Assignments

Multimodal FAQ Assignment

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 […]

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AI and Language: Facilitating Emergent Participation in New Discourse Communities

Kelsey Hawkins Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description Since the public release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022, instructors and scholars have grappled with the ways that AI technologies are transforming writing practices. In a world that increasingly relies on Generative AI (GenAI) technologies like text generators to produce content for public and professional contexts,

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Communication Guide Assignment

Alexandria Hanson Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description First-year students often enter introductory writing courses with a wide range of language experiences and backgrounds. To develop critical language awareness, as Shawna Shapiro writes, it is important to help students “recognize the variation within their own linguistic repertoir—no matter how many languages or language varieties they

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Reflecting with Zines: A Multimodal Alternative to the Final Reflective Essay

Kelli R. Gill Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description While reflective writing assignments can be an excellent way to have students look back on a past term and ask how their writing has grown, these assignments can also be challenging for both teachers and students. Often these projects come at the end of a term

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Proposal for Change on Campus

Sarah Swofford Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description The purpose of this assignment is three-fold: 1) it helps students execute prior knowledge about genre so they are able to effectively compose unfamiliar genres of writing; 2) shows students how their writing skills are useful in professional and not only academic contexts; and 3) teaches students

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Who Is This Space Designed to Exclude? Instructions and Usability/Accessibility Analysis (IAUA)

Megan Von Bergen Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description Designed as a major assignment in a general education professional writing course, the Instructions & Accessibility/User Analysis (IAUA) assignment asks students to create a multimodal set of instructions for a simple task, while making design choices that improve accessibility. Students also conduct a user analysis of

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Impersonation Podcast: Understanding Untruth in Uncertain Times

Joseph S. Vuletich Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description In today’s media ecosystem, politicians dismiss unflattering news stories as “hoaxes” and AI-generated deep-fakes concern us because of their increasingly realistic qualities. Scholars teaching information literacy have responded by developing sophisticated methods for sorting fact from fiction, promoting credibility, and dismissing falsehood. Yet falsehood is not

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The Zine Project: Reorienting Concepts of Composition through Multimodal Reflection

Tania de Sostoa-McCue Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description This assignment is intended to be a transition, preparing students for practice in moving from alphabetic to multimodal projects. The goal of this assignment is for students to take a familiar genre (in this case, post-project reflections) and practice how they might transform an alphabetic assignment

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Discourse Communities Manual Presentation

Andrew H. Yim Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description In this activity, which will take around 3-4 weeks, students are tasked to research one discourse community (e.g., college club, job, volunteer organization) that they have never joined or recently became a member of. They need to pick out the 6 elements of the organization including:

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The Time Capsule: A Narrative Composition for Developing Social Support Systems

Michele N. Zugnoni Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description The development of a social support system is one of the greatest factors in college student success. Without such a system, students experience a sense of isolation and loneliness (Tinto 4). 28.4% of college students report feeling socially isolated (“Loneliness, Resilience” 3). 64.7% of college students

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