I’m teaching URI’s Introduction to Research Writing this semester, which I love because I always get to learn so much about things I may not otherwise read about. My students’ topics have included:
The course progresses from a formal research proposal to an annotated bibliography and a persuasive essay. In the past I have assigned a field research report, but after varied levels of success with it, I decided to assign a public document this semester instead. This assignment closes the course by asking students to design a document that could bring the research they’ve conducted and the arguments they’ve developed to another, broader audience beyond our classroom. While students will write and design something that could influence others, it’s not actually an action project in the sense that I’m not asking students to organize campaigns or events, or even to make their document public if they’d rather not. As much as I want this to be a truly public document—that is, for it to be made public—I cannot ethically require it. If a student designs a flyer, poster, or brochure they would have to spend money to share it in print. Another student could design a website for free. I am compelled to keep the print media options because students might determine that one of them is best for reaching the audience they have identified based on their topic and argument. For the rest of the course I will have determined our writing genres (proposal, bibliography, essay), but this is a chance for students to choose their genre (from a list of options), as well as the design, purpose, and audience (the four broad bases of the rhetorical situation as we are studying it). It needs to engage students’ skills, creativity, and analytical thinking. This week, my colleague Bridget Fullerton (First-Year Writing Coordinator in URI’s Department of Writing & Rhetoric) hosted a workshop for instructors of first-year writing fittingly titled “Inspire Creativity!” The workshop gave me an opportunity to discuss and think through methods for helping students use multi-modal forms of presenting their research. The assignment options always included the above-mentioned flyers, posters, or brochures as well as online videos, websites, and blogs. I decided to add other options like Instagram accounts, Facebook pages, and Prezis or other presentations that are shareable and deliverable. My hope is that some students will take the option to make their public document live and reach some as yet unknown public. I hope they will have conviction in their ideas and confidence in their delivery. I hope they will tap the skills they had before to highlight the skills built in our course. I hope they see how fun research and writing can be.
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BlogThoughts on pedagogy, updates on projects, and analyses of texts, cultural phenomena, social issues, and intellectual curiosity. Archives
November 2017
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