critical thought and analysis

Getting in Conversation about Activism: Group Podcast Assignment

Anti-Racist Pedagogy, Assignments, collaboration and group work, Community-engaged writing, critical thought and analysis, genre and discourse community, narrative and storytelling, Place-based Writing, Public Writing, visual/multimodal rhetorics /

Jeanette Lehn Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description In my class on public rhetorics, I strive to empower students to possess agency in speaking to an unbounded global public with the understanding that all rhetors are constrained and imbricated in complex systems. Cooper writes, “Rhetors—and audiences—are agents in their actions, and they are responsible for […]

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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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Using Reflection and Metacognition to Develop Your Half Essay

critical thought and analysis, drafting and revising, Racial Literacy, reflection, Writing Transfer /

Lindsay Knisely Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description I created an exercise for first-year writing students titled “Using Reflection and Metacognition to Develop Your Half Essay” because I wanted my students to use reflection recursively, as a tool to strengthen the analysis in their essays while they were still engaged in writing the essays themselves.

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Unpacking Abstracts: Conventions of Empirical Abstracts in Social Science Papers

Activities, critical thought and analysis, genre and discourse community, primary source research, reading strategies, research, secondary source research, STEM, Style, writing across the curriculum /

Faqryza Ab Latif Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description The goal of the activity is for learners to be able to describe the components that make up the abstract of an empirical social science paper and apply them to other abstracts in the field. This goal is connected to introducing students to the conventions of

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Playing with Paywalls: Information Literacy in Theory and Practice

Accessibility, Activities, critical thought and analysis, information literacy, reading strategies, research, secondary source research /

Arielle Bernstein & Chelsea L. Horne Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description Increasingly, online publishers and distributors of information – news sites, popular magazines, professional blogs – have implemented paywalls to limit the number of articles to which the public has free access. This has traditionally been true for scholarly sources and databases, and prompts

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“Upstream” and “Lateral” Moves Through Information Networks

Activities, critical thought and analysis, information literacy, reading strategies, research, secondary source research /

Philip Longo Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description Recent widespread concern over the spread of misinformation and disinformation has placed a renewed emphasis on information literacy skills in FYC courses. Traditional approaches often draw on student skepticism, asking them to analyze the credibility of a single source. But such skepticism-laden approaches risk adding to our

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Object Ethnography for the Real-World: Using Objects and Documents for Disciplinary Development

Assignments, Community-engaged writing, critical thought and analysis, genre and discourse community, primary source research, reflection, research, rhetoric /

Meng-Hsien (Neal) Liu Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description As Writing Studies has sought to address multimodal and embodied composition, one area has focused on how objects mediate writing processes and identity formations (Shipka). This assignment represents a final term project for an advanced composition class with the overall objective of complicating students’ thinking regarding

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Emotionally Aware Ethnography

Assignments, Community-engaged writing, critical thought and analysis, genre and discourse community, narrative and storytelling, Place-based Writing, primary source research /

Sarah Bramblett Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description I’ve encountered several jarring writing submissions: an essay describing a student’s family member’s tragic death, an essay detailing a student’s battle with an eating disorder, an essay telling of a student’s loneliness in their first semester of college, and an essay recounting a student’s suicidal thoughts. These

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