An Assignment That WORKS

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For the literacy narrative and since my theme is identity as text, I have them write a letter to somebody who has misidentified them. They have to correctly identify the one who incorrectly identified them. Then they have to describe how they were misidentified. Then they use a text to identify themselves. This text will be used later in genre analysis.

I’ve tried to make this as concrete as an assignment about identity can be. There has been a lot of success.

However, I’ve started to consider using the interview somehow to discuss concretely concepts such as rhetorical situation and audience. I’m considering changing this to an interview with themselves. They can speakinto their phones and use auto transcribe. This will help to teach revision since they’ll have to edit. They can also explore and discover different discourses by using the ways they talk to friends, at work, with kids, at places of worship, etc. when they talk about those rhetorical situations.

Carillo, Difficulty and Emailing a Professor

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Hey guys, thanks for a good session! I’ll try to get us a less sauna-like room for our next meeting.

For next time, please do the following:

  1. Read “Creating Mindful Readers in First-Year Composition Courses: A Strategy to Facilitate Transfer” by Carillo and “Introducing Difficulty” from The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty by Salvatori and Donahue. (links are live). They’re both pretty short, and both could be used with your students if you so desired.
  2. Comment on at least 2 of the 3 discussion forums (they are just below this post.) These are the topics that we were talking about in class. All you have to do is add a comment to the post. Super easy!
  3. Upload the low-stakes assignments we discussed in class to “low-stakes assignments.”

That’s plenty, so I’m not going to ask you to write more, but if you DO happen to have any good handouts of reading assignments or strategies you have, please send them my way! I’m going to compile a packet of reading assignments and I would love to have more to add.

Also, in case you are interested, here is the handout I have about teaching students how to email a professor. Jackie has one that’s less corny, I think, but corny is kinda how I roll (you’re welcome to use this if it’s helpful to you.)

Download (PDF, 292KB)