One Hundred Ten

This series last semester was interrupted by life—as you might notice if you scroll down, my third post talks about an assignment that occurred before the research paper and multimodal project. My semester did not end there. My students went on to complete research papers and multimodal projects, with adaptation (mostly) in mind. My life was busy, certainly, but so were the lives of my students and peers. It felt like all of us—at least educators I know—had a rough return to campus after the summer of 2021. It was also my first time back in a classroom since March of 2020. Even as a former TA and PhD student in coursework myself, I was not as well adjusted to pandemic classrooms as I had thought.

I will not try and (over)analyze every lesson in class that failed or fell flat, but I will offer one observation about my own teaching that I hope is relatable: I am not as engaging as I thought. Or, more positively, the rules of engagement in the space I inhabit as an educator have changed. When students elected to work in groups silently through Google Docs, I found myself unprepared to force conversations and liveliness. I’ve thought of various potential solutions. For instance, I could have temporarily outlawed devices. But at what cost? Some students need devices for accommodations and others simply work better with them—who am I to ask them to put them away, in the sake of how I want their learning to go?

There were also other factors I needed to adjust to. I was teaching after lunch for some and after waking up for others (my class started at 1:25). My students had varying levels of experience writing in high school. At the end of the semester, many admitted to logging in to Zoom classes during the lockdowns and then napping while their teachers talked. Others stated that their high school teachers didn’t say much about college, or what to expect, given their own scramble to prepare for Zoom classes in an (alarmingly, unfortunately) unprepared world.

I appreciate my students’ honesty and I do not say any of this to be denigrating. I think many of us can empathize with both parties—the students and their high school teachers. It’s also possible none of this played into why my lessons weren’t “working” in the way that I thought they might. And I likely need to reconsider what a lesson “working” means to me and to my students—though less of my students filled out their feedback forms than I would have liked, I did receive generally positive feedback about my accessibility and efforts to encourage them. It appears my own post-lockdown insecurities, like those of my students, bled into my perception of the room. 

As an aside: to the students who provided feedback—who almost certainly won’t read this—thank you for your encouraging notes and for motivating me to revisit my teaching strategies. 

Ultimately, though, when Olivia reached out to me last week, I knew I had to continue. I view adaptation more than ever as a necessary tool for survival in college classrooms as we continue to navigate changing environments, in flux for several reasons. The pandemic, terrifying book bans, accidental bombs on campus, and our neighborhood AI friend ChatGBT, are just a few recent instigators of change. It is not surprising that I felt more like a human product of BADaptation, “one that does not suit its new environment or changed conditions” (Elliott 20).

This semester, I am teaching in a classroom where all twenty-two of us sit in a circle at 8:00 in the morning. I initially wanted to move rooms (Cheryl, as always, is very kind and helpful), but ultimately decided to stay. Our forced proximity shows potential already, as students adapt to the change in seating and perspective. I will need to ensure my presentations are accessible, given the room’s constraints, but I look forward to making these changes with my students as a team of adaptors in a new space.

Regarding content, I am still using adaptation as a lens through which students can view composition. I kept Spike Jonze’s Adaptation (2002) on the syllabus, but I replaced Robert Louis Stevenson with Joseph Harris’ Rewriting and other short texts. In addition to content changes, I (begrudgingly) adapted to available technologies and build out Canvas modules in addition to the syllabus, so that assignments would appear in the digital “to-do” list. I’m sure many of you already do this and I know from observation that many of you are successful without it. I wasn’t. So, though I do not understand using Canvas as a digital planner (in lieu of a physical planner), I don’t need to. As my harshest, probably imaginary critics would say: Cat, get on board or get out of the way. And, because I’ve elected to remain on board, I am going to prioritize time management this semester as a key component of writing. Digital planner, paper calendar, or neither, I want my students to utilize their community as they learn to manage their time as writers.

Looking back at my first blog post in October of 2021, I talked about adaptation texts and introduce adaptation as a more general concept. I ask how we define adaptation, why we define it, when we define it… I also ask, what is an adaptation doing? – how does it do it—and who does it do it for? This semester, I want to plant myself more distinctly in the role of an adaptation. What am I doing? How am I doing it? Who am I doing it for? I am also hopeful to open this conversation to some of my peers, to talk about adaptation in our department and in our community. How are we adapting, when are we adapting, and who are we adapting for?

In future posts, you should expect to see more classroom situations, student examples, and discussions with other educators. Rather than a specific outline, which I made far too rigid last semester, I am going to make this blog a space for constant adaptation. In other words, it will change depending on how everything goes. For instance, this was an uncharacteristically personal post—it is doubtful I will replicate it. Nonetheless, I reach an audience that resonates with my experiences and my self-deprecating humor.

In all seriousness, I am looking forward to the semester and to speaking with some/many of you in the weeks to come.

P.S. As a bonus, I asked ChatGBT how I should navigate a new circular classroom. All the advice I’ve received from peers and mentors has been more helpful, which I hope is not surprising. In addition to simply pasting “circular” in front of very generic teaching advice, the AI told me to just use more hand gestures. Thanks, ChatGBT!

As I write the third episode in this series, my class is working away on their adaptation essay “tests.” We’ve concluded our course readings designed directly on adaptation and now, finally, I’m putting them to the test.

The Adaptation Essay “Test” is comprised of two brief essays, based on prompts composed mostly by students themselves. Over the course of the last three or so weeks, students submitted discussion questions on course content, which we then adapted to fit the style of an essay prompt. Afterwards, with the reformatted questions, students voted on their preferences and can choose between the winning six questions (they must respond to two).

In the spirit of composition, the prompts were designed with rhetorical analysis in mind. As students and I discussed how to ask questions (a fundamental part of any research process), I talked a lot about designing questions for a course like ours—a first-year writing course. Thinking back to the first episode of this series, some guiding key terms were audience, form, and genre. One of the reading assignments which will appear on the “test,” for example, is Thomas Leitch’s “Adaptation, the Genre,” which allows students to read and adaptation and genre conventions, and to dip their toes in academic arguments.

The “test” is based on course readings that appeared after we read Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. This novella was perhaps the biggest risk in my content, as I recognize the boundary between literary analysis and rhetorical analysis can be a bit difficult to navigate. In order to frame conversations, I began each class with “flash” lessons in writing, taken from the open-access writing textbooks on my syllabus. The goal, by the Adaptation Essay “Test,” was to give students the technical writing information on how to perform quote synthesis in an effort to back up a coherent thought. So, we used Stevenson’s text to practice some of the close reading strategies and to trial using keywords to better analyze and understand the meaning of a specific writing tool.

After Stevenson’s novella, we read a variety of related adaptations. The adaptations, I’ll point out, were not just creative texts. I took the classification of “adaptation” very liberally, assigning content like the Better Read Than Dead podcast episode on Jekyll and Hyde as an adaptation of the English classroom, The Incredible Hulk (2008) (Jekyll and Hyde in Superhero form, perhaps), a video essay about Ang Lee’s Hulk and toxic masculinity (an adaptation of a research paper), cartoon adaptations, and the trailer for Disney’s She-Hulk. These choices were specifically designed to practice audience and genre analysis, with an interest also in exigency and modality. These conversations also led to other writing topics, like bias. All in all, I wanted to experiment with how Stevenson’s novella would assist students in their analyses of the other media.

Did this experiment work? Were these texts as transformation as Dr. Jekyll’s serum?

It’s too soon to tell—the results are yet to be submitted. But students were generally receptive to the material. Though it seems like a difficult point in the semester (I had to adapt my teaching to wavering levels of engagement), many students expressed genuine interest in the topic. After listening to the podcast episode, for instance, I eavesdropped on one student tell her group she found the Stevenson’s novella more accessible, because the conversation about it was funny. Another student became much more actively involved once we arrived to our Hulk era: he offered the class context for the video essay, as he was the only one familiar with Ang Lee’s Hulk.

By way of conclusion, I want to be forthright in mentioning my disappointments alongside these successes. I had forgotten, in my excitement for this experiment of my own, the challenges of teaching first-year writing

Cat Champney is a second year PhD student and graduate instructor at the University of Delaware. She studies literary adaptation of the 19th century, with an emphasis on authorship and female gothic narratives. Prior to attending UD, Cat received her Master’s Degree in 19th Century Literature from Brooklyn College and a joint degree in English and Political Science from SUNY Binghamton. Her master’s thesis examined the absence of Scarlett O’Hara’s children from David Selznick’s film adaptation, Gone with the Wind. Prior to her current composition course at UD, Cat taught various composition and writing courses at CUNY Brooklyn College and City College of Technology. 

By Cat Champney

(FERPA Disclaimer: students are quoted in this article. All personally identifying information has been removed. Regardless, though, the students quoted here gave written consent to use their words.)

The goal for the first few weeks of my class sound simple: define adaptation. However, that’s not really so easy. As I mentioned in my first post, arriving at a single definition for adaptation is futile and perhaps even useless. We agree on a central definition of adaptation… then what?

After watching Adaptation (2002), I had students talk about what they thought adaptation meant, to the film. What does the film tell us about adaptation, and how might those features help us define it? The film allowed us to talk about adaptation in different dimensions: how was it a theme? How was it a genre? What about a format, or medium? Some of the class dipped into some literary/film analysis, which I entertained, but we quickly focused on the rhetoric of the film and its paratexts: what can Adaptation tell us about adaptation in writing?

The following class, we discussed two online articles about the Netflix adaptation of Persuasion. After briefly recapping our previous discussion, we talked about how the two authors considered adaptation in their arguments and what specific rhetorical devices they used to signal those considerations. I selected both articles because they used somewhat inflammatory language—terms like “Fleabagification”—to provoke students’ realization of the power of rhetoric. Students quickly came to realize that both authors, in a similar way, projected certain expectations on to adaptations. Expectations, of course, quickly gave way to talking about audience and genre.

Prior to assigning the film, I was nervous to its reception. Would students be caught up in the meaning of it all, or would we be able to focus on rhetoric? Would they be able to compare a film to an argumentative essay online? Or, would it be too distracting?

Ultimately, all of these fears were unfounded. There was value in the change of medium, from the film to the online article, and the topic was met with high levels of engagement. Even if it wasn’t apparent that students had read closely, they were listening to others’ elaborations and contributing their own thoughts on the many nuances to adaptation. I took this opportunity to open the room and ask about personal connections to the material: how do these qualities of adaptation apply to our own creation and writing processes?

These questions were strategically placed. My first assignment in the course is a low-stakes diagnostic essay. I began using these when I was an adjunct instructor as a way to gauge students’ strengths and weaknesses. I explain the essays as both introductions and samples: I want students to try their best to introduce their writing to me, without the added stress of grades. Then, students and I work together throughout the semester to build on their strengths and practice their weaknesses. The prompt for the essay is intentionally basic: I ask a general question and encourage students to use a mix of course material and personal experiences to back up some sort of central claim.

For this essay, as you might have guessed, I asked, what is an adaptation? Although only a sampling, I’ve included some interesting replies:

“An adaptation is a process of change due to disruption in the environment. The world’s smallest sunflower adapted to the sidewalk by wriggling its flexible stem through the fissures in the rock. This process of tactical revision, however, extends beyond nature; when a written work is to be ‘adapted,’ it too must acquire a new set of traits—a unique demeanor and fresh commentary…” (my emphasis)

“An interesting paradox I can think of that relates to this is the Ship of Theseus… But what if, over time, every part on the boat got damaged, and replaced with a new part? Would this still be the same ship? Would it be a new, different ship with a different identity?”

“Often it depends on the context of the work being adapted, however this basic format of an adaptation requires a balance. An adaptation is the balance between the accuracy of the original work and the updating to bring modern ideas into the new pieces of work”

Other students spoke of adaptation more generally, referring to their own adaptation from high school student to college student. Though I disagree with the categorization, many of them found such personal adaptations “unremarkable”—even though they’ve build an entirely new identity. Another student created an adaptation trifecta: Nature, Literature, and Culture as three ways to “center” or ground adaptation, while others approached the question in a less structured manner, organizing their paragraphs by evidence instead.

While I think every teacher is impressed with their students’ work, I found myself struck by the variety in their responses, even using the same evidence. I was happy to see some students flat out disagree with the argumentative essays, providing counter examples like Harry Potter and other media to construct their own definitions. While it’s just a start, that was the point in this assignment: encouraging students to think about how they define adaptation and how to enter into existing conversations about it. What matters, and to whom?

The next few weeks of the semester will build on their responses to this question and their skills in discussion questions about Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Hyde—how does this frequently-adapted novella inform us further about adaptation, and rhetoric? While there will certainly be challenges with this text, I look forward to talking about it… and reporting on it here!

Until next time!

Cat Champney is a second year PhD student and graduate instructor at the University of Delaware. She studies literary adaptation of the 19th century, with an emphasis on authorship and female gothic narratives. Prior to attending UD, Cat received her Master’s Degree in 19th Century Literature from Brooklyn College and a joint degree in English and Political Science from SUNY Binghamton. Her master’s thesis examined the absence of Scarlett O’Hara’s children from David Selznick’s film adaptation, Gone with the Wind. Prior to her current composition course at UD, Cat taught various composition and writing courses at CUNY Brooklyn College and City College of Technology. 

By Cat Champney

Adaptation is an appropriate key term for many composition instructors returning to the classroom for the first time since the lockdowns in 2020. All of us have had to change our syllabi, our assignments, and our mindsets around teaching composition in the digital, pandemic age. Even if we were tech-savvy before, a shift in and out of online classrooms (and potentially some time in a hybrid classroom) left its mark on all of our individual psyches. On top of the pandemic, we are living in an era of misinformation: teaching students how to evaluate sources, recognize bias, and write for specific audiences holds near-apocalyptic prescience.  

After reflecting on my own adaptation as an educator and, frankly, as a human being, I asked—why not center the composition classroom in adaptation itself? Why not talk directly about our shared experiences through adaptation as a process and medium? 

These questions, I must admit, were not brought on only by the pandemic and social injustices that sparked adaptation for so many of us in the last few years. As an adaptation scholar, I spend a considerable amount of time thinking about adaptation texts, how we define them (if we can), why we define them (if we do), and how adaptation studies fit in with English departments. For some, an adaptation is simply a film born out of a movie—and, of course, the book is always better than the movie. For others—myself and other adaptation scholars—that definition limits the vast potentialities of our field… and the book is not always better than the movie, my apologies. Before formally becoming an adaptationist (in training), I was most interested in the nineteenth century: but I never understood why many disdained movies that recreated the period. Who cares if Netflix’s Persuasion uses contemporary slang? Does it not send young, new readers back to Austen’s novel? I became more interested in other questions: what is the adaptation doing? – how does it do it – and who does it do it for?

As students begin to try and define themselves and their writing processes—which are both perhaps equally undefinable—why not use adaptation, then, as both a metaphor and a literal tool for first-year writing instruction? What is their writing doing? How is their writing functioning? What rhetorical devices achieve what ends? Who are they writing for?

Definition uncertainty aside, the process of adaptation in theory is a very useful, adaptable, term for writing instruction. Marty Gould writes, “when we focus our student’s attention on adaptation as a process, we help them understand that verbal and visual communication necessitates multiple contingent decisions involving audience, medium, and message, and this perspective should make them more aware of form and content in their own writing” (my italics, 636). That is, like many adaptationists, students are capable of reading beyond book fidelity (how loyal an adaptation is to its “source” text) in order to understand the process of adaptation in creation. How does adaptation as a process, then, help us to understand writing today? Especially in a first-year classroom, where students adapt to changes in location, lifestyle, and academic rigor, how might adaptation aid students writing for their institution and beyond?

All of these questions are the basis for my composition syllabus this semester, though I realize it’s doubtful I’ll form concrete responses in one semester, or twenty. In the opening of my syllabus, I ask students a serious of framing questions: “What is an adaptation? How do we adapt our writing for new audiences? How can we adapt writing from one format (a novel, or research paper) to another (a film, or digital advertisement?” By looking at adaptations and formulating hypotheses about the processes of adaptation, I hope that students then understand that they have the power to replicate, transform, and recreate their own reading and writing processes. Not to sound too metaphoric, but I hope students strive to become adaptations of themselves, in a way, well positioned to write for the college classroom and beyond.

My assignments and readings for the semester emphasize adaptation, with a secondary emphasis on digital media and content beyond creative texts—in conjunction with our department’s interest in multimodal writing. I began the semester with a viewing of Adaptation (2002), followed closely by two online articles about Netflix’s recent Persuasion (2022). The first assignment in the course is a combination of a literacy narrative and a traditional five paragraph essay: I asked students to try and define “adaptation” in three pages, using examples and evidence from the course content and personal experience. The definition they define in their essay will help them frame the rest of the semester, as we talk about adaptation, but also exemplify how reading new texts in new ways can change opinions, mindsets, and writing strategies. They should look at this first essay / first definition not as a formal argument that they must defend, but as a work-in-progress… much like their reading and writing processes at this stage in the semester.

As an overview—and by way of conclusion for this post—I intend this regular blog series to track the success of adaptation in the composition classroom. By the end of the semester (and the culmination of this series) I hope to find answers to the following questions:

First, how does adaptation function as a key term, a strategy, and a metaphor in first-year writing?

Second, what are the challenges and pitfalls of talking about adaptation? Will the class succumb to performing literary analysis, as opposed to rhetorical analysis? Or, will they challenge this opposition altogether?

Lastly, how can I adapt the syllabus, my own teaching, and my own understanding of adaptation to better meet the needs of post-pandemic students and multimodal English departments?

Though this is a large undertaking, I am not without support. Scholars like Thomas Leitch, Marty Gould, Julie Sanders, and Kamilla Elliott (to name only a few) all have excellent scholarship on adaptation in the English department. Similarly, the learning goals and objectives for first year composition at the University of Delaware are extremely compatible with such an undertaking and in line with pressure from adaptationists to include adaptation in the English classroom. Key terms from these goals, such as audience, context, multimodal, community, revising, and more apply to the process of adaptation, which is in itself a process of writing and rewriting. I will revisit these goals and objectives frequently in this series, to pinpoint how adaptations (texts) and adaptation (process) complete and exceed such goals and objectives.

Finally, and selfishly, I hope that this project works towards more unity between literature and composition departments. Though the University of Delaware is more united than most, it would be irresponsible to claim that there does not exist any tension between writing studies and literary studies—adaptation studies, in this case, might be a perfect mediator to two to-be-divorced parents who, to follow the metaphor, should remain married rather than pursue co-parenting.

Throughout the semester, I’m happy to invite visitors to class sessions, share content, and collaborate with other instructors on this endeavor—you can reach me at champney@udel.edu.

Cat Champney is a second year PhD student and graduate instructor at the University of Delaware. She studies literary adaptation of the 19th century, with an emphasis on authorship and female gothic narratives. Prior to attending UD, Cat received her Master’s Degree in 19th Century Literature from Brooklyn College and a joint degree in English and Political Science from SUNY Binghamton. Her master’s thesis examined the absence of Scarlett O’Hara’s children from David Selznick’s film adaptation, Gone with the Wind. Prior to her current composition course at UD, Cat taught various composition and writing courses at CUNY Brooklyn College and City College of Technology. 

By William Repetto

Over the winter session, we first-semester TAs took some time to reflect on our experiences. Our conversations covered not only English 110 conceptually as a course, but also the nuances of meeting every day via Zoom and interacting conversationally primarily on Canvas. As a final post for this column, I thought it prudent to share our reflections, which I hope will offer insight for navigating the spring semester. Hopefully this will be our last semester of mandatory distance learning and teaching. Ideally, however, our insights will be applicable wherever the computer becomes the primary medium of teaching.

Breakout… but…

In our super-section of English 110, each TA was assigned a group of three or four students to work with throughout the semester. For portions of the class meetings, we would meet with these students as a small cohort in Zoom breakout rooms. Though it took time for familiarization to grow, the breakout time was well-spent. One of my colleagues quipped that in the main Zoom room before the breakout sessions, “it was definitely really hard to tell if they were engaged or not.” Yet, when we returned to the main session after breaking out, this TA felt comfortable calling on one of their students to say, “hey, you had a really good point about this; why don’t you share that?” In other words, the Zoom breakout rooms functioned as an appetizer for generating meaningful discussion when the full group was together.

One caveat we would add to breaking out, however, would be to keep the breakout rooms consistent. We experimented with rotating groups of students so that people from the class engaged with new faces and more learners. The TAs I reflected with, however, preferred when the breakout room group was consistent because, as one stated, “It made it more conducive to get to know the students; it felt more personal.” In a phrase, this TA added, “I preferred my small group.” It seems that the online breakout room does not make a good media for quick icebreakers before focusing on a task at hand. Our advice then: break out! … but keep the student cohorts in the rooms consistent.

Chat

I espoused the virtues of the Zoom chat function in my first post for the column, so I don’t want to dwell too much on it here, but I would like to add two quick reflections. A fellow TA mentioned that during in-person instruction they would get to class early in order to make new friends or catch up with old ones. Such informal connections between classmates and friends obviously do not get their proper moments in virtual learning. I personally found such interaction integral to my college experience – in both undergrad and in graduate school – so a substitution should be worth considering.

You could schedule a five-minute informal discussion to start the course, or, as I opine, allow the chat feature to be the space for that. Not everything the TAs or students contributed to the chat was prim, proper, or laser-focused on writing, but, as another TA mentioned, “The chat function was a way to get to know each other in a way we might not have been able to in person.” That same TA added that the chat “was one of the unexpected ways we built rapport” and “it offered another kind of anonymity” because the TAs could vocalize any general concerns or specific questions that came up.

So, the chat can seem messy and off-topic, but be sure to maximize its potential; it certainly helped us.

Canvas about Canvas

We TAs loved Canvas. We used it primarily for reading student work and providing feedback in the absence of printed copies, but Canvas also kept us organized and on schedule. One TA said, “I did like the modules that you could click through in order to find what you had to do that day; I thought that was pretty helpful.” Another added that it was excellent for giving feedback; “especially with longer comments, I found myself speaking better to the strengths and weaknesses of students’ assignments like that versus trying to talk about it in person.”

One TA remarked, however, “I wonder if we had talked about assignments in class and brought up different trends we saw in the assignments enough.” Hence my advice: canvas about Canvas. With a large portion of a class held on a learning management system and the other biggest component happening on the Zoom interface, it might be easy for the illusion to arise of two separate courses – one where the student attends and listens and another where the student checks things off and submits assignments. A way to avoid such an illusion, as this TA implies, is to check-in often with students about how they are finding things on Canvas.

Align

Alignment is a buzzword is self-help literature, but let’s define it as the competent mobilization within one person or among a group of people toward a purpose. It is a bit of a catchall, but I believe it will suffice as a summary for the advice presented here as well as a last thought for this column. Communicating the expectations of breakout rooms, of chatting, of Canvas is key to keeping students, TAs and professors alike aligned. As said, alignment functions on personal and group levels. More than anything, the virtual environment seems to ask educators to find alignment in their own lives – where do I draw the boundary between work and personal wellbeing when everything happens in my house and on my screen? The virtual environment challenges educators to align our own expectations with those of our students – when are a couple of “video off” and “mute on” moments required to kindle further learning? These are questions we might not have asked ourselves only a year ago, when we already may have considered ourselves out of alignment, but during the pandemic more than ever, alignment should be sought and continually revisited.

William Repetto is a PhD student in the English department at the University of Delaware. He is also a TA and writing center tutor. William earned his MA in English at Villanova University after completing a bachelor’s in history at La Salle University. He wrote three theses at La Salle covering frame narratives, the influence of American culture on Japanese cartoons, and The Adventures of Tintin. His master’s thesis gave a comparative reading of Wallace Stevens and David Foster Wallace to show how conceptualizations of spirituality versus religion changed over the course of the 20th century in America. While at Villanova, he also received an entrepreneurship award and small grant for his work on diversity and inclusion at their Falvey Memorial Library. William has formerly taught English composition classes at Eastern University and English as a second language classes at La Salle University.

Big News: An article by Bill Repetto, who has been writing a column for onehundredten.org about his first year TAship, will be appearing in Threshold Conscripts, a book project to be released in the spring of next year by WAC Clearinghouse. The article is titled “Redefining RhetComp Professional Development,” and covers the tension between obligation and freedom experienced as a first year PhD student at the University of Delaware during a global pandemic.

By William Repetto

I’ve written elsewhere in defense of libraries. I’ve also used their services as an instructor before – Connelly Library at La Salle University in the English as a second language classroom and Warner Memorial Library at Eastern University in the composition classroom. I cannot say enough positive things about my experience as a graduate assistant at Falvey Memorial Library of Villanova University. I certainly never thought that I would see a day when “library” itself called for re-definition, certainly not as it has during the coronavirus pandemic. I found, however, that during our library session of ENGL110 with special guest speaker Assistant Head of Instructional Services Meg Grotti, we were calling for our students to do exactly that: re-define what’s meant by “library.”

The exercise that our du jour instructor Meg Grotti set up for us pertained to the course’s researched paper. The exercise was divided into two appropriately titled parts, “Part A: (Too Much)” and “Part B: (Too Little).” There was no middle section, or Part C, called “Just Right.” Part C’s conspicuous absence contains a powerful message: it’s rare in scholarship that you’ve got just the correct amount of information/data, and your thoughts are fully confirmed. The students were to fill out a matrix of questions that offered guidance for either narrowing down or expanding a topic. The worksheet covered such questions as, “what specific part of your research question/topic interests you the most?” and asked students to “critique your words… play around with these new terms mixed with some of those you started with.”

My group’s topics included food waste, children’s literature, and medicinal marijuana during the coronavirus pandemic. By filling out our matrices, we discovered that two of these topics required narrowing down and one required broadening up. Can you guess which? Irrespective, the exercise generated a conversation among my small TA group, a conversation of pedagogical import for research generally.

I started that conversation (drawing on the concept of the Burkean parlor) by saying that research can be a lot like walking into someone’s living room during a dinner party and trying to get caught up on the conversation, and my group quickly pointed out how, in the case of their topics, catching up on the conversations would require thinking geographically, psychologically, and across populations. From there, we dove into the particular work required to get caught up in an academic context; specifically, we highlighted the importance of keywords and finding the right database/journal.

The exercise, then, forced us to think both conceptually about research and practically about getting research done. The genius of the exercise runs much deeper, though. By showing what UD’s library still offers and the functions it still serves, the exercise taught us three important things about how to view libraries in a new light in a pandemic-stricken world.

First, when one takes a tour of a library or sits through a seminar on its various databases, the perception can arise that the library is this huge repository of answers, which you must learn to navigate in order to find the answers you want. By asking the questions of us that it did, however, the worksheet also asked us to re-think this perception. Instead of situating the library as a repository of answers, our exercise made it clear that the library is as much a repository of questions as a place to find answers. Now that I put it this way, it feels an obvious truism that I should have noticed in two years of working at a library or in inviting my previous class sections to the library, but it took a pandemic, and masterful curriculum from the UD library staff for me to recognize it–I hope my students picked up on it too!

Second, and this one I have recognized before, the exercise really highlighted how the library, more than a building and a digital space, is a collection of people. I cannot remember any of the other institutions I attended or instructed at offering such a personalized trip to the classroom. The worksheet, in reference to one of our class’ specific assignments, directed us to “Look at your topic as you wrote it in [Reading and Writing Activity] #5. Are there more sub-questions to this topic that might be useful to explore?” Connections to our course like this show how the library can be defined as a team of people whose scholarship and work support the learning of all the other various departments and groups that make up the university. Whether or not we get to re-enter the physical space of the library with regularity soon, we learned that COVID-19 will not stop our librarians from that part of their mission.

Third, we learned that in its present, mostly digital iteration, the library is still a safe space. As a graduate student, I know that I feel the pressure to be “right” all the time, and I remember, as an undergraduate, the pressure to be using the “proper sources” or finding material that would impress my professors. Grotti’s visit to our class, however, showed us that the library is a safe space for exploring where your opinions have gone off track or where the thought you’re having needs further refining. Even in the library’s, and indeed the world’s, current, mostly digital state, its databases and journals are still safe spaces to be wrong, to refine thoughts, and to ultimately challenge oneself.

I’m acutely aware that the above may seem an elaborate PR piece for the University of Delaware’s Libraries, Museums, and Press. I assure you, though, that these are my genuine reflections on library day in our class. My intention is to show the many ways that libraries can be re-defined during the pandemic. These lessons can be useful across types of libraries and certainly across campus communities. I wonder if it may be useful for scholars and librarians alike to return often to these new definitions when the pandemic subsides and library doors open wide again.

By William Repetto

[FERPA Disclaimer: both students and TAs are quoted in this article. All personally identifying information has been removed. Regardless, though, the studens and TAs quotes here gave me written consent to use their words. The symbol […] has been added to show when bits of non-meaning-altering conversation have been cut out and YT refers to me, yours truly.]

In the first post for this column, I doted all over the chat function on Zoom. I did so because I see it as a secondary locus of teaching and learning in the digital space. Students use it to candidly express themselves. TAs use it to share links pertaining to the information presented in the classroom. It has its drawbacks—some students get distracted; some TAs (including me) can be the reason why; sometimes the chat discussion takes a different course from the verbal conversation. Despite these minor drawbacks, however, I find that the chat function does much more good than harm. In this post, I will explicate a set of the interactions my fellow TAs and our class had on Zoom’s chat box to show how I think it supports—rather than stunts—student learning.

The context: the TAs had just wrapped up an exercise in breakout rooms in which we discussed the potential obstacles that students might encounter in research. Among the solutions to such obstacles, someone mentioned how tough it might become to integrate two ostensibly different topics. Our fearless professor, Dr. C., discussed at length the mental exercises one may have to use to find the common ground between two topics. Then she warned that it might be folly to try to combine two topics that are not only ostensibly different but that are actually totally incompatible, like “anime and dogs.” Well, the chat erupted to a cacophony of corrections:       

TA #1 : Anime puppies. ❤

Student #1: Nintendogs

YT: Ein in Cowboy Bebop!!

TA #1: ^ you just opened a locked box in my mind

TA #1: ❤ Ein ❤

Student #1: scholarly article about why corgis are so good

Student #1: amazing dissertation

This interaction has hearts (<3) and markers of a new language (^), and so some educators might scoff at the idea of my considering it serious pedagogical discourse. I will argue that it is anyway. The prompting of tying anime and puppies together by TA #1 allowed Student #1 to point to a particular place where one can also see the overlap. I added the example about Ein from Cowboy Bebop–a corgi in that anime series. Student #1 then dreams big about the confluence of ideas, e.g., a scholarly article or a dissertation.

We often “sell” composition courses as places of self-exploration, where one can discover their passions in reading and writing. The chat function here fulfilled that promise, and, more importantly—whether or not dogs and anime interest the other members of the class—the Zoom chat function is accessible to everyone present, so everyone enrolled can see how TAs might assist in igniting, merging, and managing interests that a student wants to follow. In fact, the conversation didn’t stop there:

Student #1 : fandom would be so interesting to do research on but there are also millions of them

[…]

TA #2 : ^^^^^ true. I’ve done fandom research before, let me know if you’d like some guidance.

[…]

Student #1: there was a UD engl110 that was centered around fan studies actually

Again, the interaction has informal markers (^^^^), but a look at the content of the conversation shows that the chat function sped up the pace of discovery for Student #1. Student #1 figured out a way to step out of the frivolousness of the previous conversation and focus energies on an important, contemporary, academic conversation about fandoms. TA #2 steps in to offer assistance and demonstrate ethos. Instead of having to wait until office hours to hear that TA #2 has experience with fandoms and discover what kind of resources TA #2 would suggest, Student #1 is informed right then and there during class time.

Finally, and curiously, the student becomes a spokesperson at the end of the interaction; Student #1 gives a plug for the entire department by advertising other offerings. Ideally, none of the students enrolled will need to take another section of ENGL110, but Student #1 announces here the other types of experts available for assistance on the department’s faculty. I am not arguing that all students immediately took note of this and will reach out for fandom assistance. I am saying, however, that the chat offered those paying attention another perspective and another tool for approaching topic selection.

The chat is not entirely devoid of flaws; take a look at this interaction:

Student #2 : is anyone else confused on this ^

TA #1: Confused on what, Student # 2?

Student #2: Fan studies and Nintendogs

For Student #2, the conversation surrounding fandoms, fan studies, and Nintendogs did not generate new ideas or new passions. Instead, the chat probably functioned as a distracting meta-discourse on Dr. C’s lecture. It should be noted, however, that I’ve removed the time stamps from the conversations. TA #1’s response came only nine seconds after Student #2 asked for clarification. This kind of efficacy likely cannot be matched in a traditional, face-to-face classroom or lecture hall. It’d be twice as distracting to whisper/speak to a TA right in the middle of a lecture (or, doubly so to ask a TA what that TA is whispering about to another student!).

I’m hopeful that a movement pushes to implement something like Zoom chat into the traditional classroom when we return to our respective campuses. I could envision an anonymous feed integrated onto projection screens for students to externalize their thoughts as a lesson progresses. This would maybe give voice to students who feel uncomfortable speaking up or who would feel “stupid” asking a basic question. As with all technologies, we’d need to smooth out the kinks—e.g., how to filter out unwanted or inappropriate content. In any event, it’s an interesting experiment in thought: how could we splice the benefits of the Zoom room back into our traditional classrooms?

This is our Composition Program Faculty “Office” Hour

Join us to chat, discuss ideas, and talk about teaching issues. All are welcome!

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https://udel.zoom.us/j/94533802461

Topic: CompPro Faculty Hour
Time: Sep 2, 2020 02:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Every week on Wed, until Dec 9, 2020, 15 occurrence(s)
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