Category: In the Classroom

Tips and Approaches for Multimodal Revision

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By Alycia Gilbert

Note: This post was originally developed for the Winter 2021 CIC Workshop and published to the CIC Blog; however, I thought it was especially relevant now, as students begin their second assignment sequences and instructors begin planning their requirements for the portfolio. Even if your course materials don’t lean too heavily into multimodal composition, this post raises applicable questions and provide tips for scaffolding the revision process for any major project. In resharing this post, I hope that it’s a useful prompt for considering how to define substantive revision for the portfolio, how to prepare students for revision, and how to set reasonable expectations for the revision process considering the scope of the project and the length of the quarter!

Both with my own students and with other instructors, I’ve had a lot of conversations about anxiety when approaching multimodal projects—specifically, anxiety over how to tackle revision. I’ve felt that anxiety myself; developing a philosophy on multimodal revision can be tricky, but it’s an absolute necessity for a portfolio-based writing course. What does substantive revision look like for a multimodal project? What do you emphasize as the end-goal of multimodal revision? And what do you do with multimodal assignments that are difficult to revise within the course’s timeframe?

While everyone’s approach varies with context (and often even by assignment!), here are a few tips for facilitating and framing multimodal revision:

Scaffolding the Revision Process

Assignment sequences that allow you to pace out feedback and the timeline for revision can make the whole process much less daunting, both for you and your students. To scaffold the revision process into your course design, you might…

  1. Consider dividing projects into preliminary drafts

    Preliminary drafts are often easier for students to revise; they’re much more malleable, and students are often more receptive to feedback during the drafting stage. This also helps focus your feedback, which can be geared toward students actualizing their project. You might have shorter assignments that ask students to first create scripts, storyboards, mock-ups, “minimum viable product” drafts, or pitches, depending on the nature of their multimodal project.
  2. Create opportunities for peer review during the drafting process

    Similarly, incorporating peer review into the earlier stages of drafting provides students with concrete insight into how their project is working and where they could make adjustments. These early interventions create a more collaborative class environment and make it easier to resist the urge to backload revision at the end of the course.
  3. Set clear expectations for revision and articulate them before feedback

    Potentially as early as in your syllabus, in your first few class sessions, or within the assignment prompt itself, you might find it helpful to clearly state what goals and expectations the class will have with revision. What does substantial multimodal revision look like for your course? For an assignment? If this is a question that you want your class to negotiate from project to project, what general, core expectations might you let these individual negotiations stem from?
  4. Consider crowd-sourcing assessment criteria with your class

    Not only does this create space for students to more actively and equitably engage with their own assessment, but establishing a communal vocabulary for assessment can make understanding and incorporating feedback easier for students. It can also make peer review more effective, as well. You might begin with the course outcomes and ask students to brainstorm what these outcomes would look like specifically for the assignment, or you might have students assess a past sample together.

Process Over Product

In framing revision, it can be helpful to emphasize gaining and understanding new skills over producing perfect final products—this allows students to experiment with genres they may not feel like they have mastery over and places the focus on growth, student choice, and active use of course outcomes.

  1. Use reflection prompts or revision plans

    These encourage students to demonstrate knowledge of course outcomes and concepts, as well as to explain their rhetorical choices as composers. Revision plans create space for students to explain what they would revise if they had time or were asked to do so; revision plans keep the focus on the process of learning multimodal composition and negotiating feedback with questions of rhetorical effectiveness, while acknowledging the time constraints of the course (“If I had more time to work with this project, I would…”). Additionally, these types of assignments tie in well with the goals of the final portfolio and incorporating metacognition.
  2. Provide multiple opportunities for students to reflect at different stages of the composing process

    Reflecting across a project’s composition helps students break down the creative process and see how feedback, revision, and trial and error shaped their work. Ask students to focus on the effects of their compositional choices and incorporate evidence from their compositions.

Giving Feedback to Multimodal Assignments

Sometimes, anxieties about facilitating multimodal revision are tied to broader anxieties about giving feedback on multimodal projects. In addition to emphasizing process over product, here are a few things that might demystify the feedback process:

  1. Be aware of time management

    Multimodal pieces often take more time to grade, but it’s important to experience the piece in full—the pace at which the audience engages with the material is a rhetorical aspect of the text. You might try to develop systems for responding quickly and effectively to multimodal texts, like taking screenshots or marking areas to return to after your first viewing.
  2. Consider Higher Order Concerns for multimodal feedback

    With multimodal projects, keeping tabs on how much revision you’re guiding students toward can make your feedback more straightforward and their revision process less overwhelming. Like in any other composition classes, use rhetorical principles to guide your comments. With HOC in mind, you might focus feedback on:
    • The composition’s effectiveness in addressing the rhetorical situation
    • Where the composition could better meet the requirements of the assignment or tie to the course’s overall goals and conversations
    • How effectively the composition uses multiple modes symbiotically, rather than considering the modes separately in your feedback. Does the composition combine appropriate modalities effectively to communicate the piece’s purpose? Or do the multiple modes overlap in ineffective, redundant ways or seem extraneous?

An effective, consistent feedback system and scaffolding revision into your course are just a few of the larger approaches that you can take to make multimodal revision a little less intimidating in the composition classroom. Let us know in the comments if you’ve got any tried and true approaches to framing multimodal revision to add to this conversation!

For further reading, check out these sources that helped inform this post:

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How To: Lesson Planning with the Classroom Activities Grab Bag

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By Alycia Gilbert

Sometimes filling out an entire lesson plan can feel like you’ve been asked to complete a puzzle without knowing where to find all of the pieces, especially during your first year of teaching. How can you create structure and engagement during active work time in your class meetings? How can you turn synchronous or asynchronous time into valuable preparation for students  as they work toward their assignments? How many free writes can you put into one lesson plan before your students check out?

If you’re looking to create opportunities for your students to practice skills and build classroom community, having a few go-to and varying classroom activities can be such a help! That’s why the Classroom Activities Grab Bag was developed by program ADs in 2020, to make lesson planning less laborious for instructors.

This post will walk you through the Grab Bag, highlight a few of my personal favorite activities that it features, and offer tips for transferring these activities into your lesson plans. Remember that the Grab Bag in its entirety is available for EWP instructors here!

What Is the Classroom Activities Grab Bag?

The Classroom Activities Grab Bag is a compilation of common, go-to classroom activities to help foster an active learning environment. While some activities focus on specified composition skills (like peer review or revision), most of the activities listed are contextually open, meaning that you can integrate these activities into any lesson plan, regardless of the skill you’re teaching.

The Grab Bag is intended to be a working document that grows to represent a variety of teaching styles and modalities; if you have any activities or activity formats that you’d like to add, please consider doing so!

Go-To Activities from the Grab Bag

1. For Revision: Reverse Outline

A reverse outline is a revision activity working where students work with a completed draft backwards, mapping out their composition’s organization in retrospect. The instructions ask students to label each paragraph’s main idea or subclaim, then consider if the order of these ideas is effective for readers. This activity is especially useful for teaching organization and structure—not just for papers, but also for multimodal assignments—because it asks students to think about reader/viewer experience and the navigability of their argument in a very concrete way. It can also be helpful for prompting students to think about transitions!

Instructions here.

2. For Full-Class Discussion: Roundtable Discussion

This Roundtable activity was developed by ADs in 2017 and has been tweaked by different instructors’ use ever since. This full group activity asks students to discuss a series of set questions for fifteen minutes. The catch? For every thirty seconds of silence, another minute is added to the time, and the instructor’s participation is limited to listening in and taking notes. It may sound intimidating, but I’ve always gotten positive feedback from students on the activity—and I’ve never had to add time to a discussion. Instead, I’ve always had to speak up at the twenty-minute mark to stop the conversation from going on even longer!

Instructions and sample here.

3. For Peer-Review: Read-Around

A Read-Around is a peer review activity in which students read and respond anonymously to multiple student papers in one session. This activity exposes students to more writing on the same prompt and helps students articulate successful writing in the context of this assignment can look like. It’s also a great way to generate group feedback by asking students to give broad advice to the class based on the trends they noticed in the activity.

Sample instructions here, but there are a variety of read around formats out there!

4. To Motivate Class Discussion: Think Pair Share

Activities like Think Pair Shares can be written into your lesson plans, or they can be quick solutions to low student engagement in a class discussion. Even the most talkative classes can have off-days, and it’s useful to have a few backup strategies to spark conversations when student participation is low. Activities like Think Pair Shares give students a lower stakes environment where they can work on a discussion question, get affirmation about their answer from a peer, then return to the group to share more confidently.

And that’s the formula for a TPS: Individual reflection (typically written), partner collaboration, then a full class share-out. Other great activities to prompt discussion in a pinch are asking students to free write an answer to the question, individual brainstorming, or asking students to get up and move!

Instructions for Think Pair Shares here.

Tips for Using the Grab Bag to Lesson Plan

1. Know your lesson plan’s learning goals and how they scaffold to your course assignments

Lesson planning is always easier if you scaffold down to them from your course assignments. For each lesson, start with the overall goal you want students to have learned and practiced by the end of the lesson (Ex: students will learn about rhetorical appeals and begin connecting the lesson to their MP 1 argument).

If you have a strong learning goal, it’ll be much easier to go into the Grab Bag and find an activity that aligns with that learning goal (Ex: if students need to connect today’s lesson to their MP argument, an individual brainstorming activity like listing or a subclaim brainstorm would be a useful way to prompt transfer).

2. Consider your classroom space and your students

It’s very likely you’ll have to consider your classroom space when looking through the Grab Bag. What things can be transferred online and how if you’re teaching remotely? How will students move in a physical classroom if they’re at tables instead of desks? What teaching technologies do you have on-hand in the classroom?

As you get to know your students over the quarter, let that guide your activity choices too! If you have a class that’s less talkative, consider how you can combine individual work + instructor check-ins with activities that scaffold discussion or presentations so that they’re less intimidating for students (TPSs, Jigsaw activities, group polls, etc!). Consider your class’s general learning styles, what they’ve seemed to find helpful, and how you might need to adapt an activity’s framing for your students’ needs.  

3. Collaborate with ADs!

If you have any activities that you’d like to practice facilitating, or if you have questions on how to adapt materials for your classroom (both in-person or online), ADs are readily available and excited to collaborate with you on lesson planning. Check the EWP Newsletter for AD communal and individual office hours.  

Let us know below if you have any go-to activities for lesson planning, or if you’ve had any experiences with or tips for the activities that we’ve included here!

And don’t forget that the EWP Archive also has sample class activities + instructions that are tied to more specific writing skills/outcomes! Make sure to check out the sections sorted by topic to find detailed activities on genre translation, sample rhetorical analysis, handouts on claims, etc. The Library Resources for EWP Canvas site also provides potential activities for lesson planning.

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Tips on Pivoting from In-Person to Remote Instruction (and Back Again)

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This post was adapted by Alycia Gilbert from IWP Director Dr. Megan Callow’s and CIC Director Kimberlee Gillis-Bridges’s talks at the Fall 2021 CIC workshop: “Strategies and Technologies for Pandemic Classrooms.” A recording of the full workshop, as well as the transcript used to create this post, can be access by UW instructors here.

During the Fall 2021 CIC workshop, the CIC, IWP, and EWP shared the following tips for flexibility and navigating the transition between online and in-person instruction. With the online start to Winter 2022 and the announcement that courses can operate fully online or in hybrid formats at the time of this post’s publication, these insights feel even more timely (please note: guidelines on instruction may have changed since this publication; please reference your current university guidelines for up-to-date information on remote vs in-person teaching requirements).

Though many of the following tips focus on course design, these changes can still be made in your course as we enter Week 2, or even later in your course! Transparency with students on the evolving nature of your course can help you adjust to sudden shifts in your teaching environment as well as incorporate student feedback during this time.

Build a Strong Course Structure

When classes were fully online, organizing Canvas sites through modules became a useful structure for students to navigate course materials and assignments. Using Canvas modules for hybrid or largely in-person courses can similarly provide a cohesive structure for your course. This cohesion can make pivoting between in-person and online teaching more intuitive for students and less labor-intensive for instructors.

You might consider setting the modules as your Canvas site’s homepage, so there’s no extra steps for students to access that information. A “Getting Started” module for the very beginning of the course can also be helpful; when students first log into the course site, they are immediately directed to important starting documents, which could include introductions to the course and basic course information.

Create Consistency

Structuring every week in your Canvas course around a few basic parallel elements can help create consistency for you and your students.

For example, organizing your modules by week and beginning every module with an overview page can set clear expectations for students. Personalizing overview pages or other Canvas materials with elements like images can add personality and levity to your course while subconsciously enhancing parallelism and consistency across weeks. The Canvas site showcased in the workshop features weekly overview pages with an image, a little prose description, and then a bulleted list of what tasks have to happen that week.

Irrespective of whether the course can meet in-person, or if the class has to suddenly pivot online, those overviews are ready to situate students. While a sudden pivot in classroom modality will inevitably need some adjustments (for example, creating and sharing Zoom links, etc), a strong Canvas organization and overview pages will still provide a kind of anchoring document.

Having your assignments as similarly structured from one week to the next also establishes consistent expectations. Choosing consistent activities like discussion posts or reading forums, with regular due dates, can help students stay on track during a pivot.

You might even consider having all weekly assignments due on the same day each week, or even the same two days a week. For example, in the Canvas site shared during the workshop, all assignments, no matter what they were, are due Sunday at seven. Students finished assignments at different points during the week, but the singular deadline was very positively by students who appreciated the flexibility for their own schedules and circumstances.

Foster a Pedagogy of Care

When pivoting a course on or offline, students might have different needs during the transition, or due to circumstances in their own lives. In the workshop, Dr. Callow discussed student needs during online pivotes and ways to create boundaries as an instructor. Describing a paradigm shift in her own teaching across the pandemic, she explained how a pedagogy of care has become front and center in her teaching.

A pedagogy of care can look like modeling a culture of flexibility in your classes, to foster open communication about student needs and deadlines. As Director Gillis-Bridges said, this moment requires us to make accommodations that go beyond those accommodations that we were familiar with pre-pandemic; now we have insight and communication with students who need accommodations that could not be described in a disability accommodation, but nevertheless impact our students ability to access and do the work that we are asking them to do. We’ve all seen in our classrooms how students are struggling with pandemic-related tolls on their mental health, from grief to stress. A pedagogy of care can make flexibility and compassion the guiding classroom policy.

Director Gillis-Bridges also discussed approaches to negotiating student needs and feedback with the limitations of our classrooms and our own boundaries. She suggests creating a classroom contract through Google Doc to establish agreed upon communication norms for both in-person and online teaching, which can help facilitate that level of communication that helps instructors make flexible accommodations. Checking in with students, through tools like surveys or Poll Everywhere, about their needs and the structure of the course, can help make sure your classroom centers students and operates in a way that’s useful and navigable even when the layout and format of your class may be changing.

“Self-care is not a buzzword.”

– Dr. Callow

It can sometimes be easier to center compassion for your students’ circumstances than we are with ourselves as instructors; often, we don’t give ourselves any slack with deadlines, grading, or course development when students would extend that graciousness to ourselves if we’re transparent with them. The final portion of Dr. Callow’s talk emphasized the importance of extending that pedagogy of care to yourself as an instructor, of being gracious with yourself in this high-pressure experience of teaching in grad school during a pandemic.

Especially for new instructors in UW writing programs (“Or people like me who are very type A and need to have their entire course planned out before the quarter starts,” Dr. Callow added), it’s helpful to accept that in the current teaching environment, it’s necessary to accept that you might not have your entire class planned out from the start. And that’s okay! Having that parallelism and really clear structure in Canvas and across your course design helps ease the work of transitioning between classroom settings and makes it okay if not every single module is built out. A syllabus with all major deadlines and consistency in how you build and present your course can give you a solid baseline for students while allowing yourself flexibility. Director Gillis-Bridges discussed how her system of uploading modules week by week (posted the Thursday evening of the week before) gave students plenty of time and awareness while still allowing for flexible course design in terms of readings and in planning online vs in-person class sessions.

Above all, the Fall 2021 workshop hoped to highlight that open communication with students and a course infrastructure that allows for consistency and compassionate accommodations can help instructors navigate the week-by-week, day-by-day shifts that we may need to make in our teaching. Please check out the full recording for more thoughts on these topics, as well as for recommended tech tools for accessible masked classroom communities.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by lesson planning or course design, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our staff, who are happy to help and collaborate!

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7 Tech Tools for Accessible and Engaged Masked Classrooms

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On November 10th 2021, the CIC hosted a workshop through the EWP’s Teacher Talk series on strategies and technologies for pandemic classrooms. As part of this workshop, we shared tools that can be integrated into EWP/IWP courses to promote active learning, especially in masked classroom environments.

As we wrap up Fall Quarter and begin thinking forward to Winter, here are a few tech tools and class practices that you might consider building into your next course. Some of these technologies are less common in our classrooms, while others are familiar hits that we wanted to recontextualize in light of their accessibility features and their potential to generate student engagement. These technologies were recommended based, in part, on our experiences with masked classrooms this quarter; however, we think it’s even more important for you to reflect on your own experience in pandemic classrooms—both this quarter and online—when considering these tools. What worked for you, and what could have been more successful? What would you like engagement to look like for your next course? What would you like technology to accomplish in your course, and how will you assess if your technology practices are meeting students’ needs?

1. Google Suite: Google Slides

While Google Slides is a familiar tool used by many instructors in the EWP, we wanted to highlight a few of its functions that could be useful in pandemic classrooms:

  • Live Questions Feature

    Google Slides’ live questions feature allows students to ask questions through their electronic devices using a private code. As the instructor, you can see these questions as they’re submitted, as well as project questions onto the presentation to raise to the whole class.
  • Automatic Live Captions

    Google Slides can also generate live captions for your lecture as you speak. This can be a useful tool both for recording asynchronous materials and for instructors who are particularly concerned with masked communication, perhaps because of a student accommodation need. This feature does require being near a microphone, and may best suit instructors who stand by a podium while teaching or folks (like me!) who carry their tablet around as they teach. Microsoft PP 365 has a similar live caption feature.
  • Visual context + supplementary info

    True for any slideshow, slides are useful for providing additional context for your lecture and helping students follow along with the lesson, which can be even more difficult in masked classrooms. Consider having more text or images than you might in a maskless classroom! Students are more likely to need additional visual cues.

2. Google Suite: Google Docs

Another popular Google Suite application, Google Docs can acts as shared spaces for students to engage course materials and each other online. You may already use Google Docs for sign up sheets or handouts, but you might consider bringing the tool into your lesson plan, where it can be useful for:

  • Group Annotations
  • Collaborative Class Notes
  • Group Share-Outs or Activity Notetaking

3. Google Jamboard

Google Jamboard is an online whiteboard tool. If you’re worried about calling students up to physical whiteboards and causing crowding, this is an excellent replacement that you can project while students participate at their seats. On Google Jamboard you can also upload images that can then be drawn, written, and sticky-noted on. Great for visual analysis activities!

Check out Jamboard’s About Page to learn more. 

4. Canvas: Poll Everywhere

Poll Everywhere is a great interactive learning tool that’s most well known for its live online polling, but can be also used for activities like surveys, Q&As, quizzes, word clouds, and more. Poll Everywhere is very versatile for masked classrooms; you can generate and project live feeds of student responses, and there are tools for gauging student understanding and soliciting student feedback. Poll Everywhere can be integrated into your Canvas course as well.

To get started with Poll Everywhere, check out UW IT‘s information page!

5. Canvas: Hypothesis

Hypothesis is a collaborative annotation tool that can be integrated into your Canvas course. With Hypothesis, you can assign readings to the whole course or to groups, and students can annotate course readings collaboratively, share comments, and reply to each other’s comments with text, links, images, and video. Hypothesis annotations work well for both asynchronous activities (especially useful for if your course is hybrid or if you need to move online!) and also for in-class annotation activities. Hypothesis is also fully integrated with SpeedGrader.

6. Canvas: Video/Media Discussion Posts OR Flipgrid

Using media or video comments in discussion threads became a popular way to build community during remote learning, but it remains a useful tool in our current teaching environment. You might consider, for example, bringing back video introductions on Canvas at the start of the quarter for a more personal introduction where students will be able to see everyone’s unmasked faces.

For instructors who prefer not to use Canvas in their courses, Flipgrid offers a Canvas alternative that similarly allows for students to have video-based discussion threads.

7. Reclipped Video Annotation Tool

With Reclipped, you and students can highlight, annotate, and share timestamped moments from videos. Another useful group annotation tool, Reclipped makes responding to video content much easier, and again makes space for students who feel less comfortable during in-class discussions to participate. Reclipped also doesn’t require any video downloads and can be used to annotate YouTube videos as well as uploaded materials.

Returning to in-person teaching has been, in many ways, a process of trial and error; similarly, integrating technology in the classroom can be seen as an experiment! New tech can be tricky and involves planning and preparation, as well as negotiating with students and getting their feedback. If you’re interested in using more technology in your classroom, we recommend picking only one or two new tools to try based on your teaching style and course content. The CIC AD and the rest of the EWP staff are here to support you in facilitating, practicing, and framing this!

If you’re looking for further resources on the topic of active learning in pandemic classrooms, a recording of the CIC workshop and presentation materials have been made available for EWP instructors here! I also recommend Columbia’s CTL’s “From Online to Face-to-Face–Keeping What Works” and their resource on collaborative learning, both of which were helpful in developing this resource page.

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Have We Got a Problem in Teaching Argumentation?

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Note: This post was written in 2018 as a short blog post, but it has been a bit more fleshed out with a few more thoughts and resources linked in.

I want to talk about something that I’ve been reflecting on my work as a writing/composition teacher especially in light of the 2016 post-election climate in the U.S: the way I’ve been taught how to argue/persuade and that same way now I’ve been teaching to my students.

I’m writing this post drawing on the presentation I did at a local conference. My observation, an “argument” if you will, that I want others to also notice is that the way we’ve been teaching argumentation (otherwise known as persuasive writing) in higher ed mirrors how people persuade and argue in everyday social, political and public life. In the best case scenario, the model of argumentation as we know it is to put our best foot forward, which means to present an argument supported by credible evidence, and in the process of doing that, we can score extra points if we manage to deconstruct or tear down a counter-argument we don’t agree with. Even though this model works pretty well for the Western cultural values in rhetoric and communication, it makes us focus on only one part of the puzzle–how to persuade others. What about how to be persuaded by others? What to learn from others’ arguments and how they make those arguments? 

In White Western academic culture, we’re so hung up on making arguments for the effects of immediacy and efficiency–to quickly score points and come out on top. And now that I’ve been a composition teacher for several years, it dawns on me to rethink, “Do I really want to teach this way to my students? What for?” Especially in the Trump-era conversations in academic and local communities about how folks have been increasingly polarized, now would be a good time to really think about how we can decolonize the normative way of conceptualizing what an argument is and how we practice it.

In the current framework of making arguments, it’s almost a reflex to individualize or privatize arguments in the heat of the moment and start seeing who says what as one and the same. As composition scholars such as Miller and Ratcliffe argued and as we sometimes have noticed in everyday life, the complexity of our discourses is that our voice is never truly ours alone. We are our communities’ voices. We are our communities’ ways of knowing, believing, and discerning. Since most of us belong to multiple communities we identify with, we often have multiple voices that may contradict with one another which can be fascinating to look at.

What kind of nuances and complexities can those multiple voices teach us? If we understand that people make arguments from the often convergent place of their intersectional identities and the associated multiple communities they belong to, we can be reminded to see an argument we don’t agree with as part of historically ongoing larger voices that have often been there even before the immediate person who voiced that argument. Decolonizing our argument pedagogy would mean to teach argument-ing less as a “who wins this debate” and more as a mutual conversation in which listening dispositions are just as important as assertive speech acts and going deeper with one’s line of inquiry and perhaps even ending with more informed and situated questions might be appropriate in some situations than settling on an assertion/argument. Decolonizing argument pedagogy would also mean to train ourselves and students to learn to see arguments in various modes and genres that go beyond the normative argumentative writing in the academy such as arguments in multimodal compositions and arguments in narratives, stories, and counterstories.

11 Resources for Teaching the Portfolio

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The EWP ADs have put together this list of teaching artifacts related to the Portfolio, including presenting the portfolio, understanding outcomes, conferencing prep, writing reflections and other topics. We’ve done our best to add framing and ways for you to think through each material offered. If you want to grab any of these for yourself, please make a copy in Google Docs (File>Make a Copy) and adapt away!

1. Portfolio Skeleton from the CIC

Framing Note: This portfolio skeleton was developed by the CIC a few years ago to give instructors a concrete example of a bare-bones portfolio to share with students. The thought that inspired its creation was that the form of the eportfolio can be tricky, and if we’re asking students to focus more on content and reflection for the portfolio, providing a skeleton can make the process of housing/organizing that information more straightforward. (Alycia Gilbert)

2. Portfolio Workshop Guide: Showcase Piece Reflection + Revision

Framing Note: This worksheet is intended to be used for peer review activity where students work in pairs, reading each other’s showcase piece reflection and revision of their chosen assignments. The questions in the worksheet are intended to check the completion of the portfolio, the writing of the showcase piece reflection, discussion on the outcomes, and the thoroughness of the revision. (Anselma Prihandita)

3. Portfolio Workshop Guide: Welcome Page + Introductory Reflection

Framing Note: This worksheet is intended to be used for peer review activity where students work in pairs, reading each other’s welcome page and introductory reflection for the (Canvas online) portfolio. The questions in the worksheet are intended to check the technicalities of the online portfolio (links, completion of all required elements), the writing of the welcome page and introductory reflection, as well as their contents. (Anselma Prihandita)

4. Conferencing Rubric

Framing Note: This rubric serves both me and the student well to figure out if we got through everything we needed to talk about  in conferences. For portfolios, I have a lesson on the portfolio format and ask them to think through their choices for revision and what outcomes to target before our meeting. (Francesca Colonnese)

5. Portfolio Preparation Worksheet

Framing Note: I ask students to spend a few minutes with this worksheet and bring it with them to conferences (which I usually hold during the first week of the portfolio sequence). This worksheet gets them thinking about the outcomes alongside their written assignments. It doesn’t have to be super detailed, just some preliminary brainstorming that can help us talk through what they plan to do for their portfolio and how they can go about accomplishing that work. (Missy González-Garduño)

6. Peer Review: Circling Sentences to Target an Outcome

Framing Note: A peer review activity in which students work in pairs on a Short Assignment revision. Students underline physical copies of their document and follow steps to generate outcome-specific feedback. (Francesca Colonnese)

7. General Reflection Questions

Framing Note: These reflection questions came up because I felt that sometimes students are too engrossed in the “outcomes” that their reflections ended up just rehashing the language of the outcomes, ticking boxes, being performative. These questions were my attempt to get out of them something more meaningful. Instead of asking them, “Have you fulfilled outcome 1-4 in this assignment?” I asked them to think about the following questions. The result of this reflection can go into the students’ general reflection section in the portfolio. (Anselma Prihandita)

8. Critical Reflections Brainstorming/Annotation Activity

Framing Note: This activity is a helpful way for students to gather evidence or exhibits (however you frame it in your course) of how they’re working with an outcome in their showcase piece. I like that this activity lets students brainstorm content that can be immediately used in their critical reflections, and I also like that it asks students to think about all of the ways their chosen outcome is present before prompting them to get specific and choose the most effective examples–it creates space for them to consider how their portfolio audience will interact with evidence. (Alycia Gilbert)

9. Workshop Guidelines Powerpoint

Framing Note: I use this powerpoint to guide students as they workshop their peers portfolio rough drafts. Students will bring in a rough draft each day of class during the last two weeks and class sessions will be devoted to workshopping those ideas. In the past I’ve done this asynchronously which you can retain or modify if you’d like to do it in person. (Missy González-Garduño)

10. Genre Translation of Outcomes Activity

Framing Note: An activity in which students trace and reflect on their learning through the language of the outcomes by conducting a genre translation of the course outcomes for an incoming English 131 class. (Joe Wilson)

11. Reading Activity and Guiding Questions for Theory of Writing Organized Portfolio 

Framing Note: I assign this text to students because it germinates discussions about transfer, a goal of all writing courses and particularly English 131. This text has them think specifically about writing course assignments, their own engagement in those assignments, the purpose of the class, and their own revising practices. It becomes a launching point for discussing the portfolio that specifically articulates the stakes of revision and reflection in a way that gets considerable buy-in from students: they recognize that the portfolio becomes the site that either secures or maligns their disposition toward transferring learning from this course into future professional/academic/public writing contexts, genres, and modalities. (Joe Wilson)

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Integrating Filmic Analysis in Composition

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Ryan Youell presented at Teacher Talk a series of resources and insights exploring how to integrate film and filmic analysis into the composition classroom. The resources provided below can be used in any composition classroom (111, 131, 182, etc…) and can be downloaded by clicking on the links below.

Where do I start?

Just as picking an essay or book for your class requires extra planning, the same is true when it comes to picking a film to incorporate into your class. “Think about authorship,” Ryan told me as during the Teacher Talk, “select films that are in conversation with previous or upcoming lessons.” In addition to this advice, we talked about how film selection requires careful consideration of who’s voice is being highlighted, both for those actors/actresses in the film, but also the director/writer. Ryan provided a curated list of the most useful texts he’s found while teaching filmic analysis as well as a list of film terminology. Both of which can be downloaded here – Film Terminology    /   Filmic Analysis Readings

Staging Filmic Analysis in your Classroom

Incorporating film into your classroom can help change up your sequences and introduce students to viewing texts and composition in new ways. Whether you want your students to dig into the mis-en-scene, a shot-by-shot analysis, or looking at how the film is constructing an argument as a whole, filmic analysis offers a diverse and flexible series of teaching opportunities. Ryan has provided two scene analysis examples that he uses in his classroom. The first exercise seeks to build a student’s analytical eye, requiring them to apply the various film terminology and awareness of how a single shot is put together to create an inventory of ideas. The second exercise builds from the first, asking students to use their inventory to consider how the scene they’ve picked is relevant to the film as a whole. This work also helps challenge students to move away from visual summary, which Ryan has found to be a common and resilient practice.

Following this, Ryan supplied a examples of students’ close reading and two major assignments that he’s used in his class. These assignments bring together the work done in the first two exercises, putting the students in conversation with author bell hook’s writings about the film and the film itself.

Download the exercises here – Scene Analysis Excerises

Download the major assignments here – Major Assignment Examples

Thank you to the workshop participants and facilitators who were a part of Teacher Talk and special thanks to Ryan Youell for curating these resources for use by the Teacher Talk and the Expository Writing Program. Teacher Talk is hosted by the Expository Writing Program’s Critical Classroom Series. Critical Classrooms is a workshop series and teaching endorsement available to graduate instructors.

Anti-Racist Pedagogy Workshop

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by Belle Kim

In this post, I want to share a workshop I led in 2017 following Trump’s election and the ensuing, urgent call for more active conversations and mobilizations within our department and program around issues of race, equity, access, power, and critical pedagogy. I’m attaching a detailed description of the workshop along with materials used in the hopes that we as a program will return to and take up the questions raised below again and again in productive ways that lead to substantial, material, and institutional change.

ENGLISH 131 POST-ELECTION WORKSHOP
“All presidents have been destroyers.” – #StandingRock

The purpose of this workshop is to (1) think and strategize together on developing a critical antiracist pedagogical practice that reflects our commitments and investments as scholars and activists; (2) develop course descriptions that situate composition and the thematic content of our class in the current political reality in which we reside, as well as a statement for the syllabus that articulates our own commitments and the expectations we have for our students; (3) mobilize the rhetoric of “stakes” and “warrants/assumptions” (Outcome 3) to teach the ethical and political implications of producing particular kinds of argumentation and discourse; (4) launch collaborative teaching projects that can offer individual teachers more support.

Below are some critical questions that have shaped the structure, content, and objectives of this workshop:
  • How do we frame and confront the post-election moment in our classrooms in ways that actively acknowledge and hold different vulnerabilities and their uneven effects?
  • What would attempts to think historically about the present look like, given that the entire history of the US has been one of state violence against people of color? For whom has the normalization of white supremacy been consistent rather than a newly emergent crisis?
  • What is ethical and political pedagogy? What does it mean to be accountable in the present?
  • How can we inhabit and disrupt the university and its current iteration as the production of neoliberal, settler colonial, antiblack racist expansionism while remaining committed to learning as a decolonial, noncolonial, and abolitionist practice?
  • Given that the neoliberal university establishes itself by incorporating diversity, difference, and radical disruptive energies into itself, how might we cultivate a practice of critical pedagogy that cannot easily be subsumed, co-opted, or evacuated of political force?

Critical Antiracist Pedagogy Workshop (click here for powerpoint)