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English 6625 Assignments | Fall 2019

Reading Responses

Students are responsible for reading responses each week as indicated on the schedule. Everyone will do the first RR in the first week as practice during class. Thereafter, the class will be divided into groups based on how many students are enrolled. These groups will be based on “modalities”: writing, speaking, seeing, making. Groups will compose and post responses to readings by Monday afternoons at 5:00 p.m. Students will respond to at least four (4) of their peers’ reading responses by the next day (Tuesday) at 5:00 p.m.

Modalities:

  • Written Responses should be about 400 – 500 words (2 – 3 double-spaced pages if you were word processing them) and should follow one of two formats: 1) Impact on Teaching: Think of what impact the ideas or concepts in a particular article / chapter / essay may have on the teaching of writing or on teaching more generally. Explain as articulately as possible how this impact might occur by summarizing the key point(s) from the article and linking that / those to either real or hypothetical teaching situations. You might also talk about the problems and/or possibilities this concept or idea creates for the teacher / student. You should reflect, at least a little, one how your own experience(s) in classrooms and courses rub against the concept(s) or idea(s) that you’re responding to. 2) Synthesis: Looking at two or more of the texts you read for the week, attempt to synthesize a concept or idea that you noticed moving through the texts. Your goal should be to highlight the idea or concept as the writers understand it and then explain how you see these concepts connecting or disconnecting in a productive way.
  • Spoken Responses should be 1 – 2 minutes in length and should focus on one key issue / concept / confusion / frustration / excitement that occurred in the reading that week. This might be an interesting connection you noticed among readings but which wasn’t explicit, or perhaps a contradiction / disconnection between two or more of the readings. This might be an “Oh, I hadn’t thought of that” or a “l used to wonder why my teacher did that” or “When my teacher did that, it didn’t work because …” These should be created on an audio / video platform that can be shared on the course website (e.g., YouTube or Clyp).
  • Visual Responses should be visual representations of concepts / ideas that show up in the readings; these might take the shape of hand / digital drawings, flow-charts, maps, infographics, or other primarily 2-dimentional representations. These should few words on them, as they should communicate primarily through a visual medium; any words should be helpful but not necessarily essential to meaning (e.g., “STOP” on a stop sign). For digital versions, you might try Adobe Spark, Canva, Easel.ly, or similar.
  • Tactile Responses (“Makes”) should be 3D representations of concepts / ideas that show up in the readings. “Makers” (composers) might use Legos, pipe cleaners, popsicle sticks, or a host of re-purposed / re-mixed / upcycled objects in order to communicate their meanings.

*DO not pay for any digital resource unless you want to. I’ve suggested free options or options that are free to ECU students above. I would never ask you to use a digital resource that requires a fee.*

All Reading Responses (or pictures of them) should be posted to students’ individual blogs; non-written responses should also include a paragraph “Maker Statement” of up to 100 words which explains what the visual representations are meant to convey. Because we are using an open-source technology (WordPress) for our blogs, students should keep back-up copies of their responses should the technology fail during the course. One recommendation would be to type your responses in Microsoft Word or Notepad and save copies on your computer; then copy and paste the text into your blog using the “Paste from Word” icon above the textbox.

Response Groups

Group 1 Group 2 Group 3 Group 4
  • Emily
  • Morgan
  • Hunter
  • Megan
  • John
  • Cara
  • Sarah
  • Mayee
  • Nija
  • Cari
  • Garrett
  • Ashten
  • Brianna
  • Katie
  • Laura
  • David

Response Schedule

Written Spoken Visual Tactile
Response 1 All Groups X X X
Response 2 Group 1 Group 2 Group 3 Group 4
Response 3 Group 2 Group 3 Group 4 Group 1
Response 4 Group 3 Group 4 Group 1 Group 2
Response 5 Group 4 Group 1 Group 2 Group 3
Response 6 Group 1 Group 2 Group 3 Group 4
Response 7 Group 2 Group 3 Group 4 Group 1
Response 8 Group 3 Group 4 Group 1 Group 3
Response 9 Group 4 Group 1 Group 2 Group 4
Response 10 Maker’s Choice Maker’s Choice Maker’s Choice Maker’s Choice

Literacy Autobiography

College composition courses, at their core, are always about literacy, about how human beings learn to language, how we develop our connections to words, images, and sounds — and how we learn to deploy our awareness of these things in order to accomplish our goals: to indicate to a parent that we’re hungry, to get access to the tv remote, to figure out where we sit the first day of school, to find our name and replicate its writing in various media, to enjoy and create stories, to share our ideas with others. Literacy, of course, is a complicated concept, as is our individual relationships to literacy. Because college writing composition courses study literacy, a common assignment that we ask of students is some sort of literacy autobiography. Following the basic teaching dictum that good teachers do not ask students to do things that they themselves have not done, we will spend this semester inventing, composing, and revising literacy autobiographies. These projects will allow you to see this sort of assignment from both the student’s and the teacher’s perspectives so that you can imagine how you might assign, respond to, and evaluate this sort of project in English 1100/2201.

I am very purposefully not calling this assignment an essay because I do not want you to see yourself as limited by the sort of conventions that the essay genre may imply to you. You might end up creating a video/digital story, a podcast, a multi-genre or multi-modal project, or might end up using only words on a screen/page. I’m not interested in dictating the genre/form of your finished project, and I hope you will take some creative chances to do something interesting and innovative with your autobiography.

We will practice several different invention techniques to get your ideas going, and throughout the semester, you will be required to bring drafts to class for peer and instructor feedback; we will also read a good bit about different types of literacies and what those look like. Finished drafts of these autobiographies will be due at the end of the semester as part of your course portfolio.

Writing Assessments

In October/November, we will do a deep-dive discussion issues of assessment, evaluation, and grading, as well as methods for responding to student writing. Most writing teachers will tell you that these practices constitute the most difficult aspects of the job. Many of us would much rather encourage writers, help them to think of topics and conduct their inquiry/invention processes, than have to come behind them and evaluate their products. Nonetheless, that’s part of this particular endeavor.

For this part of the course, we will read student papers written in English 1100/2201, and practice our response strategies and grading methods. Such an activity can never be truly “authentic” as one cannot read the papers written by one’s own students and in one’s own classes the same way as those written in a different context. Regardless, after class discussion and practice, each of you will write a 2 – 3 page reflection/analysis on how you interacted with those texts. As part of this reflection, you should ask yourself the following questions:

  • Which activity was more difficult (assessment, evaluation, response)? Why? What does that mean for you as a future writing teacher?
  • Looking back at how you handled each of the discreet activities of this ‘unit’ (assessment, evaluation, response), what would you say you ‘priorities’ have been as a writing teacher? What issues/problems/concerns seem to occupy your thinking as a writing teacher? Why do you think these stick out? What impact might these priorities have on you in the future when you’re teaching?
  • What issues related to assessment, evaluation, and response continue to concern you? Why? How might you work through these issues?

In class, we will work in teams to discuss your responses and build a rubric for the projects based on your responses. After that activity, you will write a brief reflection on your experience with providing revision-based feedback and grades. We will start this in class, but if needed, you may have an additional 48 hours after class to finish this “quick-write.”

Questions for In-class Quick-Write:

  • For this activity, you read two samples of writing from each of the three main projects in English 1100. When it came time to respond, how did you set your priorities for response? How did you focus  your response to a very few key revision suggestions for the next draft? Or, did you have trouble focusing your responses? What made that difficult?
  • What strategies or ideas from this week’s readings were particularly helpful and/or frustrating as you tried to respond to and evaluate the essays this week? How did the research you read this week help you with some of your thinking about assessment practices?
  • What was the most difficult part of responding to these drafts (aside from the obvious: that these were not your students or projects you had assigned)? What did you enjoy most about the responding to the writing? What least?
  • What struggle, if any, did you have determining a grade for the work? After your conversation with your group, how did your grade choice line up with those of others? How much variation was there?
  • What was it like trying to create a rubric (as a group) that better reflects the values of what you all noted in your comments/responses to students?
  • What might this experience mean for you when you teach English 1100? What, if anything, might transfer to your own pedagogy based on this experience?

Curation (Inquiry) Project

This course works to dismantle the prevailing myth of the college professor as an ‘expert’ in his/her field who can therefore teach b/c of content expertise alone. From the book that we used to start (Bain’s What the Best College Professors Do) on, we have pulled at the notion of teacher-expertise to ask how we know what we know, whether what we know helps students learn to write, and what we might know better in order to perform more effectively as writing teachers. Your Curation Project for English 6625 should explore a significant issue / problem / idea / concern / etc that you’re interested in pursuing and which you think other new teachers could learn more about in order to be better at teaching English 1100/1200. The only real limit is that the issue etc. must apply to teaching writing in the context of English 1100/1200 and should represent a genuine space of contention / concern / awareness within the field of Rhetoric and Composition. In September, you will begin drafting CP proposals, which I will respond to with ideas for how to focus your inquiry. In October and November, you will have drafts of your project due on several occasions; for each due date, I will assume a different level of work (quantity and quality) as you push through the research that’s available for helping you to think about the project you’ve chosen.

Final products (which may take many shapes and involve many genres) should demonstrate the following:

  1. a beginning knowledge of the issues involved in the topic being researched (evidence: 15 – 20 pieces of scholarly research included in the project in nuanced and careful ways);
  2. a thoughtful exploration of the issue/topic in writing/speaking/representing (evidence: prose/images which represent(s) the positions of the teacher-scholars effectively and correctly);
  3. an awareness of the complexity of the issue(s) involved (evidence: text which explores both simple and complex understandings of the issue(s) being researched and which demonstrates why there are no simply answers to the problem(s);
  4. a set of research-based practices useful to teachers (evidence: text which points to options supported evidence).

Final products should represent the work equivalent of a 12 – 15 page scholarly essay.

Example: Rex’s Flipped Classroom

Writer’s Memo: For this project, write a brief reflection on the following questions as your writer’s memo for the Curation Project. This should be added as your Curation Project (give the post a title like “Will’s Curation Project: TOPIC” or similar so that it’s clear whose project your classmates and I are reading). After the memo, you may either copy-and-paste your project, if it’s a Word-style document, or provide a link out to whatever site you’re using to host your project.

  • What drew you to this topic/issue? Why did you want to work on it?
  • What did you learn through this process about the topic/issue?
  • What do you hope your readers’ gain from your resource? What do you think you and they will find most useful the next time you/they teach first-year writing?

Course Portfolio / Self-Assessment

One method of assessment/evaluation that you may only recently be starting to know is portfolio assessment. You’ve read a bit about it (or will have by the end of the semester) and how it applies to FYC, but the difference between reading about and doing it is vast. If you’ve never created one yourself, then I would argue, you don’t really know what these are, what they do (or can do), or what sort of work is involved. For English 6625, I’m asking you to construct a Digital Course Portfolio of representative work from this course that demonstrates that you have met the outcomes for the course and for your own learning. A portfolio is both a collection of artifacts (reading responses, quick writes, comments on peers’ writing, essays, etc) AND a reflection on those artifacts. The reflective cover letter that goes with your portfolio is your chance to articulate what you’ve learned, how you learned it, why that learning matters now and in your future as a teacher, and where the reader (mostly me) can see evidence of that learning. You might also think of it as an application packet: if you sent this to the Director of Writing Foundations, would she be convinced that you’re ready to teach English 1100/2201?

Your Analytical Cover Letter should answer the following questions collectively (don’t just answer one at a time like a short-answer essay test):

  1. What are/were your learning goals for this course? What do/did you want this course to help you with? How have you found answers to those questions/concerns? What answers have you found?
  2. How do the texts you’ve collected for your digital portfolio demonstrate that you’ve met the learning goals/outcomes that the teacher constructed? Why were these outcomes relevant? Do you see them differently now than when you started the course?
  3. What projects, activities, assignments, discussions, etc. have had the greatest impact on your learning this semester? Which ones, if any, have fostered what Bain refers to as “deep learning”? Were any of the readings and activities transformative in any way?
  4. If you had focus in on two key concepts, activities, or ideas that will do the most to guide your teaching of first-year composition, what would they be? How will they guide you?
  5. What grade do you think the products in your portfolio warrant? Why do you think this?

Your Analytical Cover Letter will be the first thing I read when it’s time to evaluate your performance in this course. From it, I will click on the different links to texts you have included and see if I can see in them what you see in them/say is in them. This is your chance to demonstrate very deep, engaged critical thinking about the entire course and your work within it. Look for connections across different genres of writing this semester and different projects; explore what you’ve learned; consider what you still need to learn. So what artifacts go “in” the portfolio? That’s up to you: what artifacts do you need to select, after the reflection, to make the case that you outline in your analytical cover letter? Remember, a portion of your grade is your “studentship,” so having posts on the site on time and which meet the criteria I outlined, turning in drafts of projects on time and meeting any criteria I sketch out, etc etc … that’s all where I will evaluate your “studentship.” Your learning is a different issue and we have to evaluate that together. So make your best case, make it clear and articulate, and let’s see where you are.