This is lifted from a creative piece I wrote a while back. It fits the mood of this Fourth of July well, when my mind drifts into fantasies of deserts, golden hayfields and cacti caked in the red glow of sunset--essentially anything recent political developments haven't infringed as of yet (as hard as Scott Pruitt … Continue reading A Prose Poem for the Fourth of July…
Tag: writing
Can We Hold Class Outside, Professor? Nature, Cognition and Composition
Composition and education have long questioned a central premise of the academy and university life in higher education: What is a classroom? Recent research published in Psychological Science steers us toward a premise that is of paramount interest to our discipline. What would it mean for the natural world to serve the acting, thinking brains of our … Continue reading Can We Hold Class Outside, Professor? Nature, Cognition and Composition
Developing Habits, Developing Minds: What Can Neuroplasticity Do For Composition?
A bevy of scholarship within both the sciences and the humanities have surveyed the implications presented by recent research into the human's brain's astounding and only recently-realized levels of neuroplasticicy. The brain, the body of research suggests, is not a static entity that exists in fixed and stationary configuration, but rather is malleable, changeable, pliant … Continue reading Developing Habits, Developing Minds: What Can Neuroplasticity Do For Composition?
On the Value of “Soft Reading”
Blame it on Oprah. Blame it on One City One Book. Blame it on the declining reading habits of ordinary Americans (as recent popular wisdom would have you believe). Just about every highschool, community center and early-college common curriculum in the past decade or so has tried out some version of a community-read initiative. SUNY Cortland, … Continue reading On the Value of “Soft Reading”
When Worlds Speak: Apocalypse, Composition, Critique
Compositionists have in recent years begun, in a mode similar to the ethical, social and Sophistic turns of recent decades, the collective project of mobilizing the discipline to hold in greater esteem the cataclysmic situations of public concern unfolding in front of our eyes. We need only examine the evening news … Continue reading When Worlds Speak: Apocalypse, Composition, Critique
Apocalyptic Turn/Sparking Change
And just like that, the Spring semester has flown by and will soon give way to the joys of summer. Before we end, however, I'd like to take some time to outline the final capstone project I'm assigning to my first-year writing students to end our time together and draw everything to a cohesive close: … Continue reading Apocalyptic Turn/Sparking Change
A Blast From the Past
I've been reading a lot recently on literacy narratives, chronicles of time and transformation in which writers reflect on their past experiences reading, writing and communicating in conversation with others. I'm intrigued with what I might find myself writing were I to begin a literacy narrative project, especially considering my literacy, as it stands, is only just … Continue reading A Blast From the Past
Writing and Mindfulness
Writing and Mindfulness I first encountered meditation during the spring semester of my senior year of college. A group of twenty or so of us sat in a two-tiered circle, red and blue light shimmering inside from the interfaith center’s stained glass windows, as a philosophy professor/smiling mystic led us in breathing exercises. These exercises … Continue reading Writing and Mindfulness
Writing The Academy
Lots of work within rhetoric and composition has been put into examining the intersection of gender and writing in higher education over the past thirty years. I can't summarize it here, but instead I'll steer the mindful and attentive reader(s) toward the work of Gwendolyn Pough, whose published articles I've been moving through lately, and … Continue reading Writing The Academy
Go Left, Young Writers!
One of my favorite writers, the Depression-era labor theorist and literary organizer Mike Gold, called upon the young writers of his day to stand boldly against passivity, to dare to speak and make their voices known, to audaciously demand an audience and to demand that audience's attention. Gold writes "the best and newest thing a young … Continue reading Go Left, Young Writers!
Jacob Richter 