In this post, I'll show how how it came together. 

How Did You Make This?

Good question! I'll break it down. 

First, I popped open my Twine application, which looks like this: 

Screenshot of my Twine archive. 

To start a new story, I clicked the green button on the right. Then, a blank canvas awaited! I added the first passage. 

The first passage of Source Analysis I, in Twine. 
(Note: the story format I used for this project is called Chapbook.
More on this, and why it's important, below.) 

Each passage represents a different page of text. As you may have noticed, there are a few parts to this passage. The title at the top, which is not seen by the player. The tag section, which I'll ignore for now because I rarely use it. And the text section, which is where you put the words you want students/players to see. 

You may have also noticed a couple of codey-looking things here in the text section. First, the double asterisks (**) surrounding some phrases, which makes them bold. Secondly, the double brackets; these are the most important things you need to make a Twine. Every double bracket makes a link somewhere else, usually to another passage. If you put a double bracket around some text, it creates a link to another passage and titles it with that text. Twine then puts an arrow connecting the first passage to the new passage. (You may also notice the external link above-- more on that later.) After completing Source Analysis I, I had a structure that looked like this: 

The entire structure of Source Analysis I, in Twine. 

You also may have noticed that the two different paths available in Source Analysis I have the same questions, but one allows text inputs and one doesn't. Here's the passage for the first set of questions without text input: 

"there were many that corrupted the service of the Lord" passage, in Twine.

The only code here is {back link}, which provides a link back to the previous passage labelled "Back."

For comparison, here is the corresponding passage from the other track of the activity with the text inputs: 

"service2" passage with text input code, in Twine. 

All that was needed for me to put in the text input boxes was to pop in a bracket ([), tell Twine I wanted a text box (text input for:), specify a variable ('serviceA'), and close with a bracket. I also opted to make them optional (required: false), so that students could move back and forth between pages as much as they wanted. Each of the text input boxes throughout the activity has a different variable attached to the information that the student puts in that box.

I also chose to relabel the "Back" links on these pages, to reassure players that this responses would be saved if they went back (label: 'Save and go back to excerpt').

The last critical piece of this activity is the final page, which returns all of the variables I set on the other pages and lets students know how to turn in their answers:

"Submission Instructions" passage with variables, in Twine. 

When I completed this activity (putting in some truly solid answers if I do say so myself), skipping some questions and answering others, this was what my final page looked like, with the answers I gave replacing the variables on the page above and the unanswered questions simply printing the name of that variable. 

Screenshot of final passage with example answers, in itch.io.

Finally, I published the game to an HTML file by going to the name of the game at the bottom left, clicking on it to bring up a menu, then clicking the last option:

Source Analysis I structure with menu open, in Twine. 

Limitations...

In the last post, I focused on goals and benefits of using this activity or something like it. Now I want to highlight a few limitations and things to consider if you want to use something like this for yourself. 

...of this activity

• You may notice that if you choose Passage I, the option in which you type nothing, or if you don't put text in a box, the final page shows the variable for the empty boxes instead of just being blank. There are ways in which to make this display differently, but I wanted to keep this example relatively simple. If you're curious, feel free to reach out. 
• I noticed that Print To PDF for the end page did not work well on itch.io, but it did all right when I tried a version of the game posted within an LMS. So, your mileage may vary on being able to capture the last page in a PDF versus other methods like screenshots or copying and pasting the text. 

...of Twine

• Twine remembers things in the browser. As the beginning screen of this activity notes, that means that someone who wants to do this activity needs to use the same browser all the time. They should not use incognito mode if they want to save their progress (and depending on the game, it may not work in incognito at all). This also means that anyone opening the same browser on that computer will open the activity to the same point and with the same information still saved in the input boxes, so remember this if you have anyone sharing devices. 
• Depending on how you host your Twine, it may not show up on mobile, or display awkwardly. (You used to be able to use philome.la and it was so easy--- but alas, it is no more. Here's hoping someone picks up this torch). To ameliorate this issue, there are a couple of things you can do; I'll offer what I think are the two easiest.
• You can upload Twine files to an LMS and play right within the LMS page-- different systems all handle this slightly differently. I tried with this game on an old Compass page and it seemed to work well in both the Blackboard Instructor app and in a mobile browser. 
• You can also upload your game/activity/interactive whatnot to itch.io. After you create an account, you can upload games and activities' HTML files (which is what Twine gives you when you publish your activity). This is where, as you may have noticed, this activity is hosted. Itch.io offers a lot of options-- you can fiddle with the size of the display (Source Analysis I is 650x900), check a box to enable mobile-friendliness, etc. Lots of Twine games are hosted there.
• Lastly, Twine can incorporate photos and audio, but the image and audio files themselves can't live within the game file, which can get a bit tricky. I would rate incorporating those things as a bit more advanced than you may want to experiment with on your first go-round, but it is doable. 

I want to experiment with Twine! 

Hooray! Just visit https://twinery.org/ to get started. You can use the tool in your browser, which will save your work to the browser, or you can use the downloaded version (I prefer this). 

Please note: Like player progress, Twine also saves your projects in progress themselves in your browser (whether you use the desktop version or not), meaning that deleting your history, cookies, etc can wipe away your games too. To avoid disaster, archive often: From the story list, click the "Archive" button on the right, then save the resulting file to a location you can find later. This will bring your entire library back if you lose it!

I want to make something like this or edit this to make my own thing!

Hooray! Feel free to use this framework in your classes,  and change it however works for you. (If you publicly post any versions, a linkback here would be nice, and I'd love to hear about your project!) All the text in the project can be found here (so if the screenshots above are difficult to read, you can find all the text they display here as well).

Please note: There are multiple story formats (that is, highly specific programming languages) for Twine, meaning that depending on which one your Twine is set to,  some commands or features are done differently. This activity uses the Chapbook story format, which is relatively new and easier to learn than older formats. If you'd like to use Chapbook, set that as your format by clicking the title of your game while you're editing it, then clicking "Change Story Format" and selecting Chapbook. If you want to learn more about what you can do in Chapbook, see the Chapbook Story Format Guide.

However, all story formats will let you use double brackets to let you link between passages; for example, [[Passage I]]. If that's all you want to do, you don't need to worry about story formats.

Questions? Ideas for using Twine in other ways? Let me know! 

Enough About Me: Using Interactive Fiction Tools for Source Analysis, Part I

 

Scrolling text gif courtesy of Screedbot.

I've recently been rediscovering my love of interactive fiction, a formative medium for me when I was growing up. 

A Brief Intro to Interactive Fiction

Interactive fiction (IF) includes several different classifications of thing, but usually the term refers to text-based (though not necessarily exclusively text) software games or stories which allow players to have some amount of control over how and/or when the story unfolds. There are two main styles of IF: choose your own adventure (CYOA) style, which offers a limited number of options that you can click on (similar to the old Choose Your Own Adventure books, which had you make decisions by flipping to a particular page), and parser IF, which allows you to type in the actions you want to take within the narrative. Some interactive fictions are more focused on telling a story,  while others are more focused on creating a game experience (solving puzzles, winning). 

Screenshot from CYOA style game Birdland, by Brendan Patrick Hennessy. Surprisingly, unrelated to my Fiction and the Historical Imagination course. 

Screenshot from parser IF game Counterfeit Monkey, by Emily Short.
Image: Media Archaeology Lab. 

Before recently, I had never really tried to make my own games, content to play others (almost entirely parser IF); however, more recently I've been working on a few personal projects in the CYOA style. In this post, I want to talk about a couple of ways to use a tool often used for creating CYOA-style interactive fiction in the classroom: Twine.  

Make Your Own Adventure

When I sat down to write this post, I thought that I'd talked before here about using Twine for history courses, but it turns out that I've only briefly mentioned the beginning of the Western unit. So, I'll preface this by saying that I've used Twine before in the classroom, assigning students to make their own takes on the Western genre which incorporated gamified or choice elements. Twine is a great tool for this sort of thing because it is very easy to learn enough to get started making a narrative. My Fiction and the Historical Imagination students used Twine for a "hackathon," spending the whole of a 50-minute class period putting together their games in small groups, and did a fantastic job embracing, challenging, and pushing the limits of the Western genre. 

So, Twine can pretty easily be used as a student assignment tool. However, there are also ways in which instructors can make something in Twine to assign to students. Here's one example that works well for history: source analysis, especially close readings of shorter texts. So, being curious about how this might look, I knocked out a potential example, which you can experiment with either in the embedded version below or directly on itch.io.

"Source Analysis I" (a creative title right up there with my childhood stuffed animals "Lamby" and "Mr. Bear") took me about an hour and a half, not counting all of the other distractions I got up to along the way like changing the wording around, taking screenshots for this post, and testing it on a variety of devices and browsers. The goal is for students to click on the parts of the text that are linked to questions related to that phrase or idea, and answer the corresponding questions. As you may notice, this version of the activity offers students the option to collect their answers in their own document and turn that in, or type their answers directly into text boxes under each question; the answers are then returned to them all together at the end in a single page that can be emailed, printed, or submitted to an LMS. One could also assign only one or the other format; I wanted to include both in this activity to illustrate that there are multiple options for doing this sort of activity (and you can offer all, some, or only one to your students directly), and that one takes almost no "coding" and the other only minimal coding.

How much coding, you ask? In part II, I'll walk through the process of creating the activity, and talk more about the limitations of this particular version and of Twine overall. For now, though, I'll leave you with some of the...

Benefits of this activity

One of the things that can often be difficult about reading for college courses is figuring out how, exactly, you are supposed to read something. In history courses, we often want students to skim the textbook and pay close attention to the details of a primary source, but it can be difficult to explain and emphasize this distinction in a way that feels natural.  I like that rendering a passage in Twine this way, with particular segments linked to related questions, makes the act of close reading feel more intentional, and the source as a whole a bit less daunting. Selecting a particular phrase and digging deeply into it becomes a more finite undertaking; it is no longer a long sheet of questions but rather a series of small tasks directly embedded into the text itself. 

This version is a bit handholdy, suitable for an introduction to this sort of close reading. One could climb a bit higher on Bloom's Taxonomy by asking one or more follow-up questions; I like the idea of asking a student what segment of the text they would highlight and questions they would add if they were going to edit the game themselves. 

I'll be back with part II soon, with a detailed walkthrough of how to make a similar activity. If there are any particular questions or features you'd like me to address, feel free to drop them in comments! 

Related links:

 

If you want to try playing interactive fiction yourself, the Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB) is a great place to start. (You might find this friendly beginner list or this other friendly beginner list useful.

 

The Interactive Fiction Archive might be of interest to digital humanists/technology historians.

Flashback Roundup: The Birthday of Bourne

There's been a lot of talk about the Spanish Flu recently for obvious reasons. While many people have varying associations with that particular epidemic, it always makes me think of radical antiwar bohemian and disabled writer Randolph Bourne, who died of it at age 32 in 1918. In honor of Randolph Bourne's birthday (May 30), I'm revisiting two posts on Bourne's lesser-discussed life and work. In addition to the sources linked below, you can read some of his writings at the Internet Archive, or listen to some of his essays at LibriVox. 

Randolph Bourne, Student Radical (originally published November 6, 2017)

I love it when my research allows me to indulge some personal curiosity I have about something. This was the case on my trip to Northampton, where I peeked in at the Helen Gurley Brown papers. Primarily, I sought information on Brown's sister Mary, a polio survivor, but also enjoyed peeking at the papers I had so longed to look at three years before, when I was finishing up my master's thesis on Brown's revitalized version of Cosmopolitan.

Visiting the Randolph Bourne papers at Columbia provided a different sort of satisfaction: getting a closer look at a character from the first Reacting to the Past game I ever encountered, Greenwich Village, 1913 (habitually shortened to GV). I looked at Bourne's papers in the hopes of finding some personal reflections on or similar to his work in "The Handicapped-- By One of Them" to use in my dissertation research about children with disabilities in the early twentieth century. However, in addition to learning a bit more about this piece and its reception (which I'll discuss more in a future post), I also found resources from Bourne's college days which shed light on some of the conflicts within the Greenwich Village game and the historical moment with which it engages. 

In GV, two factions, suffrage and labor, vie for the affections of the bohemians living in the neighborhood. The bohemians can be an unruly bunch-- loftily principled, if you think kindly on them; unrealistically flighty, if you're less charitable. One of the most focused bohemian roles is Randolph Bourne. The game describes him primarily as a young intellectual with firm beliefs in the vital power of youth to bring about social and political change. His piece "Youth" informs his speeches and writings within the game and those of other characters who wish to emphasize the value of vitality, novelty, and energy. Those who play him often pick up his voice fairly well in this respect, continually advocating for youthful energy and voices to play strong roles in the plans of the suffrage and labor factions.

One of the great additions I came across in Bourne's papers for future GV sessions was a series of replies to an editorial Bourne wrote for Columbia's Spectator while a student at the university. In the editorial, Bourne criticized university administrators for their exploitation of the women and children who labored at cleaning, book-delivery, and other "drudgery and primitive methods" he thought inappropriate for a university setting. Though I have not been able to find the full text of his editorial, it is referenced in this New York Times blurb from Feburary 26, 1913: 

Bourne's piece itself is a fantastic argument for his alliance with labor, as it showcases his interest in equitable working conditions and willingness to challenge systems of institutional authority. It could also be used to persuade him toward suffrage, as he seems particularly appalled by the degradation of women and children promoted by the university's practices and claims he and other students "blush with shame when they pass a poor, gaunt scrubwoman on her knees…or have a book delivered to them by an undersized, starving child."

The replies offer the opportunity to bring the discussion to another level. Most of them are strongly negative, taking Bourne to task for his exaggeration of the laborer's working conditions and his distrust of the university administration to know what is best. The writers of these replies found Bourne's ideology extreme and distasteful. Much of the Greenwich Village game is tightly wrapped in the insular community of Greenwich Village. In the Village, social cachet comes with doing something--anything-- that is daring, new, intellectual, fun-loving, or expressive. Radical ideas are the order of the day and for the most part all are trying to out-radical one another. There are some insertions of more conservative perspectives in the course of the game, particularly in opposition to woman suffrage which comes from outside the Village. These letters offer an intriguing look at everyday "college men's" opposition to ideas about labor rights in a context which affects him daily.  

Although people given the role of Bourne in GV are informed of Bourne's disability, it rarely comes up in game sessions or papers. I'm still struggling to come up with ways to promote discussion of this attribute of Bourne's life within the Greenwich Village game. I'll discuss Bourne's contributions to disability history, theory, and identity in another post. 

Related Links: 

Bourne is frequently lauded for his commentary on World War I, including his famous assertion that "War is the Health of the State."

The memory of Bourne's opposition to war has inspired continuing antiwar organizations, including the Randolph Bourne Institute.

John Dos Passos' piece about Bourne, written about a decade after his death, is often quoted (including in disability activist magazine The Ragged Edge's version of  "The Handicapped" linked above).

The Embodiment of Bourne (originally published July 18, 2018)

Randolph Bourne at typewriter.

I brought two books on my trip to Princeton to work as a teaching assistant for the Center for Talented Youth. One of these was the script for Body of Bourne, a play that deals with the life of Randolph Bourne, an antiwar thinker and bohemian. One morning I found myself sitting at breakfast in a dining hall on Princeton's campus, reading the scene in which Bourne has been accepted to Princeton but is unable to go, lacking the financial support his uncle offered only to Bourne's abled sister. Bourne never made it to Princeton; instead, he worked six years in an low-paying job and eventually raised enough money to attend Columbia University.

As you might remember, Bourne is one of the bohemian roles in the Greenwich Village, 1913 Reacting to the Past game. His role in the game is to promote bohemian ideals, particularly those of multiculturalism and the influence of youth on social change. But how did he come to care about these things? I've previously written about his college days at Columbia and the commitment to women's rights and labor issues espoused by his editorial in the Spectator. In this post, I want to explore another of his pieces, one critical to understanding the formation of his ideals and the experience of embodiment in the early 20th century US: "The Handicapped-- By One of Them."

Initially much of the scholarly work on Bourne suffered from a misleading mind/body dualism. Bourne has long been regarded for his mind, and his ideas continue to hold weight among liberal and radical thinkers-- he was even the subject of an article on current politics in the New Yorker in August 2017. His antiwar stance and embrace of multiculturalism as a boon to American life have made his ideas feel fresh to multiple generations. His body, however, has often been portrayed as either a mere footnote to conversations about his intellect or a tragic obstacle he overcame-- in other words, he is a notable thinker in spite of disability. The back cover of Bruce Clayton's Forgotten Prophet: The Life of Randolph Bourne, for example, suggests surprise that the "disfigured and hunchbacked" Bourne "reacted to his disability not with bitterness or self-pity, but rather with exuberant love for beauty and a compassion for humanity"-- in other words, it is a pleasant surprise that Bourne was able to resist bitterness and develop a compassionate view of the world. 

This viewpoint on Bourne is all too common; the great disability scholar Paul Longmore criticized these trends in scholars' work on Bourne in his review of Forgotten Prophet by saying "The problem with it, as with all Bourne biographies, is its fundamental misunderstanding of his experience and identity as a disabled man in a society that intensively stigmatized him." Longmore was so interested in this side of Bourne that he took up the topic twenty years later in an article with Paul Steven Miller, arguing that Bourne's experience of disability (or "philosophy of handicap," a phrase Bourne used to title "The Handicapped" when it was reprinted) was the foundation of his radicalism. (In many ways, Body of Bourne and the Longmore/Miller article are companion pieces, making harmonizing arguments through contrasting means about the role of body in Bourne's political thought.)

Bourne saw handicap as a critical part of his experience and his ideology. The category of handicap, as Longmore and Miller explain, is less about bodily function or impairment and more about social expectation. Bourne's "The Handicapped" opens by claiming that in many ways, it is easier to be "helpless" and happy with any little diversion you can get than it is to "move about freely," but with a "crooked back and unsightly face" and have to strive and work for opportunities frequently denied you. Employment, friendship, and day-to-day tasks are all hampered, as he goes on to describe, not by physical impairments but by the low expectations of others. Most successes must not only be clawed for through perseverance (akin to the can-do attitude promoted by rehabilitationists of the era) but also at some point permitted through the explicit cooperation of an abled person.

As this need for cooperation might suggest, the difficulties Bourne related were socially informed-- they did not hinge on the body's function but on others' perception and treatment of that body. Bourne could have stopped his essay and his ideology there-- i.e, "my experience has taught me that peoples' perceptions of my body affect me negatively"-- but instead, he explained that this had contributed to a broader understanding of the ways in which people's status and success were influenced by social factors outside their control.

It makes me wince to hear a man spoken of as a failure, or to have it said of one that he "doesn't amount to much." Instantly I want to know why he has not succeeded, and what have been the forces that have been working against him.

Bourne extended the idea that people had underestimated him to a consideration of the roles of others within his society-- i.e., "if I am being underestimated and blocked from success, others must be suffering the same treatment." He prized this aspect of himself, noting that the knowledge was worth anything he'd endured to gain it: "If it is solely to my physical misfortunes that I owe its existence, the price has not been a heavy one to pay." 

At first, "The Handicapped" was printed anonymously (hence "By One of Them"), which Ned Stuckey French posits may have been due to embarrassment of his disability; I suspect concerns about having his other published thoughts disregarded, and thus his livelihood and reputation affected, was the key motivator. The worry of being flippantly disregarded is key to this piece; he even cites it as one of the worst things he experiences socially: "What one does get sensitive to is rather the inevitable way that people, acquaintances and strangers alike, have of discounting in advance what one does or says." Publishing this piece represented risk for Bourne, who likely did not wish to jeopardize the success of his other political writing.

Reactions to Bourne's "The Handicapped-- By One of Them" suggest that themes Bourne raised resonated with disabled readers of the Atlantic Monthly. Some readers wrote to thank him for his words. Bourne's correspondence, held by his alma mater, Columbia University, include two letters from different women who signed their communications "Another of Them," in reference to the title of his piece. Both thank Bourne for his writing, saying that it had encouraged them. They offer brief details of their own about their lives in support of his points: one notes that she is writing both for herself, an "old woman who is learning to bless her handicaps for the insight they are bringing into the possibilities of life," and for her brother, still struggling in the "darkness, the weight of his handicaps heavy upon him." His greatest problem? The "lack of intimate friends," which Bourne highlighted in his piece; which several sources suggest was critical to both the greatest joys and sorrows of his life; and which frequently, especially at a time when socializing was much more circumscribed by place and social circles, necessitated the need of cooperation by abled friends and family.


Related Links:
An early review of Body of Bourne in Variety. It's a great intro to the man and his life, so read or see it if you can: I got the script through Interlibrary Loan, and there's an upcoming production at Oberlin College next year. You can also see an interesting image of the original performance at Getty Images.
Bourne's "The Handicapped" appears in a variety of places across the internet, including the Disability History Museum, the disability rights publication Ragged Edge Online, and The Anarchist Library. The second form of the piece can be found in Youth and Life.
Randolph Bourne at the Disability Social History Project. 
More of Bourne's writing available at fairuse.org. 
Weird connections: the New Yorker article mentioned above was written by Jeremy McCarter, author of two books: Young Radicals, about many of the Greenwich Village bohemians including Bourne, Jack Reed, and Max Eastman; and Hamilton: The Revolution.

Archival Citations:
Another of Them to Randolph Bourne, September 1911; Randolph Bourne Papers; Box 1; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library. 
Another of Them to Randolph Bourne, September 14, 1911; Randolph Bourne Papers; Box 1; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library.  

Pedagogical Possibilities: Translanguaging for the College Humanities Classroom

Signs in various languages indicating different locations. 
Photo by Soner Eker on Unsplash.

Today I have teamed up with a fantastic guest-poster. Logan Middleton is a PhD student in writing studies who works with the Education Justice Project, a college-in-prison program in Illinois. (You may remember him from my enthusiastic posts about his work as a workshop leader: Writing Across Curriculum and Staying on Track With Thesis and Dissertation Writing.) His words are in regular case throughout, and my contributions, largely about how these topics relate to particular types of classrooms and disciplines, are italicized.

What Price Grammar?

From my experiences in teaching writing, the number one thing I hear from students of all ages is “I’m a bad writer.” If I ask why and dig a little deeper, it’s usually because someone has been told as such by a former teacher. Dig a little more, and I hear refrains to the tune of “My English is bad” or “My grammar is bad.” 

It’s not uncommon to hear from instructors or administrators that we need to ensure students can use “proper” English and grammar. Not only must we uphold “correctness,” they say, but we can’t conscionably let students go out into the real world with their writing looking like “that.” 

Statements such as these hurt students. From my experiences as an instructor and as a tutor, they not only make them dislike writing but also make them afraid to write. I recall working with one first-year college student who, in introducing me to her assignment prompt, said to me, “I’ve been told by teachers that I don’t communicate very well.” Though I can’t speak for this particular student, I have a hard time imagining them as feeling excited or good about their work—in their first semester of college nonetheless.

The ideologies undergirding statements about proper English and correctness not only hurt students but the rest of us as well. This is in no small part because they’re racist. This isn’t a particularly new or novel idea; I’ll say more about it in a bit. But I want to stay with this idea of grammar and how it relates to writing, teaching, and English.

It’s striking to me that people who claim English as a first language can often tell that something is “grammatically incorrect.” I find myself in this position often. Less often can we explain with any certainty why that’s the case. I also find myself in this position a lot as do students. Oftentimes, the things native English speakers can identify as grammatical rules are based on outdated folk models of grammar that were handed down by family or teachers, the likes of which would hardly be recognized as legit by contemporary theories of language. So contrary to what we might think or believe, our ideas of what English grammar should look like aren’t really all that sound or accurate.

Intriguingly, this sort of knowledge or memory is often something historians feel like they are combatting in their courses, letting students know that what feels true about historical figures, places, and ideas is not always what is actually true. Good historians know that they fall prey to these same patterns of thinking even as they combat them; writing and grammar is an arena where we rarely think to look for such patterns. 

All of this discussion about English and language and correctness matters because instructors who teach writing—many of whom have not been formally taught how to teach writing themselves (through no fault of their own)—are often concerned with assessing grammar in student work, especially when it comes to emergent bilingual or multilingual student populations. We know grammar is built upon sets of rules, but how can we enforce these standards in student work if we can’t even describe the mechanisms by which they operate? All of this becomes more problematic when instructors wield grammar as a tool of punishment in grading and feedback contexts, as a means of marking down student papers. Such logics operate in accordance with deviation from a set, centralized, universal standard of linguistic purity.

I find this particularly interesting in History because often it is very difficult to 1. Teach historical thinking and 2. Make a quick case about why historical thinking, specifically, is important. I often hear people make the case that history courses’ most critical contribution is to teach students how to write (okay, I have been guilty of emphasizing this myself at times). The more I teach, however-- and the more I learn about writing-- the more I question whether this is actually the core thing we do, and whether it is a worthwhile goal for historians in particular to do. Few instructors of history think it would be a worthwhile goal to spend several weeks on English grammar and syntax, yet they grade for these details. One takeaway here, then, is to clarify the central goals of your course-- what are you actually hoping that students take away from this course? If better writing is one of your goals, is it more critical that students follow your preferred grammar, or that they learn to organize their thoughts, or make a clear argument?

Against Purity 

Linguistic purity is a guiding feature of Dominant American English (DAE) or White Mainstream English (WME). These varieties of English, of which grammatical correctness is a part, function as ideologies that fundamentally exclude rhetorical and linguistic traditions that aren’t white, western, abled, or middle-classed: African American Language, Spanglish, and neurodivergent communication, to name a few examples (see the work of Django Paris, Carmen Kynard, Steven Alvarez, Christina V. Cedillo, and others). And while some well-intentioned instructors might say, “It’s OK to communicate like that at home, but not in your writing for this class,” what this comment really says is, “You can write or speak like that at home, but you(r languages) are not welcome here.” We can’t pretend that we can separate language from identity since we know language is social and cultural in nature. As many students will show us if given the chance—whether they’re multilingual students or not—our language practices are part of who we are.

Whether we realize it or not, linguistic purity often goes hand in hand with racial purity. Those students whose language most gets targeted in writing contexts are likely students of color, many of whom are international students and/or multilingual students (though, of course, these identity categories are not mutually exclusive). 

So when instructors claim that adhering to Dominant American English is preparation for the real world, I’m reminded of “I Can Switch My Language, But I Can't Switch My Skin" by the brilliant Dr. April Baker-Bell (a piece that students have responded really well to for the most part). Speaking of linguistic racism, she notes that communicating in WME doesn’t lead to guaranteed success for Black folx, it doesn’t prevent Black folx from being impacted by racism, and it certainly doesn’t help Black folx from being murdered. 

As I’ve previously touched upon (though I am far from the first to so so), there are a myriad of ways in which the people who are supposed to be promoting progressivism or providing aid or combating inequity in some of their work shore it up in other arenas. Similarly, many academics shore up white supremacist and imperialist ideals of writing and classroom comportment even as they critique these frameworks in their research. Their day-to-day functions butt up against their ideals. 

Disability scholar Sami Schalk contends academic work about people with disabilities exists that is not actually an example of "disability studies.” Disability studies, she contends, should be at its base for the benefit of disabled people as embodied and political actors. Work about disability or disabled subjects that does not do those things is disconnected from the field’s purpose. Similarly, there is a disconnect if we as teachers and scholars claim to be advocating for immigrants, people of color, people with disabilities, the subaltern, and/or the working class without also supporting the actual students from those communities by whom we find ourselves surrounded. 

Linguistic Justice 

By no means is what we do in our classrooms a solution to state-sanctioned murder or white (language) supremacy (for more on this term, see Asao Inoue’s 2019 conference address from the Conference on College Composition and Communication). But as instructors, we can do more to effect linguistic justice in the classroom. 

What’s this look like? For me, that means recognizing—and communicating to students—that academic language is a white, colonial, elite system of gatekeeping for people in power. It means making space for students to use their full linguistic repertoires in the classroom, to draw upon varieties of spoken and written languages in talk and text. And it means explicitly stating that language is not just linguistic in nature; it’s always entangled with visual, sonic, spatial, gestural, affective, and embodied communication. 

As a writing instructor, I speak with students on the first day of class about my course’s language policy—shoutout to María Carvajal Regidor for her work in writing this policy, which I’ve tweaked a bit. It appears in full below.

“The ways in which people are socialized into White Mainstream English and Academic English are often violent, damaging processes for multilingual and non-multilingual individuals alike. As such, I’m open to and encouraging of student work that represents or draws upon students’ full linguistic repertoires. That is to say, if you know multiple languages or codes and want to use them—either in written work you submit or verbally in the classroom—I’ll engage your contributions just as seriously as I would engage with more mainstream or academic forms of English. If there’s anything I can do to be more supportive of your language needs, please do speak with me so I can better support you. At any point in the semester, feel free to ask me, either during office hours or in class, about how I’d respond to work that isn’t communicated in ways that are traditionally valued in university spaces.”

I’ve found it important to frame things here in terms of an invitation. Just because students know multiple languages and language varieties doesn’t mean that they necessarily want to use them in a classroom setting. And so creating opportunities for students to possibly take up such practices—on their own terms and in a way that works best for them—can be a productive way of addressing language diversity in teaching situations, at least from a curricular point of view. 

Pedagogically speaking, I often invite students to interrogate their language histories, writing practices, and social identities by writing a critical linguistic autobiography. This assignment asks writers to take stock of the texts and contexts that shaped their language use and to address how their social identities shape how they use language. In the semesters I’ve used this assignment, students have written about affective interconnections between home, school, and Latinx identity; railed against gendered expectations about swearing in profanity-laced reflections; and blended autobiography with poetry in genre-bending mashups. Even for non-Black, non-brown, and non-POC students, this exercise can encourage students to think critically about how white (language) supremacy impacts dynamics of power when it comes to class, gender, sexuality, ability, and the manifold ways language is policed by others.

I’ll move to wrapping up here by returning to the issue of non-linguistic language as noted above. When we think of writing and language, English alphabetic text often comes to mind. But we’re always communicating beyond words—with image, talk, sound, movement, gesture, and affectively. Even though these forms of communication are critical in everyday life, they often go unrecognized as essential meaning-making practices. Such communicative practices are even more invalidated when performed by Black and brown populations (see Adam Banks and Geneva Smitherman) and disabled populations (see Melanie Yergeau) as well as other multiply minoritized people. 

So if we want to better enact linguistic justice, we not only need to address white supremacy through discussions of language diversity but we’ve also got to push back on narrow, restrictive notions of language, literacy, and writing—the likes of which exclude a host of rich, communicative practices. One of my former colleagues, Katherine Flowers, employs a language policy similar to the one discussed above that invites students to compose their work in whatever modalities (visual, sonic, etc.) that make the most sense for their project’s aims. Such a move both grants students the chance to critically think through what languages and modes will help them accomplish what they’re hoping to accomplish. When I’ve taken this approach in my own teaching, students have created final projects that I’d never have even thought of, texts as communicatively diverse and imaginative as choreographed dances and 3D-printed objects. So how we regulate the modes in which we communicate, too, is also a matter of linguistic justice.

Historians as well as other humanists already have the classroom tools for students to contribute their own knowledge or experience, and many of us have realized how much allowing students to do so invigorates a room full of thinkers. Consider how sparkling class discussions become when a student contributes unique knowledge of a source. In a discussion from this past semester on a selection of the Padma Purana, one of my students used his personal experience with the larger text not only to give the class additional context, but in doing so shed light on how the source was interpreted in the modern day as well as when the text was written. It became a living document in a way that I did not have the ability to make it. We encourage students to bring in their experiences frequently, or at least, we should-- their experience of language should be no different. 

Depending on your degree of teaching experience as well as what field you’re in, these steps toward teaching for linguistic justice might seem small or overwhelming, possible or inconceivable. In trying these strategies on, hopefully we can inch closer to a more just world—in our classroom and beyond.

Related Links:

A Pedagogy of Translanguaging offers some basic principles of translanguaging in classrooms of any level and discipline. 

For more on neurodivergent and neurotypical communication, Melanie Yergeau’s article from Disability Studies Quarterly examines these in the genre of the typical autism essay. 

Christina V. Cedillo’s “What Does It Mean to Move?: Race, Disability, and Critical Embodiment Pedagogy” is an excellent article that discusses connections between race, language, and neurodivergence.

Carmen Kynard’s website provides a range of scholarship, pedagogical resources, and commentary on race, writing, and teaching.

(Sub)title Talk: What Price Glory?