Place-based Writing

Map-Making and Storytelling

Gitte Frandsen Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description Transnational, multilingual students have extensive experiences negotiating language difference by translating, translanguaging, and drawing from their literacy and rhetorical resources (Canagarajah). Further, by traversing physical and digital borders, these students habitually engage in the transnational flow of ideas and information, which gives them access to a wealth […]

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Genre Analysis of Project Proposals

Sarah Swofford Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description The purpose of this assignment is to help students develop a process for learning unfamiliar genres successfully. This assignment is the first part of a two-assignment sequence (the second part is “A Proposal for Change on Campus,” also found in Writing Spaces’ Assignment and Activities Archive) in

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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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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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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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Safety & Accessibility Problem Statement

Kelly Scarff Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description The Problem Statement is a collaborative assignment that helps students approach writing as a problem-solving tool, incorporate discipline-specific language in their writing, and identify safety or accessibility issues in their community. In teams of three, students identify a safety or accessibility problem on campus or in the

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“I Didn’t Know I Could Research That”: Using Objects for Research Topic Invention

Mario A. D’Agostino Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description Objects matter. As material rhetoricians (Barnett & Boyle; Gries & Brooke), cultural materialists (Bennett), and compositionists (Rule) have recently noted, objects play an important role in our lives and composing processes. An excellent example of the cultural significance of objects and what they mean to their

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Environmental Justice: Writing Urban Spaces

Mattius Rischard Volume 5 Chapter Description Our sense of place not only affects our perspective, but also the way in which we represent our home to others. It is vital that students learn to write about spaces that civically engage them on a personal level. The structural elements of the built environment that contribute to

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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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Using Recipe Archives for Place-Based Research and Writing

Ashley M. Beardsley Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description Cookbooks “allude to meals and events, people and places, success and failures, joys and sorrows, lives and deaths” representing “the life worlds—past and present—of their creators” (Theophano 83). Through archival research, students explore how cookbooks and recipes are more than instructions that teach people how to

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