narrative and storytelling

Reflective Artist’s Statement for Multimodal Assignments

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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The Twine Project: Engaging Metacognition and Remediation with Digital Narrative

Brian Ernst Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description The Twine Project invites students to reconceptualize a previously written paper, ideally a personal narrative or argumentative essay, into a non-linear experience that can easily be shared or published on the internet as a single hypertext markup language (html) file without prior coding knowledge. Twine, an open-source

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Getting in Conversation about Activism: Group Podcast Assignment

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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What Color Is My Voice? Academic Writing and the Myth of Standard English

Kristin DeMint Bailey, An Ha, & Anthony J. Outlar Volume 5 Chapter Description In this chapter, a community college writing professor and two of her first-year writing students collaboratively address the issue of Whiteness in academic writing. Specifically, we challenge the notion that academic language is neutral as well as the expectation that all academic

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Emotionally Aware Ethnography

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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Literacy Autobiography

Anita Chaudhuri & Subrata Bhowmik Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description Writing a personal narrative assignment is commonplace in first year composition classrooms and the proposed assignment presents it as a literacy autobiography (LA) which can, according to Canagarajah, focus on individual learning journeys and underline “in-between identities and discourses” (p. 13). The transnational identities

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Non-standardized Grammar Assignment

Cheyenne Franklin Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description “… dont nobody’s language, dialect, or style make them ‘vulnerable to prejudice.’ It’s ATTITUDES” (Young 110). Vershawn Ashanti Young, along with Asao Inoue, Geneva Smitherman, and more recently April Baker-Bell, have long fought against oppressive language standards in education. It is not enough, they have jointly argued,

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Strategies for Analyzing and Composing Data Stories

Angela M. Laflen   Volume 5 Chapter Description Data stories are multimodal texts that combine data with words and images to tell a story to or make an argument for a particular audience. They are increasingly common in everyday life as technology has resulted in an information explosion. Data often do not make sense unless

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Weaving Personal Experience into Academic Writing

Marjorie Stewart Volume 3 Chapter Description “Weaving Personal Experience into Academic Writing” uses the metaphor of weaving to demonstrate one way of using personal and narrative writing within academic essays. Rather than debate whether narrative is appropriate for academic writing, it addresses the question of when is it appropriate and how it can be done

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Storytelling, Narration, and the “Who I Am” Story

Catherine Ramsdell Volume 2 Chapter Description This chapter focuses on the importance of storytelling to successful personal and professional communication in the 21st century. Because narration transcends experience, and because stories “can be found anywhere from a movie theatre to a corporate boardroom, everyone should know how to tell a good story.”  While the chapter

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