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Teaching Experimental Structures through Objects and
​John McPhee's "The Search for Marvin Gardens"
Ashley Anderson
5.2

On a brisk November morning, I start my Introduction to Nonfiction Prose class by asking students to discuss John McPhee’s essay “The Search for Marvin Gardens.”  Today is the end of the first week in which the class explores essays that experiment, and after two days of grappling with the many ways in which the essay form can play with structure, I see some faces that look a little, well, weary.  “What is this essay about?  What’s the experiment that’s happening here?” I ask the class.

One student raises his hand.  “Well, it starts off by talking about McPhee playing in a competitive Monopoly tournament, in which he starts off by advancing to Vermont Avenue.”  As my student works his way through the essay, I start drawing on the board.  One square inside of a slightly bigger square.  Two angled rectangles inside the smaller square.  My student names off some of the properties on the Monopoly board and I fill them in.

Mid-sentence, it hits him as he looks up from his book and sees my artwork.  “Oh my god, this essay’s the Monopoly game!” Click here to continue reading.

Negotiating Linguistic Borderlands, Valuing Linguistic Diversity, and
Incorporating Border Pedagogy in a College Composition Classroom
Trisha Brady
5.2

Given the high cost of academic success for students at a moment when the vast landscape along our national borders is being increasingly weaponized both literally and figuratively, it seemed necessary to consider how critical and pedagogical intervention might disrupt the ideological effects of monolingualism and quell fears of difference that often accompany nationalistic expectations for the use of English only in America.  Political discourse about the national border affects how students interpret borders and situate themselves in relation to those borders as well as how they negotiate linguistic borderlands within and beyond classrooms.  Border pedagogy offers faculty and students the opportunity to consider the intersections of language, identity, and culture in ways that decenter nationalistic views to promote inclusion and equity.  This decentering is possible because the concepts of translanguaging and multilingualism (Creese and Blackledge 106) that inform border pedagogy conceive of all individuals as if they possess “a complex of specific semiotic resources” (Blommaert 102) that they use to communicate and fashion identities. Click here to continue reading.

Writing Health and Disability: Two Problem-Based Composition Assignments 
Kim Hensley Owens
5.2

Writing Health and Disability is an upper-level undergraduate elective offered by the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Rhode Island (URI) that attracts a wide range of students, with clusters from the pharmacy program, health studies, and the writing and rhetoric major, as well as students who have disabilities or have experienced significant health issues. The course catalog explains that the course “[e]xplores the ways we experience, label, and politicize health and disability in our culture. Writing may include narratives, cultural critiques, persuasive essays, and policy proposals.” While other teachers have approached the course in a variety of ways, I taught the class through problem-based writing assignments; I presented students with health and disability-related “problems” they then attempted to find solutions to through their own research and writing. 

URI’s Writing and Rhetoric Department is separate from the English Department, and its course offerings reflect this institutional separation of rhetoric and composition from the broader English studies umbrella. For example, URI’s general education courses are often titled “Writing X,” (e.g., Writing Culture [see White-Farnham 2012] and Writing Health and Disability). Those familiar with English courses can sometimes misinterpret “Writing X” classes as “Writing about X” classes, in which students might write analytical essays about texts or topics relating to health and disability. “Writing X” classes, by contrast, focus on the production of texts within that topic or field rather than on analysis of texts. The course titles reflect the departmental emphasis on providing students opportunities to use research and rhetorical strategies to craft texts that create meaning and information in a wide range of genres directed toward a wide variety of (real or imagined) audiences.  Click here to continue reading.

Threads from the Refugee Crisis: Creative Nonfiction and Critical Pedagogy
Reshmi Mukherjee
5.2

In Threads from the Refugee Crisis, graphic reportage by British cartoonist, nonfiction writer, and activist, Kate Evans documents the horrifying living conditions and inhuman treatment of the refugee population in a camp in Calais, France, also known as the “jungle.” By the time Threads was published in 2017, the “jungle” had already been dismantled, but with a history of 10,000 asylum seekers who were forced to languish for months and years, much like the detention center in Woomera, Australia, it has become a symbol of Europe’s anti-humanitarian policy and refusal of basic human rights to one of the most vulnerable population of the world (Buken 80). As a representational technique, Evans draws sketches of the wrenching reality of this intractable problem, as she witnessed it herself, to the narrate how state orchestrated mechanism dehumanize human subjects and punish those who are fleeing war and political unrest in their home countries. Evans’ skillful drawing to evoke a visual imagery speaks of literary and artistic excellence where traditional forms of reading and learning gets blurred, and a nonfiction can be read as a piece of literature that also serves as an historical archive. Threads also has an underlying metanarrative about the non-refugee volunteers who work in the refugee camp, but find themselves equally disadvantaged when they dare to challenge government policies. Click here to continue reading.

Architectures of Revision
Susan M. Stabile
5.2

The human practices of savoring, lounging, praying—and writing—shape (indeed necessitate) the forms of food, furniture, buildings, and essays we design. And all require trial and error, experiment and revision. A little less salt, a few more chives, and Alice Waters perfected the medley of flavor and color for her Salted Potatoes with Crème Fraise and Chives recipe. Shaping plywood medical splints around his own leg and bonding them with resin glue by applying heat and pressure, and Charles Eames fashioned an adaptable prosthetic for wounded soldiers. Replacing the traditional church steeple with angled geometries sculpted in concrete, copper, and glass, and Frank Lloyd Wright revolutionized the performance of Unitarian devotion.  Recipes, prototypes, blueprints, and sketches are these artists’ first drafts, which are refined through tinkering, experiment, and modification. They are also potent analogies for the creative nonfiction writer to engage: the feeling-your-way sense through what Vivian Gornick calls an essay’s situation (the topic or event or experience or memory) toward its story (the deeper and resonant meaning). The progression from situation to story (the essay’s within), it follows, necessitates its organic architecture (the essay’s outward) or structural design. And moving from within outward requires manual labor.​  5.2 StabileClick here to continue reading.