Kanika Verma
Assignments & Activities Archive
Activity Description
Teaching writing concepts in an undergraduate university writing course can be challenging. Several threshold concepts in writing studies are new for undergraduates majoring in any discipline. The comprehension of many concepts is dependent on other sub-concepts or meta-concepts. For instance, students need various examples to understand what ‘meta’ is in order to understand, use, and integrate ‘metadiscourse’ (Cayley; Samuels and Garbati) in their academic writing. Films are one of the creative media commonly used in classrooms to underscore important course concepts. 3 Idiots, a 2009 Bollywood Hindi film, is a comical satire on the Indian higher education system. I use a three-minute university classroom scene (What is a Machine? – Funny Scene | 3 Idiots) from 3 Idiots to highlight three core concepts in an undergraduate ‘Writing for University and Beyond’ course: meta, code-meshing (Pattanayak; Young), and whether to teach language, communication, and writing prescriptively or descriptively (Young).