Look HERE for some tips and quite a few examples of Units 2 and 3 for 1101.

• Make sure you review the unit descriptions of Units 2 and 3 in prior blog posts.
• Drafts of these assignments are due on the Open Lab on May 4. You can post them together, and just click both categories: 1101 Unit 2 and 1101 Unit 3.
• There will be an optional Zoom meeting on Thursday, April 30 at 3 pm (link at the bottom of this page) to talk about Units 2 and 3.

Important Upcoming Dates

• Thursday April 30: Optional Zoom meeting to discuss 1101 Units 2 and 3
• Monday May 4: Deadline for posting 1101 Units 2 and 3.
• Monday May 11: Deadline for Commenting on partners’ Units (same partners as before.)
• Thursday May 14: By noon, post a draft of a final portfolio assignment (with reflection) for 1101. This is the assignment as you would give it to students. 3 PM ZOOM MEETING!
• Thursday, May 28: The final syllabi, and all unit assignments for 1101 and 1121 are due. Please note: final syllabi do not need to include the whole schedule for courses–they will include all your course goals and policies.
• Thursday, May 28: Student grades due. All portfolios uploaded to the PD Dropbox folder (I will provide link shortly)

I have a couple ideas for low-stakes assignments for the Genre Awareness unit in 1101.

First, I’ve found that students most readily know genre as a term related to music/film, and therefore I think it would be useful to start there.

1. In class, play a short clip from a recent horror/thriller film (Midsommar/Us).

Discuss w/ class: What makes this a horror film? Are there any things that, if you took them away, would change the genre?

Writing Prompt: Imagine being asked to rewrite this as a romantic comedy. What would change? What would you have to add to make it romantic and funny?

2. Play clip from Seinfeld’s “The Subway” where riders strain to hear an indecipherable announcement.

Class Discussion: What are the conventions of a subway announcement?

Writing: What other ways can you find that information? What are the strengths and weaknesses of these other different genres/modes? What is unique about subway announcements versus all other genres/modes?

Concepts to tie in (for both): How do considerations of audience/purpose/constraints/genre conventions impact the content and form and mode of the text? Can we write out a procedure for identifying the conventions of a genre given some exemplar?

Prompt: What are some strategies or low-stakes assignments you might use to teach your students what genre is, and how and why we move between genres in order to reach our audiences and achieve our desired outcomes? Try to think of strategies that you might be able to use online.

Genre Awareness (First Steps?)

• To prepare for class discussion and activities, I could ask students to read and annotate a three-page excerpt from The Bedford Book of Genres (Braziller, 2nd edition; pages 30, 32, 39). Doing so would introduce students to a framework for analyzing rhetorical situation and genre conventions. This specific excerpt provides a chart template, specific questions, and an engaging example.
• In a low-stakes assignment or discussion, I could offer students a long list of genres. I could ask students to brainstorm which different “types of texts” they’ve read in the past two weeks. Then I could ask students to choose one specific text that they’ve read recently and fill in the chart mentioned above.

Moving Between Genres (Intermediate Steps?)

• To prepare for class discussion and activities, I could ask students to read and annotate “Navigating Genres” by Kerry Dirk.
• In a low-stakes assignment, I could ask students to find something that they had written in a previous class, for work, or on social media. Then I could ask students to fill in the chart mentioned above for that specific text.
• In class, with blank copies of the chart, I could ask students to brainstorm in groups how they could move the information from that specific text into another genre for a new specific audience: Given a new audience, what could they really accomplish with this new text, in a new genre, and how could the text look?

Genre Awareness versus Audience Awareness (Early On, or Much Later On?)

• I wonder how I could separate, organize, or integrate class discussions about genre awareness and audience awareness.
• For example, I’m thinking of WIRED’s 5 LEVELS series (1 Season, 10 Episodes): “Can everything be explained to everyone in terms they can understand? In 5 Levels, an expert scientist explains a high-level subject in five different layers of complexity— first to a child, then a teenager, then an undergrad majoring in the same subject, a grad student and, finally, a colleague.”
• In a given video, while all the conversations are part of the same multimodal text, and while the modes of live conversation within the video generally remain the same, each live conversation uses different rhetorical appeals and communication styles.
• So perhaps I could use one of these videos to jump from choices in live conversation (across audiences) to choices in written texts (across audiences and across genres)?

To teach genre I was thinking about having an assignment with two parts: first the  students would choose  a genre that they are familiar with and write about the core rules and rhetorical strategies of the genre, and who the desired audience is. After they have solidified their set of rules, I would then have them analyze a work of art in the genre of their choosing through the rules that they have written.

The second part of the assignment would be for them to locate a parody of the genre they are choosing, and have them write about the parody and whether it adheres to or plays with the rules of the genre that they had established previously. After they have analyzed this, then they will be asked about  the effects that the parody has on the desired audience.

I did something similar at the beginning of our multi-modal composition unit on the discussion board this semester after instruction began online and the students seemed to understand and respond well. Since this was successful I think it could be easily done through online platforms.

Q: What are some strategies or low-stakes assignments you might use to teach your students what genre is, and how and why we move between genres in order to reach our audiences and achieve our desired outcomes? Try to think of strategies that you might be able to use online.

A: I liked the idea presented in the Murder/Rhetoric piece we read, since my trashy TV of choice is crime drama. Having a student review how one documents a crime scene is a good way to look for specific details. Then having a student write those details in different forms: from police report to a newspaper article–from newspaper article to a feature piece or eulogy–from a feature piece to… I’d say you could do the same with other jumping off points, and you could have a series of questions with each genre used: Who is the audience in A? Why do you say this? What does A want to see? What about B? (And so forth.) All of these would easily be taken from the internet.

I actually really like the ones suggested in both readings, so I would probably steal those.  I did ask my students in one class to read a poem and turn it into a newspaper article.  We did it very quickly, but if I were to build it out into a more formal assignment, we’d probably read some poems and articles as mentor texts, then have a discussion about the elements that define each genre. Then, I’d give them a specific poem and ask them to proceed with the task of turning the content into an article. In the end, I might ask them to analyze what they did to translate one thing into the other. I think once we all figure out what makes a specific genre a genre, we could proceed with a weekly “show and tell”.  Students bring in something that seems undefinable and proceed with applying the criteria. It might be interesting to ask them to create their own genre, although that might turn into a bigger assignment than what is being asked for here.  Perhaps we could start the steps as low-stakes assignments.