Tag: resources

Course Revision Toward More Equitable Classrooms

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by Michelle Liu

 

Congratulations! You’ve almost made it to the end of the quarter!

All your energy right now might be going towards supporting students in successfully finishing the quarter. If you’re reading this blog post and know that you don’t have the capacity to think about the near future right now, know that you can return to this blog post later when you are ready to start thinking about teaching next quarter.

The pause between quarters is so useful for thinking about what needs to be changed one quarter to the next, and what could change. For myself, I annotate my syllabus and assignments with a running list of things that need to change the next time I teach the course as a little gift to my future self so that the course will run more smoothly. 

What could change is often less obvious, since for me, these kinds of changes involve tinkering with things that are already working fine. But I know that each time I teach, I’ve learned something from my students. I get ideas about how to help them better engage with assigned material, what I can do to try to make the classroom community even stronger, and how to connect my course to the ever changing cultural shifts that shape the stakes of teaching and learning. 

The things that could change often relate to my taking a moment to think about the next quarter as yet another experiment with manifesting the vision of the PWR antiracist and accessibility praxis statement. What does it mean to do my part in a program that commits to “working together, with compassion and critical intention, to resist and transform normative systems within our university and program and to rebuild our teaching and learning communities to be more socially equitable, culturally sustaining, and just”? 

Luckily, I know that I don’t explore this question alone. Each of us decide what happens in our classroom, but I feel fortunate to be part of a program and department that encourages us to think together through these decisions. Over the summer, Eric Ames, the chair of Cinema and Media Studies, shared with me resources from his pedagogical toolbox. From him, I learned about the Eberly Center at Carnegie Mellon. 

While many universities, including our own, have teaching resources, the layout and presentation of resources and questions to think about at the Eberly Center website make particular sense to my brain. I particularly like their thoughtful presentation of “How to Center DEI in Teaching.” They too, like Gin Schwarz and Anselma Prihandita did in the SQ21 PWR workshops on assessment, see course design as built upon the triangle of learning objectives, assessments, and instructional activities. And each of these legs of the triangle are opportunities to make a course more inclusive to better build up intrinsic learning motivation in students. This building of a motivated classroom community to me feels so vital in reaching towards what a “socially equitable, culturally sustaining, and just” future could feel like.

What I find helpful about the Eberly Center’s layout of centering DEI in teaching is that they succinctly present the research that guides their advice along with concrete examples of what this research sounds like in the day-to-day of the classroom. In my conversations with Eric, both of us think that this site is helpful for newer and more experienced teachers alike. For myself in planning WQ 23 teaching, I’ve been thinking about deeper ways to bring “culturally responsive teaching” into my writing assignments so that students can see writing as the alchemic agent that transforms how they know and engage with difference. 

There are a lot of websites out there about teaching, so certainly, use the ones that make the most sense to how your brain operates. But if you are looking for one or looking for another that presents a different format from UW’s own Center for Teaching and Learning, you  might find a lot of worth out of the Eberly Center site. It’s teaching sites like these that remind why teaching is never boring—there is always something new to learn!

Multimodal Composing with Zines and Comedy Writing

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By Kimberlee Gillis-Bridges, PWR 182 Faculty Mentor and Stephanie Kerschbaum, PWR Director

We wanted to take the opportunity to showcase two courses that provide significant opportunities for students to engage multimodal composing: Henry Christopher’s English 131 (Composition) course, which includes an assignment sequence centered on zine-making, and BrittNEY Frantece’s English 381 (Advanced Composition) course, which focused on comedy writing.

The syllabi, assignments, and select materials from these courses, which students have given permission to share, are available via Sharepoint when you log in with your UW NetID.

To put this blog post together, we spent some time with materials Henry and BrittNEY shared, then talked about what we found so exciting about Henry’s and BrittNEY’s courses. What follows is an edited version of our conversation.

Key takeaways and observations from Henry’s and BrittNEY’s syllabi and assignments

Kimberlee: Looking at these materials, I was excited by the way they help students get at the distinction between genre and mode that can be challenging in multimodal teaching and composing. 

Anytime you’re doing multimodality, students tend to conflate genre and mode. With these classes, you have the genre of the zine and the genre of comedy, and I think these two courses highlight how particular genres foreground or make available certain modes that people can work in, and thus invite students’ attention to the kinds of modes they want to use to make rhetorical appeals. This can mean, as in BrittNEY’s course, students can say, “well, I’m going to be doing comedy–how can I effectively engage in the modes the genre makes available?”

Stephanie: I want to pick up on this point in the context of Henry’s zine approach. The assignment asks students to create a zine, but zines have all kinds of other specific subtypes and there are many different approaches to zines and they’re made with all kinds of different materials. But at the same time, because students are creating a zine, that already means they have to deal with the constraints that come up around zine-making. 

For me, both Henry’s zine-making assignment sequence and BrittNEY’s comedy writing syllabus show the value of asking students to collectively work with a particular type of multimodal performance or text and to explore the possibilities within that space.

Kimberlee: I agree, and I think another thing that’s really useful about looking at these models is that combination of direction and challenges.

I noticed particularly in BrittNEY’s class that the first few weeks were all about building community in the classroom, building a space that would feel safe for students to perform in and take different kinds of risks. To me that is a huge feature of this course. The other piece of scaffolding that she shared with us is the assignment where students made a counter argument in the genre that the source argument was done in to think about what argument means in different genres.

This assignment takes me back to the question of how you use the modal affordances that genres privilege to create your counter argument. It also feeds into the class’s focus on comedy because so much about comedy has to do with critique or counter argument–or it can, depending on the type of comedy you like. So I think the assignment involves students not only in thinking about genre and mode together and working in modes that may not be familiar to them, but also in the larger question, “What do I want my comedy to be about and how would I put it together?”

Stephanie: Yes! And, you know, in Henry’s zine assignment sequence–the second major project of the course–the first short assignment involves groups of students working together to design a masthead for their zine, a place where potential submitters might go to learn about the zine and what kind of submissions the zine is looking for. Based on the mastheads, members of the class submit rough drafts to populate each others’ zines as their second short assignment in the sequence, submitting to each other while also fielding drafts from classmates. This is such an inventive way to design a meaningful publishing opportunity.

Kimberlee: Yeah, and when you have them submitting to each other, you have the stakes of trying to understand, “well what exactly is the vision for this publication I’m submitting to?” Also, on the other side of it, “what is my editorial vision,” and assessing how particular submissions fit within that vision and requesting revisions to better connect the piece to both editorial vision and publication space.

While I’m at it, let me also raise two more connections between these projects. One is a “DIY” quality in terms of asking students to tap into individual investments, passions, and experiences. The second is the way they both engage with spatial rhetorics and modes in different ways. 

Zines invite students to engage the space on the page, how text and images are arranged together, and with physical zines in particular you often have people wrestling with spatiality and materiality of paper and how it folds, so the page becomes this interactive thing.

The comedy performance also picks up on those gestural modes and tactility of space and performance. These can include interactivity with the audience, bodily movements, and speech and pacing. Students can, perhaps, ask things such as, “where do I put my pauses? How long are those pauses? When am I delivering information rapidfire so that the spaces between chunks of information are faster-paced?” These spatial rhetorics invite attention to modes on a page, on a website, maybe in a room, and consideration of how space interacts with time.

Student agency and composer identity

Stephanie: We talk a lot in PWR about students making their own composing choices and being able to communicate about them and build metacognition about those choices, as our course outcomes indicate, such as the first outcome which includes the bullet point, “assessing and articulating the rationale for and effects of composing choices.” 

One of the things I admire so much about both of these courses is how they do a lot of work to give students support, knowledge, and community that all enable students to navigate this kind of choice-making while at the same time offering some boundaries. The courses define the kind of composing students are going to do while leaving a lot of space for the composing process to be incredibly creative, adaptive, and generative.

Sometimes what happens when students get an assignment that leaves the question of genre and modality open, it can be overwhelming. And students have to wrestle, sometimes in unproductive or frustrating ways, with how to build on prior knowledge to select from potential composing choices. I learned that the hard way. (laughs)

Kimberlee: We all learned that the hard way! (laughing)

Stephanie: It’s a balance that we have to strike: students need to activate prior knowledges to identify and work with composing choices, but if they don’t already have some of those prior knowledges, which can include things like knowing how to use a particular technology or software or having access to particular kinds of materials and resources, then we have to ask ourselves how they are given opportunities to build that knowledge in our courses. 

Kimberlee: Yes, it’s that idea of supporting and foregrounding students’ agency while giving them the tools to enact that agency by actively putting a text together.

You know, this brings up another point: these are two different levels of classes, too, one in which you have students who are probably further along in their university careers taking BrittNEY’s 381 course, and who may feel more agency than the first and second year students taking Henry’s 131. 

What I found really interesting about BrittNEY’s 300-level class and the comedy show is that idea of pulling people into a genre that they may not have done before. The students perhaps have never thought of themselves as performers. But we all have to perform in public in all kinds of ways. We all find ourselves needing to capture people’s attention through those modes that unfold in physical space, or that are projected out over digital space, and I think that this class can help students recognize this kind of agency in building skills and learning to do things that they may not have thought that they could do before.

Stephanie: Yes! I think this speaks to the question of wanting students to be comfortable and encouraging them to explore projects that they may not already think are in their wheelhouse. Sometimes you have a student you just want to say, “Yes! Go do the thing!” and you just let them loose with their ideas, but other times you want to nudge a student into building capacities and skills that they aren’t already comfortable with but which they can build familiarity and comfort with over time. 

Kimberlee: We talk about writing as a process of discovery. Maybe we can describe multimodal composing as a process of discovering an investment in something that you didn’t think you cared about before.

Stephanie: I love that, multimodal composing as a process of discovery!

Kimberlee: Yeah, it specifically brings to mind a conversation I had with a first-year student yesterday who is probably like the students in Henry’s 131 course. A lot of first-year students are carrying narratives of their identities as writers that came from previous contexts, and those externally projected identities can be doing all kinds of work–both positive and negative. A lot of students’ self-perceptions of who they are as writers developed around essays –or speeches, or Powerpoint presentations, or whatever– but mostly a fairly narrow set of textual production. 

I wonder how changing up the kinds of textual production that we’re asking students to engage in can help disrupt those writerly narratives they carry  and potentially open up a much richer relationship to writing. The ways that PWR courses like Henry’s and BrittNEY’s engage students in genres produced broadly across different kinds of spaces is really valuable to helping them  develop new senses of themselves as composers.

On assessing multimodal projects

Kimberlee: It’s important to take up the question of assessment as we conceptualize multimodal projects in our courses. For instance, in these two cases we see that there’s a way students need to perform or produce the project, but then there’s also documenting that needs to happen for grading purposes. 

If you’re doing a comedy show, for example, it’s a time-based medium, and the time goes by quickly. In these cases, I want to consider how a performance unfolded in actual time. So when I grade, one approach might be for me to say,  “Okay, it’s a time based medium, so the student is going to have to think about the comedy performance, and they’re going to have to put in pauses, and they’re going to have to organize their materials in ways that there are certain sort of peaks and valleys. I want to be able to take in the moments that the person really wants to get across in real time, and I consider real time in my assessment, because that’s how I would take in the genre.”

But part of what I also want my assessment to be doing is giving feedback on uses of the modal affordances. Hence, one option might be recording a performance that happens in physical or virtual space. That way, I can rewind. In this case, then, I might use my assessment to talk about a certain timestamp and say, “Okay, here’s where you effectively use pacing shifts.” Doing this means that my assessment time is almost always longer than the performance time.

Stephanie: To add to what you’re saying, Kimberlee, about considerations for grading that might affect the design of the assignment itself and how it is submitted and shared, we can think about how recording apparatuses–whether a video camera in the classroom, someone’s cell phone, or a zoom recording that’s turned on–all have different ways of capturing a scene that participate in the meaning-making process.

Kimberlee: Yeah, and then the question of where student creations live is a really good one. Often the creations may have to live in several places in order for us to assess them. For instance, there can be zines that people have made in a physical form, but then they have to scan them or convert them somehow to a digital form in order to be graded on Canvas. 

 

Strategies for Formative Assessment

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Last Spring the PWR ran an awesome workshop on equity-oriented assessment (check out the vlog recap here). One important thing Gin and Anselma brought up in that workshop is the idea that grading is not the only form of assessment. Summative assessment is when we give students final grades or grades and feedforward on written assignments. In these instances, we are making a judgment or evaluation about the ways students are demonstrating the content we’re trying to teach them. Formative assessment is more of a reciprocal process where we check in with students about their progress and comprehension as we go. Formative assessment is an important part of equity oriented assessment because it allows us to meet students where they are and helps give students the language and space to articulate their needs. 

 

If you and I have talked even passingly about teaching, there are two things you’ve probably heard me say about my teaching: 1) that I aim to be as transparent as possible with my students about my teaching goals and how I hope to achieve them and 2) that I see teaching as an ongoing process of learning and unlearning. I believe that teaching should be dynamic and mutable in order to reach our students’ diverse and ever-changing needs. This is why I think formative assessment is so important; because it allows us to check in with students to get a better sense of their learning needs and how our material is being received. From there, we can tweak our material and approach to meet each specific class’s needs.

 

If we’re thinking about the university writing classroom as a genre, how can we effectively teach students to navigate this genre? Toward this end, you may want to incorporate some form of formative assessment when introducing prompts, when students receive feedforward from you or their peers, or when assigning particularly dense or long readings. These activities are also important to developing a shared vocabulary of assessment. What language do you want to give students and what language are they already using effectively? 

 

This means that formative assessment and how it (re)shapes our class planning will look different for each instructor and each group of students. Still, there are a few tried and true activities that I constantly depend on and would like to share with you. 

  • Clear & fuzzy: there are various different ways to implement this one, but the general idea is the same: students name one thing about a lecture/prompt/activity/class session that is really clear to them. And one thing that they’re still fuzzy on and could use some clarity. You could do this as a quick write that you collect, a pair and share activity, or any other format that makes sense for your purposes. 
  • Ticket out the door: at the end of a class session you ask students to do some sort of reflection about the day’s work, which they turn in to you as their ticket to leave class for the day. This is especially useful on those days you wrap up early. 
  • Finger scales: ask students to use their hands to show you on a scale of 1-5 how they feel about their comprehension of a concept or reading. 1 being not super confident and would like some to spend some more time thinking/talking through as a class and 5 being very comfortable in their knowledge and ready to move on. 
  • Co-writing rubrics: Once you’ve introduced a prompt, it can be useful to ask students to co-write or revise an existing rubric from that assignment. That way you can ensure all of you are on the same page when it comes to the summative assessment you will give and the way they will read and workshop their peers’ work.
  • Formative assessment is built into most of our PWR classes. Things like writer’s memos and conferences give instructors the opportunity to check in with their students about things that may apply to that particular student, assignment, unit, or sequence.

 

How do you go about formative assessment in your classes? How do those ideas differ from or build upon the work you do with summative assessment?

What are you Teaching? An Assignment Sequence from Missy González-Garduño

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Missy's 131 Sequences

As we kick off another exciting quarter here in the PWR, I want to walk you through an assignment sequence that I’ve had particular success with in English 131.

Foregrounding my Teaching Commitments

I want to start by giving a quick overview of some of my main commitments when teaching. I always like to base my course design in a genre-centered approach that asks students to think about genre more capaciously. I made this video for my students to lay the groundwork for what I mean by a genre-centered approach. When we talk about a more capacious understanding of genre, I ask them to think about genre as any situation with a set of acknowledged conventions or expectations. Part of that is thinking about the English classroom itself as a genre. I ask students how we can gather our genre knowledge about this space in order to deconstruct and disrupt those expectations that we might take for granted.

Part of this process is an anti-racist approach which can take many forms: it’s a reading list that draws from a variety of voices, mediums, and genres. It’s course design that allows for various modes of engagement. Above all, it asks students to consider what voices, mediums, genres, and forms of engagement are privileged in this space. What are our preconceived notions about SWE and academic writing? Who and what do those notions privilege and why might that be problematic?

Alongside this is a problematizing of who and what has authority in my classroom. I tell my students that as we build a learning and writing community, I am more interested in being the “guide on the side than the sage on the stage.” And that means they need to think differently about what their peers have to offer them and what they have to offer their peers (like so many things, this is an ongoing project of unlearning).

Lastly, I’m very invested in striving for all forms of accessibility. To that end UDL, multimodality, and built-in flexibility are extremely important to my course construction. This means both how I allow students to demonstrate their learning and how I present course materials. I try not to rely exclusively on traditional lecture materials like PowerPoints, whiteboard notes, or assigned textbook readings. One thing I’ve done in the past is to take chapters from our text Writer/Thinker/Maker and convert them to videos or infographics and then make that and the written text available to students.

I also try to make all of these commitments transparent to students from the jump and throughout the quarter. I tell them that these are my aspirations and because I’m human and because I have also been very indoctrinated into the traditional conventions of this genre, I’m always liable to fail. And so, in inviting them into this project of deconstruction and disruption, I’m also asking them to help hold me accountable to my own commitments.

Sequence 1

The two charts shared here (the first is the image above which shows the progress of my first sequence from small assignment 1: Taking inventory of Your Incomes, to small assignment 2: Passage Based Paper, and finishing with major project 1: Genre analysis. The image also includes descriptions of each assignment in student-facing language) are what I show students at the beginning of the quarter. I’ll tell them “Starting in Week 2 and all the way through Week 8, we will have an assignment due every week. These assignments will be broken up into the following two sequences and then we’ll move onto the portfolio sequence.” To start off, I don’t like to have any writing assignments due in the first week. Instead, I try to focus on community building and setting the rules of engagement. This doesn’t mean that we’re doing empty ice breakers all week, but instead I try to tie that community-building into content. So for example, when we’re talking about genre and a genre-centered approach, I’ll do this activity where I ask students to think about a genre they enjoy. And again, genre here is super capacious, it could be a genre of music, movies, or writing, but it could also be a genre of place (like homes or churches). And I’ll tell them to go around the room and share their genre with folks until they find someone who chose the same genre they did. If they can’t find an exact match then it can be an approximation. So maybe they choose the genre of homes and can’t find someone else who chose homes, but someone else also chose a genre of place like schools or something similar. Then I’ll tell them to tell that person one example of the genre that they really love, the conventions that make up the genre, and how that example either abides or disrupts those conventions. For the music folks this is an album, for the movie folks a specific film, for the space people it gets more abstract. They might say “I really like homes as a genre, I love going to people’s homes and learning all those different conventions and nuances that make it theirs, maybe they ask everyone to take their shoes off or other things like that. My favorite example is my grandma’s house. I like it because she always greets everyone in a specific way and depending on the time of year, you know what kind of food the house will smell like when you get there.” So they’ll share, then I’ll ask them to find someone who has a genre they either aren’t familiar with or is really different to the one they chose.

Different activities like this set the stage for SA 1: Taking Inventory of Your Incomes. In this assignment I ask students to assess the knowledge they’re bringing into the classroom and spend some time thinking about how those knowledges will help them navigate this specific classroom space. I’ll ask them to spend time with these two charts featured here, as well as skimming the assignment prompts, so they have a general sense of the materials and skills we’ll cover. I’ll ask them to read the titles of our assigned readings, as well as the EWP outcomes and to reflect on the types of discussions and activities we did in week 1. How then do they see their existing knowledges being useful to this specific class? And they don’t have to have a clear answer yet, sometimes it’s as simple as “I was really struck during the activity where I thought about my grandma’s home as an example of the genre. I’m not sure why or how this will help me think about genres of writing, but I think it’s interesting that it was the first example of genre that came to me so I think that says something about how I engage the world or what my values are.” For this assignment, I give them two mediums to choose from either a written text or a PowerPoint presentation, but the genre is up to them. So they can write a letter to me or the class, or they can write either a personal or academic essay. For the PowerPoint, they can do an educational or business PowerPoint or they can do something like a PowerPoint-party style PowerPoint that’s more silly and geared towards entertainment and facetiousness. The assignment becomes a little bit of a time-capsule in that way, because later when I ask them to revisit their ideas, I also ask them to think about how they took up the genre/medium without spending too much time thinking about or breaking down the conventions (at least not in a class setting).

From there, I assign a passage based paper (which I adapted from Ellen C. Carillo’s “Securing a Place for Reading in Composition”) which asks students to choose one of our assigned texts, then they’ll pick a short passage from the text and do a close rhetorical analysis of that passage. This asks them to really think about how language and argument work on a small scale and then at the end they’ll tie that analysis into the text’s larger argument. This one should be academic in MLA format.

From there, they’ll do a genre analysis which is setting the stage for major project 2. Major project 2 is a position project that asks them to choose a social issue and argue for a specific position regarding that issue. Here they’re just deciding on a genre they want to use for that project (I usually give a few specific genres to choose from). For this analysis, I ask them to focus on audience and let that guide their genre: who would need this information about the genre and why? I’ve had students write an article for Higher Ed magazine where they’re explaining why teachers might find podcasts useful for instructional purposes.

**In retrospect, the passage based paper and genre analysis favor written assignments and I think that’s because of my own assumptions about how analysis should be performed, so in future I might change up these prompts to give opportunities for other forms of engagement.

Sequence 2

In the second sequence (Illustrated in the image above which shows sequence 2: small assignment 3: idea pitch, small assignment 4: annotated bibliography, small assignment 5: position project skeleton, and major project 2: position project) the small assignments are a lot more clearly scaffolded into major project 2. Small assignment 3: the idea pitch, is a written paper in MLA format, but It’s very low stakes. It asks them to think through a few possible topics for major project 2: what interests you about the topic and how do you intend to conduct your research? Where are you going to look for sources- UW libraries? Google scholar? The reference section of a wikipedia article? The works cited of an article that really interested you? What keywords will you search? What challenges do you anticipate? 

The audience here is me and the rest of the class, so I ask them to think about how this assignment can help guide their research and drafting process. Part of that is how it elicits guidance as well, so I make it clear that I want them to be really frank about confusion or indecisiveness so that when we workshop in class and when I give individual feedback, there are specific things we can all talk through.

The next assignment is a pretty traditional annotated bibliography, but what I ask them to do a little differently is to use this as an opportunity to make their research process transparent. So I ask for 6 sources, which is a lot given they’ve only been thinking about this project for a week or two. I tell them they don’t need to read all the sources, and they shouldn’t expect to use all of them in your final project. Rather, I want them to start off really big and figure out how that open-endedness can help them conduct research and narrow down their thinking. So they might have sources on there that they’re thinking “this was not useful because it looks at UK laws, but I’m focused on the US. So even though I’m not using this source it made clear to me that 1) I’m only interested in how this works in the US and 2) I need to make that more clear in my searches or be more discerning in how I”m clicking on sources” or “This source wasn’t particularly useful because it’s approaching this topic from a weird angle, but it did introduce me to this term which has helped me reconfigure my keyword searches to include this.” But it might also be that a source helped them realize, they don’t actually care about a topic and change their topic altogether. All of that is what I”m looking for here, rather than a strict engagement with sources that will be used in major project 2. Often students think they can do a search on their topic and just cherry pick the perfect four sources from the top of the results list, so I try to disrupt that habit.

Next is the position project skeleton, this is basically just an outline, but the outline is very academic argument centered. It asks for things like topic sentences and quotes with an interpretation of the quote and how it supports their argument. So they build the skeleton with the anticipation that they’ll “flesh it out” for major project 2. For students who aren’t doing an academic essay, I tell them that they should think about the move from small assignment 5 to major project 2 as an act of genre translation: If you’re not writing an academic essay, what is the equivalent of a topic sentence in your genre? And how will you figure out how to translate the material from genre to genre. 

At this point we will have done a variety of small, low stakes genre translations as class activities, so we’ll talk a lot during workshop about how we anticipate those translations happening. And then, finally, for Major project 2, the position project where they will use their chosen genre from major project 1 to discuss a social issue of their choosing. I will have scaffolded this kind of position-taking throughout the quarter in both our class readings and activities. I carefully select readings that showcase the kind of argument I want students to make: one where they take a position on an issue that matters to them and mediate the discussion of that issue through some sort of cultural project. Our in-class discussions and activities are aimed at helping them think critically about the rhetorical choices in these pieces and narrowing down their own values and convictions to find a social issue they are passionate about.

Conclusion

Like all teaching, this sequence is always in flux as I adapt to different student’s/course’s needs, but for the most part I’ve enjoyed teaching it and had warm receptions from students. Feel free to reach out for any of these prompts, adapt any of the ideas featured here, or come into AD office hours to discuss your own sequence!

Canvas Building Session: Tips for a Flexible and Accessible Canvas Infrastructure

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By Alycia Gilbert

A well-built and easy to navigate course Canvas can be an extremely useful tool for your composition class. Especially if you’re teaching a hybrid course or navigating a pivot to online teaching, having a solid Canvas site can support your students—particularly in finding materials, assignments, and deadlines. In March 2022, we held a Canvas building session to share models and advice for effective Canvas design.

Here are some tips and frameworks for building out your own course Canvas!

Beginning to Build

Your Canvas site should be developed in service to your pedagogical goals for the course; from what tools you choose to integrate to the way you organize your materials, it’s always helpful to start building your site based around your learning goals for the class. Do you want to use out-of-class time to scaffold toward group discussion, for example? Then students could find Canvas discussion posts useful ways to brainstorm prepared thoughts. Do you need students to analyze images or film clips? Then you might integrate YouTube or an annotation tool like Harmonize or Hypothesis into your Canvas site.

Here are some other key components to consider while you begin to build your site:

Navigation

When it comes to navigating your Canvas site, always consider the user-experience from the student perspective. Good navigation considers the way students move through your site and how you can make that movement intuitive and clear. You should definitely account for:

  • Where do you want students to go first?

    Setting your homepage to the location students will access most; for a long time, I set my homepage to the syllabus, but found that students weren’t scrolling down through all of the syllabus materials to reach the course calendar easily. Now my homepage is set to my course modules, where students can more easily find what they’re meant to be doing that day. If you’re an active Canvas Announcements user, then the Announcements section might be a good choice for you!
  • How will students find materials they need?

    Hosting materials in your course files without linking to these files elsewhere can be confusing for students to navigate or remember. Think strategically about organizing your files into easy to understand folders and subfolders and linking to specific files in your syllabus or course announcements. You might also share materials through your modules based on the week or day they’re assigned.
  • Guiding Documents

    Especially when using modules, guiding documents laying out the week or providing a course overview can be useful tools to help students navigate your course materials, assignments, and more. Below, I’ve included a few screenshots of how I use guiding documents for my course modules.
  • Navigation Menu – Tailor it to your course!

    Pro-tip: the navigation sidebar for your Canvas course can be edited to only include the tools and sections that you want to use in your course.

    To remove sections:

    Go to Canvas Settings (located at the bottom of your course’s navigation sidebar), then to the “Navigation” setting.

    To add additional tools or pages:

    Check out the removed sections list at the bottom of this page, or by clicking on the “Apps” tab in Settings and checking out the apps listed there. For more experimental tools, check out the Canvas App Center by clicking “See some LTI tools that work great with Canvas” in the page’s description.
Image of a Canvas site's setting page on the navigation tab.
Image of Canvas App Center.

Modules

If you organize your course through modules, our two most important tips are parallelism and consistency—make sure that you have a structure for your modules that you follow through with for each section.

For example, I organize my modules by week, including any assignments or tasks that have Canvas submissions for clear access. I also begin with a “Start Here!” module with a Course Overview and guiding documents:

Image of course overview page, which includes an image of a cassette tape and a brief course description.

Each Week then has an Overview page and is organized by class meeting. For each class meeting, I always include In-Class Materials and Course Tasks (homework) so that students know where to go to find readings and assignments:

Image of a Week One Overview, which includes an image of an old polaroid, a brief description of the week, and links to assignments students will be working on this week.
Image of a a daily page in the module, which includes an In-Class Materials section with links, as well as a Course Tasks section that links to readings and a YouTube video. At the bottom of the page is a link to the course assignment due at the end of the week.

How you organize your modules is up to you, but it’s best to go in with a clear plan that’s cohesive across your course!

Accessibility

Don’t forget throughout to do accessibility checks throughout your building process with Canvas’s Accessibility Checker, especially for your course materials and any images used. The library offers a Conversion Service That makes PDFs accessible for screen readers!

If you need help building out your Canvas site, please don’t hesitate to contact an AD on staff! We’d love to collaborate with you to design a site that suits your teaching style and pedagogical goals. And for further help, check out the recording of our CIC Winter Workshop here!

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Classroom Activity: Genre Awareness Check-Up

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By Marina Bydalek

I designed this genre awareness activity as a primer for my class’s deep-dive into genre, genre analysis, and genre research. You can think of it like a check-up—we all have genre awareness, but we still need to dust off that shelf in our brain every once in a while. Because of this, I place this activity at the beginning of the second sequence of my class, in which students have the option to compose in the rhetorical genre of their choice for each assignment. By that point, we have already discussed the rhetorical triangle and rhetorical strategies at length as they apply to the course outcomes. This activity marks the beginning of a broader exploration into the utility of these strategies as they apply to different genres.

The goals of this activity are three-fold:

  • To show students that they already have genre awareness
  • To practice composing in and identifying different rhetorical genres in a low-stakes, fun way
  • To introduce students to genre analysis and genre research

Instructions

To scaffold this activity, I start with a review of rhetorical genre and an explanation of what genre awareness is. Students are then put into groups of 3 or 4. The whole class is given the same “situation” to write about, so all of their topics will be the same. However, each group is assigned a different rhetorical genre to write in. I use a collaborative Google Doc with one page for each group. They can add images, graphics, emojis, or any other elements, as long as
they adhere to their genre. After everyone is finished, we come back together and each group reads their writing out loud. Depending on modality and time, either the whole class will guess what the genre is, or the group justifies their decisions and adherence to their assigned genre.

Situation: The official mascot of UW, Dubs II, has disappeared!

Dubs II is an Alaskan Malamute with white and black fur. He was last seen outside of Loew Hall playing fetch with his guardian; he ran off to fetch the ball, but never came back. Dubs is known to frequent areas on campus such as Husky Stadium, the HUB, and the quad. He responds to “Dubs,” “Dubs the Second,” and belly rubs. Known enemies include the WSU mascot, Butch T. Cougar, who was also spotted on campus the same day as Dubs’ disappearance.

Rhetorical Genres

  • Clickbait Article
  • Missing Poster
  • Conspiracy Facebook Post
  • Group Chat Conversation
  • UW Daily Article
  • UW Crime Alert

Thoughts for Transferring into Your Course

This activity can be “reupholstered” and applied to whatever course theme, teaching modality, or time requirements you have. My course is focused on true crime, which is why I wrote a crime-related situation (purely hypothetical, I promise!). If you do change the situation, make sure that the rhetorical genres still make sense with that prompt (e.g. you wouldn’t want to have a “missing poster” as a genre for a situation about the climate crisis, for example).

Modality can also affect the logistics and post-writing activities. I’ve done this activity both in-person and remotely. Both were successful, but they played out differently. If you’re in a synchronous Zoom meeting, you can put students into breakout rooms, where you can assign their genre and let them work in secret. That way, when everyone is done, you can have the whole class guess the rhetorical genre of each group. This keeps all of your students involved and provides additional practice identifying genres. If you’re in-person, it’s harder to maintain the same level of secrecy, but it is possible. Passing out slips of paper with their assigned genre or letting some groups work outside of the classroom are just a couple of options. If confidentiality is not possible, you can instead have each group explain to the class how they adhered to their genre and what choices or discoveries they made.

Finally, the length of their passage can vary depending on how much time you have. If you have a whole class session, they can write longer, more complete passages, but if you only have 20-30 minutes, you can adjust the length to one paragraph.

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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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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.