Activities

Reflective Artist’s Statement for Multimodal Assignments

Activities, digital literacy, metacognition, narrative and storytelling, reflection, visual/multimodal rhetorics /

Benjamin Djain & Angela Geosits Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description The challenge of providing a multimodal assignment to students is encouraging creativity and experimentation with tools that are unfamiliar while, at the same time, ensuring that their work can be marked to a standard. Having students craft a substantive artist’s statement fulfills this dual […]

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Deep Digital Reading with Google Docs

Activities, collaboration and group work, digital literacy, reading, reading strategies /

Ashley R. Ott Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description “Books and screens are now bound up with one another whether we like it or not. Only in patiently working through this entanglement will we be able to understand how new technologies will, or will not, change how we read” (Piper ix). Digital reading offers new

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Write-a-thons and Community Panels: Encouraging Students to “Go Public” with Their Writing

Activities, Community-engaged writing, Public Writing, rhetoric /

Megan Heise Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description First-year writing classes (can) provide a fertile ground for student exploration of meaningful topics that impact them and their broader communities both within and beyond the Ivory Tower. Research-based writing courses, in particular, can open up spaces for students to dive deep into areas that are important

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Towards Self-assessing Writing beyond Writing Center Consultations

Activities, critical thought and analysis, drafting and revising, Feedback, metacognition, reflection, writing center and other resources /

Saurabh Anand Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description This activity sheet’s idea and its relevance in the writing center consultation mushroomed from my English composition teaching days to my (multilingual) students. In between drafts, I often invited my students to reflect on the writing they produced to intentionally let them self-access to intentionally let them

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Getting Burned or Becoming Toast?: Problem-Exploring the Game “I Am Bread” as a Tool for Teaching Growth Mindset in First Year Writing

Activities, collaboration and group work, critical thought and analysis, prewriting and invention, Process, reading, reading to write, visual/multimodal rhetorics /

Laura E. Decker Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description First-year writers often struggle to take risks on projects, especially as they move from their composition courses to projects within new disciplines and contexts (Robertson et al.). However, taking risks by diving into new discourse communities, as Bartholomae argued, is required to participate effectively in the

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Our Sonically-Composed Worlds

Activities, Community-engaged writing, critical thought and analysis, prewriting and invention, rhetoric, visual/multimodal rhetorics /

Matt Hill Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description The activity is meant to encourage thinking about sonic pollution in our world and about the rhetorical nature of such pollution. It could also move into other sonic topics: effects of noise on hospital care, effects of anthropogenic noise on the natural world, how military sonic technologies

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Concise Writing Strategies

Activities, drafting and revising, grammar and mechanics, Style /

Elizabeth Blomstedt Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description Students often rely on writing strategies that make their writing wordy and bloated—sometimes subconsciously, sometimes to make their writing sound more sophisticated, and sometimes to meet word count. Presenting students with concrete strategies for making their writing more direct, clear, and concise increases student awareness of their

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Dramatizing the Conversation: Creating Dialogue Scripts to Support Source Synthesis

Activities, drafting and revising, Process, reading, reading strategies, reading to write, research, secondary source research, Synthesis /

Kim Fahle Peck Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description Kenneth Burke’s famous parlor metaphor presents a picture of academic research as a conversation between ideas and perspectives: Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too

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A Full Class Annotated Bibliography: In-Class Community Building & Applied Social Composing Practice

Activities, collaboration and group work, information literacy, Process, reading, research, secondary source research /

Zoe McDonald Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description This activity transforms a familiar annotated bibliography into a full class activity to give students hands-on knowledge of two central components of composing: writing as a social process (Adler-Kassner and Wardle) and “authority is constructed and contextual” (ACRL). As Tressie McMillan Cottom observes , “writing is always

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