First day of classes tomorrow

I'm really working up to the last minute on the GHK stuff. I just sent off some vignettes (?) about Kerr's work on a book about King Kalākaua, the publication of Licensed Revolution, and his failed attempt to write a second book about Okinawa. 

Now I need to turn my attention to teaching. I'm going back to teaching Advanced Interdisciplinary Writing this semester after a detour into teaching First-Year Writing for the first time in a couple of years. Compared to FYW, the advanced writing class is like an old friend. Tomorrow we'll just be introducing ourselves to each other, and I'll briefly introduce the course. It should be fairly typical of previous first days of class. But as I always tell my mom when I end a call with her, "We'll see what happens." Maybe something will surprise me (hopefully in a good way!).

Links to sources on the history vs. social science debate of August 2022

I'm not going to comment on any of this because I'm not following it closely enough, but I wanted to list out some links to various texts in the debate about history and empiricism and social sciences (particularly economics) that have been going on. I'm not going to link to all the Twitter threads right now (this one was funny), though I'm trying to bookmark some of them, but I'll just list out some of the blog posts I've read or skimmed. 

The reason I'm doing this is mainly for ENGW 3315, the interdisciplinary writing course I teach fairly regularly. One of the things we get into is how different disciplines have different epistemological stances and "visions of reality," and some of what is going on in this discussion is about that.

Here are some of the articles:

• "On the Wisdom of Historians" by Noah Smith (8/26)
• "New Acquisitions: On the Wisdom of Noah Smith" by Bruce Devereaux (8/29)
• more to come...

This isn't exactly on topic, but I liked L. D. Burnett's 2019 post on "The First Week of Class," which touches on comparisons between disciplines as well.

Summer Non-writing Project (Day Forty-Two)

I managed to make three screencasts for my summer class today, so I guess I achieved something. My videos are not at all professional, but at least I've graduated to the point where I can edit out my "ummms" and coughs (well, most of my "ummms"). I've seen some colleagues' and friends' videos, and I can only be depressed about my own. But, as I told one of my friends, not depressed enough to want to do better(!). Actually, I guess my videos aren't that terrible. The only thing students have complained about regarding the videos is that some of them are too long (around 20 minutes sometimes).  

In addition to working on my course, I took a drive this evening. Saw this interesting cloud formation. (It didn't rain, though.)

New year's resolutions for 2018-19 academic year

I posted some new academic year's resolutions a couple of Septembers ago, imitating something I had done 10 years before that.

One thing that is different this time than from two years ago is that now I have deleted most of my social media accounts. As this person has written, it's a big change. Although it has generally been a positive experience, sometimes I feel like the guy in this video:


(I'm sure everyone has already seen this, but I don't know because I'm not on social media.)

Anyway, since I gave up Facebook and Twitter, I was able to read more. I finished reading Johanna Meskill's 1979 book, A Chinese Pioneer Family: The Lins of Wu-feng, Taiwan, 1729-1895. I enjoyed it, but I was surprised at how little has been written about the book--I could find only one review on Amazon and only seven published scholarly book reviews. (Actually, I guess that's a pretty good number. And the book has been cited 128 times, according to Google Scholar.) The reviewers generally liked the book, though some of them pointed out problems in interpretation or missing sources that would have added to or modified her conclusions. Several of the reviewers hoped for a "sequel" to the book, though it apparently never came (and I don't know that Meskill intended to write one).

I have also been reading Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis. It's interesting as an interdisciplinary study of the interactions of climate and imperialistic politics in late nineteenth-century droughts. I've gotten a bit bogged down in the climate science part, though. Hopefully I'll be able to say something intelligent about it in my interdisciplinary writing course this fall, though.

As far as my new's year resolutions go, I want to do more writing. I'm currently looking at a conference paper I wrote about 13 years ago and trying to figure out how I can revise it for publication. We'll see how that goes. George Kerr is also lurking somewhere in the background.

I also want to keep up to date on my grading and responding to student work. I'm not the worst at doing this, but I'm probably not the best, either. Some changes in our domestic situation might make it more possible for me to stay on track, but we'll see.

Think I'll keep my resolutions down to these two for the time being. Maybe I'll update this closer to the beginning of the fall semester...

Reflections on disciplinary "linguistic landscape" assignment

It has been a couple of weeks since we finished the "disciplinary linguistic landscape" assignment that I asked students in my summer interdisciplinary writing course to do. I'm starting to put "linguistic landscape" in quotation marks because I'm not sure that in the end that would be an accurate description--I'm not sure the assignment did justice to the concept of linguistic landscape studies. That said, I do think the assignment was a useful entry into the course and to each other. I will have to tweak it the next time I teach the course, though.

We started out by reading the Latour & Woolgar chapter that I mentioned earlier. There are some challenging concepts in that chapter, such as "literary inscription" and "inscription devices," along with the authors' use of the terms "mythology" and "culture." We kind of stumbled around with some of those terms, and I'll probably have to take us more carefully through that chapter in the future (if I still use it). We actually didn't read the entire chapter because I wanted to focus more on the texts and uses of texts in the laboratory rather than getting into the way that papers were published and the kinds of statements used in the publications. (We are getting into that to some extent in the second project.)

After that, I teamed them up with people in different majors--I had an engineer working with a philosopher, another engineer and a finance major, an engineer with a graphic design major, an engineer with an accounting major and a communications major, etc. (we had a lot of engineers in this class!). I think I will keep this aspect of the assignment, though this time it meant that the presentations they did were pretty long--some of them going up to half an hour. The benefits were several:

• students got to know someone from a different major (which will also be useful once they get to the third project, which is an interdisciplinary research assignment); 
• they got to see--and look carefully at--spaces that they quite possibly hadn't noticed (or even seen) before; and 
• they got a chance to compare the kinds of institutional resources (including the physical plant) another discipline might possess. 

One of my goals for this assignment was to highlight the idea that in talking about discplinarity and interdisciplinarity, we're not just talking about theories, perspectives, research methods, etc., but that it's also important to consider how disciplines occupy physical and institutional spaces in a university. Some students were rather shocked when they saw the differences between their department's space and that of their partner's department. (One amusing example was when the communications major, who was working with an accountant and a chemical engineering student, noticed that some of the offices in her department still had the signs of the room's previous occupant on the wall--in one case, the previous occupant was a chemical engineer!)


Challenges and Thoughts about Revision
One of the challenges for this assignment was helping students find a focus for their presentations. As I mentioned in the earlier post, my colleagues expressed concern that students would end up just showing slides of similar and different things that they saw in their departments. To some extent this did happen, and in the future I will probably need to ask them to be more "ruthless" with their picture-cutting during the revision process. I asked them to take as many pictures as possible at the beginning, but we do need to work more on cutting, arranging, and theoretically grounding discussions of the pictures we take.

I might also have to revise my sample slide presentation because it focused on only one discipline--rhetoric and composition, as reflected in the Writing Program in the English Department. It would be easier for them to imagine the assignment if I were to do an interdisciplinary comparison myself. I'll have to decide which discipline to use, though.

Another point about my sample slide presentation that led in unforeseen directions is that although I wanted students to focus on the physical buildings in which their disciplines/majors/fields were situated, I started off with a couple of slides pointing out how the page on the English Department website introducing the Writing Program describes the WP as "an intellectual home for the discipline of rhetoric and composition"--I included that to point out that the WP is depicted as a discipline (rather than, say, a "subdiscipline" or "area" of English studies) and to have a jumping-off point for talking about the way in which the discipline of rhetoric and composition is present (and not present) in physical spaces of the English Department. What I didn't expect was that students would also start off with discussions of their departments' or majors' websites. Some of these were more relevant and focused than others, but the websites' inclusion led to me start thinking about whether or not I should somehow incorporate the virtual spaces of the disciplines in the assignment. I'm hesitant to do that, if for no other reason than that it will make presentations even longer, but I'm still thinking about this.

All in all, I think this was a good assignment, though it needs some fine tuning. I think I'll try it again the next time I teach the interdisciplinary writing course.

Drafting a disciplinary linguistic landscape assignment (Was, Work on a new assignment for my summer interdisciplinary writing class

As I might have mentioned, I'm teaching a summer course in interdisciplinary writing, beginning in June. I've taught this course before, with what I'd consider to be mixed success. The course was inaugurated in the fall of 2014, and as I mentioned back then, in my experience it's ideally (though not necessarily in practice) populated by students from a variety of academic disciplines. At this point, though, it looks like I'm going to have a lot of engineering students in my section, which will make the "interdisciplinary" part of this a bit challenging. One thing that I've found, though, is that there are some interesting differences among the fields (sub-fields?) of industrial engineering, civil engineering, computer engineering, etc. (I see that I've mentioned this before.) So I might try to take advantage of those differences to have students look into the interdisciplinarity of engineering.

In the past, I've had students start out by reading up on discourse communities and thinking about the implications of seeing their own disciplines as discourse communities, perhaps stretching the common definitions. For this class, though, I'm going to try to start off with a specific focus on the writing that goes on in their disciplines, in particular by asking students to look at their departments as physical, institutional, and textual spaces. I'm going to ask them to work in pairs (I want to put them in groups comprising students from different disciplines, which will be a challenge) and preparing a PPT presentation in which they'll describe, compare, and analyze the spaces occupied by their departments. Depending on how their departments are physically situated in the school, part of this would involve observing (and photographing) the buildings/hallways in which their departments are located. The other areas might be classrooms, laboratories, lounges, etc., that "belong" to their departments. I want them to pay special attention to the kinds of written texts that are displayed around those spaces and what those texts might tell them about how the department is trying to represent itself to insiders and outsiders. By texts, I'm thinking about not only displays of scholarly work (books, papers, poster presentations), but also signs, postings on bulletin boards, postings on faculty members' office doors, etc. I'm asking students to think about what these texts (including images) might say about what their discipline is "about"--what kinds of activities are valued in the department and how these activities help distinguish the department from or connect it to other departments or parts of the university.

I showed a draft of the assignment to Neal Lerner and Laurie Edwards, the director of the Writing Program and the director of the Advanced Writing in the Disciplines (AWD) program at my school. They kindly provided advice on revising the assignment; in particular, they warned that I should make sure that the students' products don't end up simply listing features and similarities and differences, but that these observed features also need to be analyzed in a theoretical context. So I'm working on revising the assignment to put more emphasis on analysis, and I'm trying to bring in some theoretical perspectives that will be accessible to the students without overwhelming them in the first week of the course.

In writing up this assignment, I've been drawing on several different (and probably incompatible!) sources: the field of linguistic landscape studies, John Swales' concept of "textography" (here's a re-review of Swales' book) and Latour & Woolgar's discussion of the anthropology of the laboratory life, as presented in "An Anthropologist Visits the Laboratory." Most of this material is relatively new to me (thanks to Neal Lerner for introducing me to Latour & Woolgar), but I'm doing my best to cobble it together in a way that will be accessible to students (particularly second-language learners).

I've found the slide presentation below from Dave Malinowski to be useful to me in framing the assignment from a linguistic landscape perspective. In particular, slides 18-20, 22, and 25-33 have been helpful.

Linguistic Landscape for Language Study from Dave Malinowski

One interdisciplinary aspect of this assignment is, of course, that I am asking students to view their own disciplines (or departments--and I know I'm "problematically" equating the two) from the perspective of another discipline (or disciplines! I'm not even sure!). That is, I'm asking them to look at their disciplines from a linguistic perspective, with the values of a linguist (or social scientist, more generally). I'll probably include a question about that in the reflection assignment that goes along with the general assignment.

I'll add more to this post (or add another post) later as I refine the assignment...

First week of classes over

We had a short week this week because classes started on Wednesday, but at least I got a chance to meet (most of) my students. During this week it's a little hard to get into the serious work of the semester because class populations can change a lot. I have two classes that are full, but one is still filling up. (Well, it's about half full right now--or half empty?)

That smaller class is going to be interesting, too, because its focus is on interdisciplinarity, but most of the students are engineering majors. (Probably because of scheduling issues.) I suppose that I can consider civil engineering and electrical engineering as different disciplines, though, even though they're in the same college.

I've given the classes some small assignments for over the weekend; we'll see how they do on those. The two sections of interdisciplinary writing are reading John Swales' chapter on discourse communities (from his 1990 book, Genre Analysis).



I plan for us to talk Monday about discourse communities and disciplinarity. We'll see how it goes! Later on we'll be reading a more recent chapter about discourse communities by Anne Johns. In the business writing course, they'll be brainstorming possible topics for their first project, a research report on a "hot" topic in their discipline/profession.

It was really hot in Boston this week, and one of the classrooms that I have two classes in was particularly sauna-like. I think the air conditioning didn't work. It reminded me of the good old days when I taught at Tunghai's College of Arts building--I remember that during the first couple of weeks of classes, there would be sweat dripping from my forehead when I was teaching. Hopefully they'll fix the air con before Monday!

Beginning of fall semester

Next Wednesday (9/3) will be the first day of classes, and marks the beginning of my fourth year teaching at Northeastern University. Time flies! This semester I'll be teaching two courses that are somewhat new to me: an advanced writing course for students in the business school and a new advanced writing course focusing on interdisciplinarity.

The first course isn't completely unfamiliar to me because most of the previous advanced writing courses I've taught have been largely (though not exclusively) populated by business majors. I'll be a bit more focused on some business-related genres, though, than on the kinds of academic genres I used to teach.

In the second course, we'll be focusing more on academic writing. This course will ideally be populated by students from a lot of different majors (though it looks like in one section of the two sections I'm teaching, most of the students are from the business school--more on the reasons for that later). Students will start out by investigating their disciplinarity discourse communities and sharing with their classmates the discourse conventions of those disciplines. Then we'll move from there into working with classmates from a different major on an interdisciplinary research project. We'll be trying to figure out how to go beyond the conventions/discourses/blinders of our individual disciplines in order to investigate topics or problems that themselves aren't limited to one discipline. This course is new--in the past, there was a general course in writing in the disciplines, but the focus wasn't so much on interdisciplinarity.

For both of these courses, I'm teaching the multilingual sections (traditionally called the SOL [Speakers of Other Languages] sections, for people whose native languages aren't English). In the past, there wasn't a multilingual section of the business writing course, but we found that most of the students in the multilingual sections of the general course were business majors, so we decided to open a special course for multilingual business majors. There's only one section for that course, though, which is why, I think, the interdisciplinary course is populated primarily by business majors (who might be surprised by the focus of the course--we'll see...).

We'll see how these courses go. Perhaps I'll post more about them later...