comic books, race, racism

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier: A Reader on Race and Superhero Comics

Should We Marvel at a Black Captain America?

“It’s a Bird … It’s a Plane … It’s … A Comic Book in the Classroom?”: Truth: Red, White, and Black as Test Case for Teaching Superhero Comics, Sean P. Connors (In Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction)

Thomas, P.L. (2017). Can superhero comics defeat racism?: Black superheroes “torn between sci-fi fantasy and cultural reality.” In C.A. Hill (ed.), Teaching comics through multiple lenses: Critical perspectives (pp. 132-146). New York, NY: Routledge.

O Captain America! Our Captain America!

Recommended: Adilifu Nama’s Super Black

Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes, Adilifu Nama

Black Goliath: “Some Black Super Dude,” Osvaldo Oyola

Black Lightning Always Strikes Twice! – Double-Consciousness as a Super-Power, Osvaldo Oyola

Black Communities of the 30th Century: Racial Assimilation and Ahistoricity in Superhero Comics, Osvaldo Oyola

The Man Who Lived Twice! (If You Can Call That Living): Marvel’s Brother Voodoo, Osvaldo Oyola

Humanity Not Included: DC’s Cyborg and the Mechanization of the Black Body, Robert Jones, Jr.

The Captain White America Needs, Osvaldo Oyola

Writing

How to Revise Your Essay after Receiving Feedback

Below is a new handout I created after discussing revision with my first-year seminar. Hope this is useful and you can access as a Word file in the link provided in the title below.

How to Revise Your Essay after Receiving Feedback

When you receive your essay with feedback (highlighting, track changes, comments), save that file to your hard drive (not One Drive) and then “Save as” in Word (hard drive, not One Drive) a new file following Essay submission guidelines for naming files.

Work on your revision directly with this copy of your essay and make sure track changes are off (in Review tab).

Address all feedback, creating a clean copy as you work. Refer to Guidelines for Managing and Submitting Assignments in order to work with track changes and comments (as well as removing highlighting). You can address track changes one at a time or all at once.

NOTE: Be sure to revise and edit beyond the direct feedback that you receive. Review your essay carefully for issues similar to the feedback that are not marked for you.

Revise and edit your essay independently also. Consider the following revision/editing strategies to improve any essay regardless of the feedback you receive:

  • Revise your essay for concision; making an essay briefer almost always improves the quality of the essay. Attack wordiness by addressing common usages such as “the fact that” or “a person who.” Consider using the Hemingway App for some practice; this will identify passive voice, overuse of adverbs, and overlong sentences, for example.
  • Revise your essay for sentence and paragraph variety. Check that you are not starting either the same way over and over.
  • Address word choice/diction. Make sure your level of diction (formal v. conversational) matches the type of essay and the seriousness of your topic. The backbone of your writing is your usage of nouns and verbs so review your essay for strong, vivid, specific/concrete nouns and verbs. Notably, avoid “to be” and “to get” verbs when a vivid action verb can be used.
  • Review your essay for clarity, avoiding ambiguity and misplaced words/information. Specifically address dangling modifiers and misplaced words (see also HERE).
  • Reconsider your opening and closing. How you start and end an essay have profound impacts on your reader. Careful revision of these sections is always warranted.
Gun Control

De-Gun the Police: A Reader

Officer Who Fatally Shot Daunte Wright With ‘Accidental Discharge’ Is Identified

The police officer said to have fatally shot Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black man killed in what started as a traffic stop on Sunday, has been identified as Kim Potter.

The Minnesota Department of Public Safety Bureau of Criminal Apprehension in a statement on Monday evening described Potter as a 26-year veteran of the Brooklyn Center, Minn., Police Department, now on administrative leave.

The department offered no other details about Potter’s career, saying, “Further personnel data are not public from the BCA under Minnesota law during an active investigation.​”

However, a report from the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office dated Aug. 5, 2020, indicates that at the time Potter also served as the Brooklyn Center Police Union president.

Police officials called Wright’s death the result of an “accidental discharge” of a gun by a police officer.

Officer Who Fatally Shot Daunte Wright With ‘Accidental Discharge’ Is Identified, Becky Sullivan and Vanessa Romo

OPINION: To Lessen Police Violence, Remove Cops From Traffic Stops

The largest predictor of police violence in America is not poor training, lack of discipline, or militarization. The largest predictor is simply contact with the police — and the most common contact Americans have with police is traffic stops. There are at least 20 million traffic stops per year in the United States. Racial bias pervades traffic enforcement, enabled by its largely discretionary nature; there are more drivers speeding and violating other traffic laws than police have the capacity to pull over and ticket, so who are police disproportionately targeting? People of color.

To Lessen Police Violence, Remove Cops From Traffic Stops, Alessandra Biaggi

Inside 100 million police traffic stops: New evidence of racial bias

Now, Stanford University researchers have compiled the most comprehensive evidence to date suggesting there is a pattern of racial disparities in traffic stops. The researchers provided NBC News with the traffic-stop data — the largest such dataset ever collected — which points to pervasive inequality in how police decide to stop and search white and minority drivers.

Using information obtained through public record requests, the Stanford Open Policing Project examined almost 100 million traffic stops conducted from 2011 to 2017 across 21 state patrol agencies, including California, Illinois, New York and Texas, and 29 municipal police departments, including New Orleans, Philadelphia, San Francisco and St. Paul, Minnesota.

Inside 100 million police traffic stops: New evidence of racial bias, Erik Ortiz

Stanford Open Policing Project

A large-scale analysis of racial disparities in police stops across the United States

We assessed racial disparities in policing in the United States by compiling and analysing a dataset detailing nearly 100 million traffic stops conducted across the country. We found that black drivers were less likely to be stopped after sunset, when a ‘veil of darkness’ masks one’s race, suggesting bias in stop decisions. Furthermore, by examining the rate at which stopped drivers were searched and the likelihood that searches turned up contraband, we found evidence that the bar for searching black and Hispanic drivers was lower than that for searching white drivers. Finally, we found that legalization of recreational marijuana reduced the number of searches of white, black and Hispanic drivers—but the bar for searching black and Hispanic drivers was still lower than that for white drivers post-legalization. Our results indicate that police stops and search decisions suffer from persistent racial bias and point to the value of policy interventions to mitigate these disparities.

A large-scale analysis of racial disparities in police stops across the United States

Policing, Danger Narratives, and Routine Traffic Stops, Jordan Blair Woods

This Article presents findings from the largest and most comprehensive study to date on violence against the police during traffic stops. Every year, police officers conduct tens of millions of traffic stops. Many of these stops are entirely unremarkable—so much so that they may be fairly described as routine. Nonetheless, the narrative that routine traffic stops are fraught with grave and unpredictable danger to the police permeates police training and animates Fourth Amendment doctrine. This Article challenges this dominant danger narrative and its centrality within key institutions that regulate the police.

The presented study is the first to offer an estimate for the danger rates of routine traffic stops to law enforcement officers. I reviewed a comprehensive dataset of thousands of traffic stops that resulted in violence against officers across more than 200 law enforcement agencies in Florida over a 10-year period. The findings reveal that violence against officers was rare and that incidents that do involve violence are typically low risk and do not involve weapons. Under a conservative estimate, the rate for a felonious killing of an officer during a routine traffic stop was only 1 in every 6 .5 million stops, the rate for an assault resulting in serious injury to an officer was only 1 in every 361,111 stops, and the rate for an assault against officers (whether it results in injury or not) was only 1 in every 6,959 stops.

Policing, Danger Narratives, and Routine Traffic Stops, Jordan Blair Woods

Berkeley Moves Closer to Ending Police Traffic Stops

What Traffic Enforcement Without Police Could Look Like

We Don’t Need Cops to Enforce Traffic Laws

citation, education, Teaching, Writing

Moving from Performing as a Student to Performing as a Scholar: More on Writing and Citation

The first time I recall being viewed as “good at writing” was in high school when I submitted a parody of my friends and teachers for a short story assignment; this was probably my junior year of high school during Mr. Harrill’s American literature class, and I am quite certain that I would be mortified by the story if I could read it now.

A couple years later, however, my “writer epiphany” came the spring of my first year of college. I very clearly mark the beginning of my life as a writer with a poem I wrote from my dorm room, inspired by being introduced to e.e. cummings in my speech course with Mr. Brannon.

To be blunt, I likely didn’t really write anything of consequence until my mid-30s—specifically my doctoral dissertation. And then, my life as a published academic really didn’t occur until I was in my early 40s (my 20s and 30s had a smattering of published poems, stories, and scholarship).

These realizations about writing quality over decades of formal schooling and so-called serious writing help inform my work as a teacher of writing. My undergraduates are unlikely to write anything of real consequence while in college so I see my job as helping them develop behaviors the support the possibility of them writing something of consequence if and when that becomes something they want or need to do (graduate school or in the “real world”).

As I have continued to think about my spring courses and the need for students to unlearn to write, I am convinced more than ever that students struggle to write well in formal schooling because of formal schooling.

A high school teacher of English and I talked through my experiences with three different courses of students recently submitting cited essays. Students often seem so bound to their past experiences that they do not or cannot follow basic formatting guidelines even with the detailed models I provide.

The high school teacher eventually identified a key problem I face teaching my students to write at the college level. Since my university is selective, I teach mostly highly successful students. Whether or not we want to call them smart, these students are extremely good at doing a certain kind of schooling in which student behaviors are rewarded.

Students are determined to show that they are working hard, the high school teacher concluded, but they do not recognize the need for working carefully. I added that this was exactly it, and that at the college level, thinking and working carefully and even slowly are qualities valued in scholarship.

Another challenge for students and teaching those students is the essential concept of being a scholar as that is layered onto being a writer. One example of this problem occurred in my first-year writing seminar.

A student submitted a cited essay on a topic outside of my field; I found the content to be problematic, but since I am not a scholar of the area, I simply alerted the student of my concern, noting that if he wrote the same piece in an upper-level course in that discipline, a professor would likely challenge the content in ways I could not (since I am primarily focusing on other aspects of writing, which I will detail below).

The student immediately responded, justifying his topic by his own lived experiences. I, of course, carefully explained that having a lived experience matters, but that is not how one becomes a scholar. Expertise is built from the sort of careful consideration of a topic that happens over time spent studying.

Regretfully, for students, that process of being a scholar is too often reduced to the artificial “research paper,” an experience that trivializes being scholarly and misleads students that working hard is all that matters.

This entire problem is a subset of the problem of grading as well. I do not grade but have minimum expectations; I also will not provide students feedback on assignments until they meet basic requirements (from Word document formatting to APA citation formatting).

Again, as noted above, students are working in the context of direct instruction in class that is grounded in the student resources, checklists, and detailed samples I provide.

None the less, several students will submit work without any citations in their essay, work with only 2 or 3 of the 10 sources on the references page cited in the essay, work clearly cited in MLA format, and other head-scratching submissions that seem completely unrelated to the assignment or the samples provided.

Here, then, are what I am holding my students accountable for when teaching writing at the college level, keeping in mind that they are unlikely to confront anything not already covered well by many seasoned scholars and that they (as with my own experiences) probably will not submit anything of consequence as an undergrad:

  • Learning how to use Word (or any word processor) as a tool. I am a stickler for using page breaks and properly formatting hanging indents (again, not that these are inherently important, but they are common ways in which Word can be used to help make formatting work for a writer). I am also adamant about reminding students not to submit work with different fonts (such as one font in the header and another for the essay) or manipulating spacing or font sizes (to distort the length of an essay). While I recognize that formatting is essentially superficial, this focus is about teaching students that being careful, meticulous, and detail oriented are likely to be well regarded at the college level—while their usual “working hard” approach can fail them if their submitted appears careless, sloppy, and incomplete (a draft).
  • Coming to recognize citation as a basic expectation of scholarly writing and thinking, while moving away from “memorizing” citation style guides and moving toward carefully using style guides as references while they work. I hold students to some elements of using APA (the citation of my field of education) in the same way I do simple document formatting (above); in other words, I will not give feedback on an assignment until some of the mechanics are demonstrated (double-spacing, hanging indents and alphabetized references, in-text parenthetical citations, etc.).
  • Rethinking their work as students-as-scholars/writers by shifting how they integrate sources in their original writing. One of the worst habits students bring to college in terms of citation is the hard-work approach to using their sources—stacking up 5-10 sources (in high school, that was books pulled from the library shelves) and walking through them one at a time, doing very little original work and taking almost no care to organize the content of the essays. Here is one the greatest challenges, I find, when I encourage students to stop writing about their sources—”Johnson and Kale (2018) conducted a study and found that…”—and begin to write about their topic in complex and compelling ways—”Dress codes remain sexist and racist (Cole, 2019; Hall, 2016; Johnson & Kale, 2018; Paul, 2020).”

For the first two bullet points above, I tend to hold firm to not accepting work until students meet the requirements (this can be painful for them and me), and for the third bullet, I focus on this as I comment and prompt them to address in their rewrite(s).

A final point that I must emphasize is that using high-quality sources well and fully is a foundational aspect of content in student writing. I note this since students often follow up when I return their essays and my feedback with “What about my content?”

I explain that it is very hard to take an essay seriously when citations are incorrect, incomplete, or incorporated in careless ways (working through one source at a time). In other words, for students as young scholars, citation is an essential way for them to establish and develop their credibility.

Working hard is performing as a student; working carefully is performing as a scholar.

I am under no delusion as a teacher of writing at the undergraduate level that I am producing writers; therefore, I want my writing expectations and experiences to contribute to their journey as careful thinkers—a few of whom may choose the life of an academic, a scholar, or a writer.

education, education reform, indoctrination, politics

South Carolina Republicans Seek to Politicize History

[See here: MY TURN: S.C. Republican bill would corrupt teaching of history and here: Opinion: The battle over teaching history in SC]

For over 40 years, George Graham Vest served first as a Missouri state Representative, next as a state Senator in the Confederacy, and finally as a U.S. Senator for Missouri from 1879 to 1903.

In a speech from August 21, 1891, Vest included a claim about history that has been echoed by many: “In all revolutions the vanquished are the ones who are guilty of treason, even by the historians, for history is written by the victors and framed according to the prejudices and bias existing on their side.”

Considering Vest’s complicated relationship with the state and country that he served, we should keep in mind that his comment represents something many people misunderstand about history: All history is biased, and history is created by whoever is telling the story.

Often associated with Winston Churchill, the adage “history is written by the victors” seems to repeat itself in times of great upheaval.

One of our most recent moments of political conflict was the siege on the U.S. Capitol in early January 2021. Less dramatic but more significant, that was soon followed by the Trump administration releasing the 1776 Commission report, a rejection of the 1619 Project published in The New York Times.

“The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine,” as noted in the Project’s opening, and Jake Silverstein explains,

The goal of The 1619 Project is to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year. Doing so requires us to place the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country.

The 1776 Commission is a direct rebuttal of centering slavery in U.S. history, calling for a return to viewing the U.S. through the lens of the Founding Fathers as well as emphasizing a patriotic message about the country.

While there has been some tension among historians about the 1619 Project, most historians have rejected the 1776 Commission.

Although the Biden administration removed the 1776 Commission report, the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) issued a response to the political legacy of that report: The NCSS “strongly rejects the recent development of proposed bills in state legislatures which are designed to censor specific curricular resources from being used for instruction in K-12 schools.”

Now we can add to the list of misguided state legislation South Carolina, where a bill seeks, as reported in The Hill, the following:

Lawmakers in South Carolina are considering a bill that would use former President Trump’s 1776 report to help develop the U.S. history curriculum for public middle and high school students, WCSC reports.

The Restore America’s Foundation Act would require South Carolina’s State Superintendent of Education to “review and prescribe suitable texts and online materials aligned with the principles and concepts of the January 2021 report of the 1776 Commission.” 

South Carolina may implement Trump’s controversial ‘1776 Report’ in its schools

The essential problem with this bill is it contradicts its own goals. The 1619 Project is a source for teaching history, but it has no direct political power, and any influence it has on classroom teaching is entirely voluntary.

Yet, SC Republicans are claiming that the teaching of history and social studies is politically corrupt (the basic argument of the 1776 Commission), and then proposing a bill that politically corrupts the teaching of history and social studies.

Further, this bill is endorsing a report discredited by historians across the U.S. For example, the American Historical Association asserted: “The authors [of the 1776 Commission report] call for a form of government indoctrination of American students, and in the process elevate ignorance about the past to a civic virtue.”

That statement has nearly 50 signees, and this sort of critique from historians discredits the value of the report for teaching students in SC.

Additionally, the 1776 Commission report is not suitable for use in education since the report is plagiarized, further eroding its credibility in addition to its partisan use of historical facts.

The irony here is that this bill is politicizing SC social studies and history classrooms in the exact ways that Republicans have falsely criticized the 1619 Project for doing. The difference is that legislation does change how students are taught, but newspapers do not.

“If we really want to ‘save American history,’” NCSS concludes in their rebuking of misguided state legislation similar to the one being proposed in SC, “we should address the marginalization of social studies, and why instructional time for history and social studies learning has declined so rapidly in the 21st century—especially at the elementary level.”

Mandating debunked history is political theater, but it certainly isn’t serving the students of South Carolina.

#BlackLivesMatter, diversity, education, Equity, Inclusion, inequity, race, racism, sexism, social justice

There Can Be No Equity without Community and Empathy

[D]espite overwhelmingly good intentions, most of what passes for intercultural education practice, particularly in the US,
accentuates rather than undermines existing social and political hierarchies.

Paul Gorski, Good intentions are not enough: a decolonizing intercultural education

A split second of awareness kept me from stepping into my apartment’s elevator, the floor covered in vomit, recently.

I thought about this moment yesterday while standing in that same elevator filled with an unpleasant smell as I also noticed a new orange-brown stain on the floor.

A week or so ago, I was unloading two bicycles from my car rack, going up and down the elevator and walking through the enclosed garage of the complex a couple of times. I encountered twice a women with her small dog on a lease, and in both cases, she paused while the dog urinated on a steel beam in the garage.

It isn’t uncommon to see dog droppings scattered down the hallway carpet in this complex either.

Having lived almost four decades in my own homes before becoming an apartment dweller, these experiences are new but not shocking, and they remind me of the general lack of concern for others I experienced in dorm life in college. I also recognize these behaviors are typical of the American character, one grounded in rugged individualism and lacking any real sense of community.

It is the trash carelessly tossed out of car windows or dropped on the sidewalk.

It is the “I got mine so you get yours!” ethos of the good ol’ U.S. of A.

As I stepped out of the elevator yesterday, I was thinking about #TransDayofVisibility and about why people are so antagonistic about diverse sexualities and races, about gender fluidity and transexuality.

A type of awareness for me that helped move me past the bigotry and intolerance of my upbringing was coming to peace with my own self-awareness, being able to articulate that I did not make choices about my gender identification or sexuality but that I came to recognize my gender identification and sexuality.

To be blunt, I cannot fathom denying other people that recognition because I want my awareness to be honored. I also had to come to terms with differences being simply different and having nothing to do with right or wrong, or normal or abnormal.

What is “right” or “normal” for me is not in any way a template or commentary on anyone else, and vice versa.

While this may not be uniquely American, it is certainly true of Americans that we have a fatal lack of community and empathy.

And that “we” is statistically white Americans who exist in a sort of fear that if the “normal” white America has constructed isn’t the only way of being then maybe it isn’t “right.”

Rugged individualism is a significant part of the enduring presence of racism, sexism, homo-/trans-phobia, and all sorts of bigotry in the U.S.

But the negative consequences of rugged individualism are more than the narcissism inherent in racism and other types of bigotry (the provincialism that leads a person to see themselves as “right” and “normal” and people unlike them as “Other”).

What may be worse is that a society that centers the individual maintains inequity even when trying to expand diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) if the centering remains.

I have been involved in DEI initiatives at my university for many years, and since I actively incorporate anti-racism/anti-bias elements in my scholarly and public work, I find myself regularly confronting the misguided “good intentions” of my colleagues, my progressive white colleagues.

My first rude awakening about DEI in colleges and universities came early on when I discovered that my department and DEI structures across campus used the strongly debunked “framework of poverty” promoted by Ruby Payne.

Payne’s work is steeped in racist and classist stereotyping, and it suffers from the centering of whiteness and an idealized middle-class “normal.” When I challenged using Payne’s workbooks, I also encountered the other level of centering: “But it works,” I was told, “with our population of students.”

“Our population of students” happens to privileged and white.

Almost twenty years later, I faced the same situation and same justification again.

An event was held for students examining the storming of the U.S. Capitol in January 2021. The featured speaker was a former white nationalist. When I raised concerns about centering a former white nationalist, I heard the exact same justification I heard in my first weeks of coming to my university—but our (white) students.

What if we created opportunities for growth in DEI by centering those people experiencing the unfair weight of inequity? What if we considered a Black student sitting in the audience while a former white nationalist was given center stage and honored as an authority?

If we were organizing an event on sexual assault would we invite a former rapist to speak to that audience? If not, I imagine some of that decision is grounded in considering those people who have experienced sexual assault.

I included the central point from Gorski above this blog because I am disheartened by DEI efforts; I am witnessing Gorski’s recognition that “good intentions” often still perpetuate inequity by refusing to confront it, not resisting the urge to center whiteness and privilege.

While I no longer see Payne’s materials around campus, many still eagerly guide students through poverty simulations, poverty tours, and “pretend to be a minority” activities; these are all dehumanizing and offensive approaches that are grounded in stereotyping while continuing to center the sensibilities of the “normalized” group.

No one needs to pretend to be poor or minoritized is they are willing and eager to listen to people with lived experiences in poverty or being a minority.

Days ago I avoided stepping into that elevator because I was looking beyond myself instead of assuming the world was centered on me.

That elevator would have been clean and safe to enter, however, if everyone else lived with a sense of community and empathy.

education, Teaching, Writing

Unlearning to Write

In my foundations of education course, we discussed the role of evidence and research in education, highlighting the problem with experimental/quasi-experimental research and its use in the so-called real world of day-to-day teaching. I always use medicine as an analogy—such as the recently development of the Covid-19 vaccine.

What I hope to accomplish is to offer students a more nuanced understanding of evidence and research. I stress that based on my nearly 40 years of teaching, gold-standard research matters, but it rarely matters in teaching (versus medicine) the way that many people think.

Teaching and learning, I explain, are extremely complicated.

In the article we examined, Seven ‘great’ teaching methods not backed up by evidence, one of the “popular” teaching practices Higgins and Coe claim there is “no evidence for” is discovery learning.

As someone who has spent four decades grounded in discovery learning and using workshop structures when teaching literacy, specifically writing, I find such claims to be condescending and off-base because they are overly simplistic.

In the listing of educational practices there is “no evidence for,” I ask students to consider how research in education often defines “works” or “doesn’t work” (test scores, for example), and I also invite them to consider the limitations of isolating any teaching or learning practice in order to examine causality (common in quantitative experiments).

Higgins and Coe make one fatal mistake in their claim about discovery learning by setting up a false dichotomy between discovery learning and direct instruction (a mistake made by many progressive educators who discount direct instruction).

Instead, I offered to my students, of arguing whether or not direct instruction or discovery learning work alone, I have found that the two do work in conjunction if paired effectively. Over my first five or so years of teaching, I discovered that a great deal of direct instruction was often wasted when students were tasked with authentic performances of learning (such as writing essays).

Placed in difficult and/or new tasks, students often revert to their known (see more on this below) regardless of the teacher’s direct instruction and, more importantly, regardless of that known being relevant or not to the task assigned.

I adjusted my teaching, then, by offering less up-front and shifting my direct instruction after students had produced an artifact of learning (again, such as an essay) that gave them context for that instruction.

This new process (for me) fit perfectly into my workshop approach to teaching writing since it gave even more significance to requiring and allowing students to revise their essays after I provided feedback (both in the form of comments on their individual essays and mini-lessons/direct instruction to the entire class).

Along with my foundations class this spring, I am teaching first-year writing and upper-level writing/research. These two writing-intensive courses have different goals (first-year writing is broader and more transitional and introductory while the upper-level course is specifically focused on disciplinary/academic writing in the social sciences [education]), but offer the sort of teaching/learning problem noted above; in other words, for students to write well in college, they must unlearn to write first (cast off that comforting known).

The Known/Misconception: The Research Paper

In the upper-level writing/research course, I have students read two main texts, one on navigating educational research and the other addressing rethinking how to write as a scholar. The three main writing assignments are scaffolded so that they build and inform each other, moving from annotated bibliographies to a cited scholarly essay and then to a public commentary.

I want to focus on the problems students and I face with the cited essay; here is the assignment and the support material I provide:

Assignment

Students will conduct a research project in which they critically analyze how the above chosen issue is presented in the mainstream media, and write in a workshop format (multiple drafts, conferencing) an 8-10 page essay using APA format (see student resources provided) detailing how well or not the media has presented the research. See Sample APA 7e with comments. The essay should include the following major sections: opening, literature review, media coverage, relationship between research and media, and closing/conclusion.

Checklist for Creating Bibliographies and References List Using APA

Sample APA Bibliographies

References Sample

Sample APA 7e with comments

Checklist for Revising Cited Essay

What happens fits exactly into the dynamic I discovered in those early and challenging years of teaching; students faced with a new and difficult task revert to their known and mostly ignore my instruction and even the assignment.

The essay students are tasked with writing is an analysis of media coverage of an educational topic. In order to analyze the quality and accuracy of that media coverage, students do very short literature reviews (the first main section of the essay) of their chosen topic.

While I focus my first-year writing essays on giving students a great deal of choice, in the upper-level course, we confront that writing in academia is often highly structured, a bit more “artificial” and scripted than so-called real-world writing of essays. I, therefore, offer (see above) some guidelines for subheads and sections. I also emphasize that the essay is primarily about building to an analysis of media coverage and identifying the relationship between the media claims and what research shows on the topic (in other words, I stress that the essay is 2/3 about the media).

After doing their library research and submitting their annotated bibliographies (on 8-10 peer-reviewed articles) as well as submitting their working references lists for the cited essay, guess what these students turn in for their cited essay (despite the assignment and detailed support material I provide)?

A high school research paper on their educational topic—which I specifically and repeatedly tell them not to do—and not an analysis of media coverage of that topic.

But that is their known.

Researcher Howard Gardner, often associated with multiple intelligences (another popular idea in education that researchers enjoying saying there is “no evidence for”) made a huge impact on my teaching when I read about the need to consider three aspects of students when teaching: their known, unknown, and misconceptions.

Teaching should build on the known, provide the unknown (direct instruction), and confront the misconceptions. As Gardner notes, misconceptions are incredibly robust, and as I have discovered, misconceptions sit inside the known for students who have no context for distinguishing between the two.

What’s wrong with the high school research paper? It creates for students a number of bad habits that they must unlearn in order to write well and credibly in college. Here are some of those bad habits to unlearn:

  • Known/misconception: Students understand the “research paper” to be a distinct (and special) kind of essay. Instead, they need to recognize that doing scholarly research and using citation are common expectations for almost all different types of disciplinary writing (essay conventions that vary widely among different fields).
  • Known/misconception: Students understand MLA style formatting to be universal, and not disciplinary based. Instead, as above, students need to apply the style and format appropriate to the discipline; for example, we write differently and cite differently in education as a social science than scholars who use MLA in literary analysis.
  • Known/misconception: Students understand their “job” as a student is to write about research in ways that prove they did research. As a result, students writing research papers (inauthentic forms) dutifully cover one source at a time until they have worked through their sources; this is writing about your sources, and not your topic. Instead, as I implore my students often, students need to use their research and sources to support their own original discussion by writing about their topic and not their research (see more about this here).
  • Known/misconception: Students understand a script/template for the “essay” and write clunky introductions and conclusions while struggling to develop beyond three body paragraphs. Instead, students need a much more organic and authentic perception of the essay form, again in the context of disciplinary conventions. Despite this course using a main text encouraging students to incorporate scholarly personal narrative (recommended as their opening), many students wrote their known, the clunky introduction with empty overstatements.

After responding to the essays, I returned to the essay prompt and the support materials I provided. I walked through the direct instruction addressing much of the above while asking students to look at their essays and my feedback as I taught. Students then began in class revising.

Student after student asked sincere questions that highlighted the difficulty they faced trying to move beyond the known/misconception (unlearning) in order to write the essay assigned.

Synthesizing research (instead of quoting or paraphrasing one source at a time; see here) continues to overwhelm them since they want to write about their sources, for example:

According to The Journal for the Study of Sports and Athletes in Education, anything more than twenty work hours a week can result in problematic grades or psychological well-being (Fuller, Lawrence, Harrison, Eyanson, & Griffin, 2019). 

Most of the sources used tended to use the definition of disparity provided by the institute of medicine (Cook, et al.,2012; Williams & Wyatt, 2015; Wang, et al., 2013).

Many articles and papers done on these topics jointly don’t go far enough when splitting up classes to paint an accurate picture of disparities faced by different persons at various levels of class with varying races (Braveman, et al. 2010).

If we think carefully about this known, we can see that students are avoiding themselves and being specific (writing out of fear of mistakes rather than producing their own claims and original writing). This type of writing is performing as a student, not writing as a scholar or academic.

Learning to write, then, is in part unlearning to write.

Developing and growing as a writer is a daunting task, and it also exposes the problem with oversimplifying complex tasks for students (the five-paragraph essay and research paper do not serve students well).

Students as writers and scholars have much yet to discover; they will have much better success if teachers are there to offer direct and expert instruction as they become bogged down in the known that are in fact misconceptions.

citation, Critical Media Literacy, education, Education Week, Gun Control, Science of Reading

Citation and Credibility: Three Lessons

In my three courses this fall, students are now all working on scholarly essays that incorporate high-quality sources (focusing on peer-reviewed journal articles). Since the work lies primarily in the field of education, students are using APA style guides.

Often when teaching students citation, we focus our lessons on (the drudgery of) formatting and idiosyncratic citation structures (APA’s annoying lowercase/upper case peculiarities, for example, in bibliographies) as well as the challenges of finding and evaluating a reasonable amount of valid sources to support the claims of the essay.

Students often struggle with evaluating sources for bias, and honestly, they are not well equipped to recognize flawed or ideologically skewed reports that appear to be in credible journals and are themselves well cited.

Part of the problem has been well documented by Gerald Bracey; citing Paul Krugman, Bracey confronts the rise of think tanks that promote their agendas through the veneer of scholars and scholarly reports. Then, Bracey notes, “[t]he media don’t help much. By convention, they present, at best, ‘balanced’ articles, not critical investigative pieces” (p. xvi). This is what I have labeled “both sides” journalism.

While scholarly writing and citation can often slip into a circus of minutia, one lesson needing greater care is helping students (and anyone making a research-based claim) recognize that their credibility and authority is built on the validity and quality of the sources they incorporate.

Here, I want to present three lessons illuminating that dynamic—all pulled from current issues.

Lesson One: The “Science of Reading”

One of the best examples of the problems with ideological think tank reports and media coverage occurred (again) at Education Week, a major publication covering education that has abandoned “critical investigative pieces” for simply reporting (crossing the Big Foot line) and “‘balanced’ articles.”

Ideological think tanks, as Bracey warned, are well organized and very aggressive, systematically alerting media and providing press releases so detailed that journalists have to do little work (except, of course, evaluating the credibility of the report to begin with).

Media routinely cover that think tanks release reports, and journalists have argued it isn’t their job to determine if those reports are valid or not.

For example, Education Week is so invested in the “science of reading” narrative and movement, that they eagerly present reports from NCTQ because their reports reinforce that narrative—even though, NCTQ itself has been repeatedly criticized for not meeting even the basic guidelines for scientific research.

Sarah Schwartz ignores that NCTQ is not a credible source for making claims about teacher training in reading. But with just a brief Google search, anyone can find that NCTQ has had numerous reports reviewed, finding a disturbing patterns: “Although NCTQ reports have been critiqued for their limited use of research and highly questionable research methodology, this report employs the same approaches as earlier NCTQ reports,” explain Stillman and Schultz in one of the most recent reviews (also concurrent to the report cited in EdWeek).

Students, like journalists, are often not expert in the topics they are addressing, and well-formatted reports can seem credible, but often fail the basic expectations of peer-review (NCTQ releases their reports without peer review and receive media coverage while the discrediting reviews tend to receive no media coverage).

The lesson here for students (and journalists) is that any claim is only as good as the sources used to support that claim.

If the “science of reading” is a valid narrative (and, in fact, it isn’t), citing sources that fail the basic test of being scientific certainly erodes if not discredits the initial claim.

Lesson Two: Gun Violence/Control

Since school shootings are a subset of the larger pattern of mass shootings unique to the U.S., I have been researching gun violence and school safety for many years. These topics have robust research bases that tend to contradict public and media assumptions about both.

I had just recently covered school shootings and safety with my educational foundations course when the highly publicized mass shootings near Atlanta, GA and in Boulder, CO erupted. So I returned to research on gun violence in two classes, having some students challenge what I was sharing. Those comments tend to echo typical pro-gun talking points and the common, but weak, arguments supporting gun ownership found in mainstream media.

Here’s the essential problem with research on school safety and gun violence/control: Gun advocates are ideologically driven and use compelling but false arguments to promote their gun agenda.

In other words, standard arguments for school safety (armed police on campuses, surveillance cameras, metal detectors, active shooter drills, etc.) and access to and ownership of guns (Second Amendment) are dramatically different than findings in existing research. Making this dynamic worse is that gun advocates have powerful organizations such as the NRA and even high-profile scholars offering discredited but popular arguments and research.

For example, John Lott is an economist and author of a high-profile pro-gun book; he also publishes research on gun violence that in many ways looks to students, the public, and the media like high-quality research.

Again, simply reporting on Lott’s research or citing that research in academic writing proves to be misguided since his work has been widely discredited once reviewed (see above).

The lesson here for students is that not all published scholarship is credible, and, possibly even more importantly, students need to seek out a body of research, never relying on only one study or the work of one scholar.

Lott is discredited but his work is also a distinct outlier; academic and scholarly writing loses credibility when relying on cherry picking (outlier research) in order to support a claim.

Lesson Three: Identity Politics

Another aspect of academic and scholarly writing grounded in sources is the importance of terminology—using disciplinary or technical terms in valid and accurate ways.

Recently, Barbara Smith took Megan McCain to task for McCain’s misuse of “identity politics”:

As one of three Black women who coined “identity politics,” Smith offers an incredibly important lesson for students because her Twitter thread offers credible sources for her claim, How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective and What Liberals Get Wrong About Identity Politics, the latter of which leads us to the seminal text itself, Combahee River Collective Statement.

The lesson for students here is the need to clarify terms in valid ways, including finding the primary source for scholarly language.

In some frustrating ways, citation formats and structures are both tedious and powerful aspects of building a student’s or scholar’s credibility. But a far more important task for students in terms of establishing their credibility is finding bodies of evidence that are verified by the field itself, most often peer reviewed and sitting within the bounds of many similar studies.

Since the space for scholarship and evidence continues to expand, students need to be better equipped for the difficult task of determining when sources are valid and when they are mere ideological distraction.

Unfortunately, as I show above, we have ample evidence around us daily of the great divide among research, the media, and the public—a divide often manipulated by powerful organizations with ideological agendas.

Gun Control, race, racism, sexism

Being an American, Christian, or Both: A Fundamental Problem of “Can” v. “Should”

March is a harbinger of spring.

March 2021 has also been an harbinger for some sort of return to normal after a year of living through a pandemic in the U.S. and across the world.

Mid-March now may force us to reconsider what we have wished for since the return to normal in U.S. includes two mass shootings in a week—8 murdered around Atlanta, GA followed by a mass shooting at a grocery store in Boulder, CO leaving 10 dead.

Mass shootings are so normal in the U.S. that they very much define what it means to be “American,” what it means to be a “Christian Nation,” routinely and darkly emphasized after every bloody event: ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.

After the Atlanta shooting and the predictable debates about racism, hate crimes, and gun control, one meme proclaimed “You can’t be a Christian if” by detailing the contradictions between racism and Christian values.

The problem with this claim is that many people in the U.S. do in fact identify as Christian while also actively expressing racism or passively ignoring and allowing racism (see the history of the KKK and Southern Baptists).

The Boulder shooting prompted a similar refrain; “You can’t be pro life and be pro gun,” some posted.

Again, of course you can since the people who identify as “pro life” (a stance that is actually anti-abortion and pro forced birth) are often the exact same people who are pro gun rights.

And here is a fundamental problem in the U.S. that is often lost behind the partisan and angry debates over guns as well as reproductive rights.

Anti-abortion and pro-gun advocates are typically joined, not by ethics or logic, but by fundamentalism—a simplistic and black-and-white approach to issues grounded in authoritarianism.

Trying to unpack or refute this ideological marriage through logic, then, is doomed to failure.

Fundamentalism demands that beliefs remain simple: All life matters, and gun ownership is essential for individual freedom.

That simplicity need not be internally consistent or even consistent from issue to issue. Pro-life advocates do not extend that slogan to plants or animals, and often support the death penalty; thus, their embracing guns as fundamental to individual freedom is not illogical within their fundamentalism.

“All life” and “all guns” are fundamentalism at its core—both in the lack of logic and lack of ethical consistency between the two.

Anti-abortion advocates and pro-gun defenders fetishize the fetus and guns; it then is the fundamentalism that becomes the problem since it necessarily lifts the fundamental truths above everything or anything else.

As fundamentalists, anti-abortion and pro-gun advocates are not motivated at all, ironically, by policies and practices that would actually protect life or improve living. All that matters are the black-and-white causes that have become ends unto themselves.

Banning abortion, for example, doesn’t decrease abortions or unwanted pregnancies; but that ban does erode women’s health and even the lives and living of unborn fetuses.

Those facts are far too complex for fundamentalists, and thus, this never serves as a compelling argument to change their minds. No legal abortions becomes the singular goal regardless of the impact of that law on lives or living.

The same holds for gun regulation. Logic fails against the singular belief that gun ownership of any or all guns is essential for individual freedom.

Guns do not serve as protection (home invasions are incredibly rare, and people are quite bad at using guns, even trained police officers); good guys with guns rarely save the day (a policeman, good guy with a gun, died in the Boulder shooting); and the U.S. is unique in the world for mass shootings although all countries have citizens with mental illness, have access to violent pop culture, and have all types of racism, homophobia, and sexism present in the U.S.

Mass shootings in the U.S. are very clearly most strongly connected to the amount and types of guns available and the ease of access to those guns, especially in terms of the types of guns available (such as the AR-15). Countries that have addressed these situations with policies have greatly reduced and eradicated mass shootings.

But in the U.S., gun fundamentalism prevents a reasonable discussion of gun control.

Like the too often reposted The Onion articles on mass shootings, the ugly truth is that you can be an American, a Christian, or both and act in ways that completely contradict the ideal of either.

We are left with the often fruitless task of arguing that people shouldn’t live contradictions to aspirational ideals (the American Dream, Christian love).

Fundamentalism corrupts entirely everything it touches because fundamentalism becomes its own purpose, self-righteous blinders that shield too many in the U.S. from the bodies piling up around them.

privilege, sexism

The Woody Allen Problem Is Our Problem

I should have never read E. E. Cummings: A Life by Susan Cheever, but I did.

My doctoral dissertation was a biography of English educator Lou LaBrant so much of my scholarly work while in that program was focused on biography, specifically guided by feminism as a lens because I was a man writing a woman’s life.

During the mid-1990s, I read dozens of biographies, often on writers I loved. One notable reading was Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E.E. Cummings by Richard Kennedy (who had edited one of my favorite collections of poems by cummings).

My doctoral program was a relatively late-in-life awakening for me, intellectually and personally, so this biography was one of my first experiences with coming to grips with trying to separate the artist from their art.

The more I found out about cummings, the less I felt compelled to cling to his poetry; in many ways, the person he was contrasted too significantly from the ideologies his poetry seemed to represent.

Biographies of Kurt Vonnegut, however, while exposing the many warts and flaws in Vonnegut, have never presented such a vast contradiction that I still wrestle with about cummings.

It’s my fault, then, that I found myself in Chapter 12 of Cheever’s really well done biography, titled “‘I think I am falling in love with you.'”

The chapter is about Nancy Thayer, the daughter of cummings who was raised not knowing he was her father. In the summer of 1946, there is a reunion between cummings and Nancy. Followed by cummings painting a portrait of Nancy in 1948—where the story becomes disturbing:

Nancy was almost 30 years old, and with some distress she realized that she was obsessed with, falling in love with, the charming fifty-four-year-old man who was painting her portrait. (p. 157)

E. E. Cummings: A Life

I couldn’t help thinking about this awful real-life scene—when cummings had to tell Nancy he was her father once she confessed her falling in love—filled with negligent parenthood, dysfunctional family dynamics, and the specter of incest while watching the four-part series Allen v. Farrow (HBO).

This mini-series has rekindled a horrible and complex story of power, art/artist, and white male privilege, including giving much greater space to Mia Farrow and Dylan Farrow than had been allowed throughout the first two decades (before Dylan spoke again and openly about her charges starting about 2014).

While the series seeks to present new and more nuanced details and examinations of Allen’s abuse of Dylan and his controversial relationship with Soon-Yi Previn, there has also been the expected re-energizing of those supporting and defending Allen, including a number of high-profile women actresses in Hollywood.

To say that the documentary is damning for Allen is an understatement, but the series also proves that there is much to be concerned about in terms of the American public and the moral character of our country (if such a thing exists).

The Allen/Dylan abuse is related to but not entirely the same as the Allen/Soon-Yi relationship; both have elements of very disturbing behavior by Allen, but they simply are not the same thing, except for the common element of Allen.

That connection, however, is put into a really ugly relief in the series because viewers are allowed to see and hear Allen with the children (including Soon-Yi as a child) and Mia as well as in taped phone calls with Mia. The duplicity and intimidation are aspects of Allen mostly absent in the hero-worshipping portrayals he has managed in pop culture and fashioned through his on-screen personas.

Mia Farrow remains afraid of Allen, and she physically expresses an incredible weight of guilt for having brought Allen into her family. Dylan finds herself shaking uncontrollably even as she sits holding hands with her husband (who seems to be a wonderful and loving person in her life) while discussing the lingering impact of the abuse on her life.

I am not sure how anyone watches this and remains an apologist for Allen. Much of the documentary is difficult to watch without crying, without taking breaks.

We are left with uncertainty about this detail or that; we also likely recognize that very few adults in this mess are completely sinners or completely saints. Like the awkward and disturbing moment for cummings and Nancy, this is a story of dysfunction as it intersects celebrity and power.

The series briefly walks viewers through the recent list of men appropriately snared in the #MeToo movement—Weinstein, Cosby, etc. But the light now again shining brightly on Allen must make us pause at how many more men live with almost no consequences while abusing and assaulting women.

Allen’s “woman scorned” and “parental alienation” defense is directly identified in the series as a successful strategy now used in divorces by men who gain custody of their children and then often abuse again.

And here is the real issue for anyone still unsure about the specifics of the Allen v. Farrow controversy and its impact on Dylan: The undeniable fact of all this is that women and children remain ignored in the U.S.

False sexual harassment and sexual assault claims are incredibly rare; the problem is that most sexual assault is never reported (see here); note that despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Allen was not charged. Dylan and Mia Farrow represent the silencing and ignoring of women’s and children’s voices especially against the power of men’s voices.

Lorraine Ali offers a chilling point at the end of her recent piece about the criticism she has received for reviewing the series positively: “Perhaps these Allen diehards are upset because ‘Allen v. Farrow’ finally exposes the other side of the story, and they’re used to a world where women were simply told to shut up.”

We remain too often offended that a woman or child has the audacity to confront the audacity of men.

educator, public scholar, poet&writer – academic freedom isn't free