Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction.
Mikhail Bakhtin, _Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics_ (U Minnesota P, 1984), 110.
Below, you’ll see the strategies I use in all my classes, whether they are online or in-person. Use the drop-down menu for this section to see specific strategies for online classes, as well as those specific to in-person classrooms.
Strategies for all classes (in-person or online)
Unconventional projects that transgress academic boundaries
To support my belief that writing assignments should be spaces for students to practice and hone new strategies of analysis and problem solving, I generate original and unconventional challenges for my students. Especially in my literature classes, I encourage students to break away from restrictive forms of writing (like the five paragraph essay), and instead to choose for themselves which structures and organization strategies will work best for their intended purpose. The following examples demonstrate my method of using formal writing assignments to foster critical thinking, creative problem solving, and flexible thinking even while assessing literary analysis, reading comprehension, and communication.
Oppression Journals and Explication
In 3401, Law through Literature, students read Margaret Atwood’s dystopic novel The Handmaid’s Tale. This is a first person narrative about a society in which women’s social role is determined by their reproductive abilities. The book raises themes of oppression, corruption, and rebellion, and it does so through the powerful lens of a narrator who is experiencing those themes herself. To help students engage with this text, I assign a two-part formal project. In the first part, students write their own Oppression Journal. I ask them to imitate Atwood’s strategies by writing in the first person about an oppressive situation in today’s society. Among other topics, students have written about immigration, policing, domestic abuse, and Syrian refugees. They post their texts to our Open Lab site. In the second part of the project, students perform literary analysis via an annotation and explication of a classmate’s oppression journal. In their explication, they must comparatively analyze Atwood’s text and the classmate’s journal. Then they post their explication as a comment on the student’s journal on Open Lab.
This assignment lets students develop the close reading and analytical skills necessary in an upper-level literature class while at the same time developing the empathy that the appreciation of literature demands. The assignment allows students the opportunity to understand the structures of power that can oppress populations, and it allows them to realize that authors must make a series of decisions when they try to portray such situations. Finally, it scaffolds the process of literary analysis, allowing them to analyze Atwood’s novel through the familiarity of writing and responding to peer-generated texts in the same genre.
Click here to see the assignment instructions.
Podcast Transcript
In 3401, Law through Literature, students listen to the podcast Serial, a twelve-episode study of the case of Adnan Syed. Syed was convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend in Baltimore and had served 15 years of a life sentence when Sarah Koenig, the podcast journalist, began investigating the case and his conviction. She uncovered problems with the investigation and with Syed’s defense. Because of the podcast, Syed has been granted a new trial.
Students really enjoy this text and come to class eager to discuss it; the text we read after it – Arthur Miller’s The Crucible – gets a far more chilly reception. To help students recognize the shared themes between the texts, such as investigation, corruption, power, innocence, and the power of narrative itself, I ask students to write a transcript of a podcast in which they take on Koenig’s role as investigative journalist and travel back to 17th-century Salem to find out what really happened. The assignment brings students into the text and encourages them to try to understand characters’ motives.
Click here to see the assignment instructions.
Writing About Literature and Your Major
Because it’s important to me that my students see the work of our class in the context of their entire education (and, honestly, their lives in general), I ask them to identify and write about one of those connections. This assignment asks students to write about the ways in which a science fiction text (Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles) could be used to teach an aspect of their major or career. The assignment is intended to help students understand that literature contains more substance than what is most visible in the plot.
Click here to see the assignment instructions from 2016.
Click here to see the assignment instructions from 2022.
Scaffolded writing assignments with clear expectations and instructions
WAC principles (and decades of WAC research) encourage scaffolding large projects, so students aren’t overwhelmed by the work, and so they can practice the discreet actions that comprise the writing process (like researching, drafting, outlining, revising, and seeking peer review). In the examples below, you can see the ways I’ve broken down large assignments to support student curiosity, effort, and stick-to-it-tiveness.
Click here to see the research assignment in ENG 1101, the Muhammad Ali section.
Click here to see the advocacy project in ENG 3401.
Click here to see peer review instructions for a remote asynchronous class.
Deconstructing complex concepts and skills to make them more accessible for students
IQIAA
When I was in graduate school, I developed this process as a way to discuss quotation usage in papers. While at City Tech, I’ve developed an activity that engages students in this process physically, visually, and aurally. It was a City Tech student who suggested the acronym IQIAA be pronounced like the furniture store IKEA, so I now call it the IQIAA method.
The acronym stands for Introduce, Quote, Interpret, Analyze, and Apply. Pointing out that all five words are verbs, I present it as a tool box of actions an author can take with any quotation. I’ve used a handout to teach the method, and a puzzle activity to give students the chance to practice it.
Click here to see the IQIAA handout, or view my recorded instructions here.
Transparency, clarity, professionalism
Whether classes are in-person or online, it’s important to communicate the topics and objectives of each session. Below are examples of an agenda for an in-person class meeting, sent to students earlier in the day, as well as samples of the lesson plans I use in each weekly folder for asynchronous remote classes.
This agenda would be sent to students via Blackboard announcement the morning before our afternoon meeting.
This lesson plan is written for students, not for me, and it guides them through the folder of activities due that week in this asynchronous, online class.
