Rebecca Chenoweth
Assignments & Activities Archive
Assignment Description
This assignment invites students to identify academic knowledge that they value, and to share this knowledge with a new audience that is impacted by and/or can impact the topic. They are then tasked with analyzing their own writing in this “non-academic” rhetorical situation. Both components of this assignment respond to calls for more accessible academic knowledge and more equitable relationships between researchers and communities: the first half emphasizes audience engagement, and the second half reflects on the norms of writing in both academic and non-academic spaces. In part 1, students present an academic source’s findings or theories on a topic of their choice, writing in a “non-academic” genre that seems engaging and appropriate for their new audience (500-750 words). Students aim to not only inform the audience, but also to engage them by acknowledging the audience’s experiences and expertise, and supporting the audience in effecting change or co-creating new knowledge. In part 2, students write a reflective essay (750-1000 words) that explains their rationale for choosing this rhetorical situation and analyzes the impact of their writing through the eyes of their audience. To close this self-analysis, students explain how their project reflects current or ideal relationships between their discipline and specific “publics.” Because students choose the topics they will discuss, the audiences they will target, and the genres they will use, their projects often reflect their own memberships to multiple academic, professional, and personal communities. Their intersecting memberships often motivate them, and conflicts between their memberships can grant them unique critical lenses on their discipline’s practices (Johns). Students pursue forms of engagement that are both “relational,” impacting relationships between scholars and communities and individuals who are impacted by and can impact their work, and “outcomes oriented,” changing the terms of public debate, equipping readers to put their knowledge into practice, or increasing readers’ agency in dialogue with or response to their discipline (Davies 695699). Past projects have advocated for social change through posters at political demonstrations, sparked children’s interest in fields like computer science, and shaped sustainable practices in communities near campus. This is a variation of the popular “genre translation” assignment, and builds upon prior iterations developed by Writing Program faculty at UC Santa Barbara. One iteration, developed by Linda Adler-Kassner and program faculty, invites students to reshape the ideas from a scholarly journal article into a new genre. Another “writing about writing” version of this assignment, developed by Randi Browning, invites students to share something they have learned about writing with two new audiences.