Mary Laughlin
Assignments & Activities Archive
Assignment Description
This assignment reflects my ongoing attempts to build transfer-oriented reflective opportunities into first-year writing projects. It was inspired in part by pedagogical advice in John C. Bean’s Engaging Ideas; specifically, his emphasis on giving students opportunities to consider purpose and audience. For example, Bean suggests an imagined “naïve audience,” wherein “the student plays the role of expert relative to the assigned audience” (42). In this assignment, students assume the role of a peer mentor in a hypothetical-for-the-project scenario: they must design an FAQ-style presentation (frequently asked questions) to inform new students about first-year writing. Essentially, this assignment calls for students to explicate content from the course they have almost finished for students who have yet to start. The assignment sequence prioritizes multimodal composing, rhetorical decision-making, and reflection on disciplinary content. Students create slides and an accompanying script for the presentation. Topics can be stipulated to match the learning goals and content of the course itself. My current FYC classes center goals and learning outcomes related to genre, rhetoric, and process; to match, students’ presentations must address genre, rhetorical situation, and source usage. To compose their slides and script, students must reflect on their own conceptual understanding of course content to generate questions and responses. Ideally, this metacognitive work will help them to articulate their own writing values moving forward. The hypothetical scenario of the presentation requires meaningful consideration of audience, exigence, genre expectations, and constraints; for example, the incoming student audience will likely know far less than the presenters, who will have to scaffold their own content in a way that’s appropriate for novices. Successful presentation materials will additionally demonstrate understanding of effective multimodal design and the importance of modes other than the alpha-numeric / linguistic. To note: the assignment does not require an actual live presentation (though certainly that could be an adaptation). As detailed in the assignment instructions, there are actually two audiences to compose for: attendees of the new student presentation event, and the faculty leaders reviewing the proposed materials, who originally wanted a presentation about generative AI, not first-year writing.