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 respective audiences can be seen in Zak Penn’s 2014 documentary Atari: Game Over. This film chronicles the filmmaker’s search for the surviving video game cartridges of E.T., rumored to be located in a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico (Atari). The game, as an object/artifact, is believed to have triggered the North American Video Game Crash of 1983 (ultimately bankrupting the Atari video game company). As Penn’s documentary highlights, quite often an object’s value or worth is subjective; what was once literally trash becomes an important artifact that sparks Penn’s research and documentary process. Building on the scholarly and popular interest of objects, this activity uses objects for research topic inspiration and invention. I currently teach an advanced college writing course at a private university in South Florida. In the course, students are expected to conduct a semester-long research project on a topic of their choosing within a community they inhabit. Each subsequent assignment in the class (e.g., annotated bibliography, observation report, interview/survey report, research paper, Ignite presentation) grants students an opportunity to look at their chosen topics from different vantage points. While students are empowered in the class to choose topics that matter to them, such agency generates certain writerly challenges. Specifically, students find it difficult to locate searchable questions in the communities that they are a part of. It is my belief that having students write about objects connected to their hobbies/interests remedies these challenges. This activity provides solutions to common problems with generating research topics (Gaillet & Eble), beginning by inviting students to bring meaningful objects into the classroom and write about them. Pulling examples from former students, this activity shows students that the scope of items they can write about is vast and deep, provided the items carry some kind of meaningful significance to them as writers (e.g., a rare pair of Air Jordan sneakers, an Xbox controller, and a yoga mat can serve as entry points into communities and vehicles for potential research topics). This activity also shows that research questions are all around us and are oftentimes linked to their specific communities or hobbies/interests (as evidenced by the aforementioned student example and Penn’s documentary).