Gabrielle Isabel Kelenyi
Assignments & Activities Archive
Activity Description
Assignments often take a few iterations to get just right so that students consistently produce the essay, project, or presentation the instructor had in mind, let alone demonstrate the assignment’s learning objectives. What would happen if instructors modeled “community listening” (Jackson & Whitehorse DeLaune; Rowan & Cavallaro), or listening across differences, in the development of an assignment with students? While perhaps uncomfortable at first, developing an assignment together can be a generative way to discuss audience and research while also leveraging the different intersectional positions that instructors and students occupy to understand an assignment and its goals more deeply. To that end, this activity collaboratively develops an assignment description for a profile of a community partner with students, but it can easily be adapted for a different assignment. In doing so, the instructor and students practice community listening multiple times: they listen across differences between exemplars, between the “rhetorical moves” (Jacobson, Pawlowski, & Tardy) identified by small groups, and between ideas for the assignment description. The practice of collaboratively developing an assignment can help improve students’ ability to accurately imagine audiences for professional and community-engaged writing. This activity requires community listening, and because of the increased level of authority students can have over the assignment (and therefore, one would hope, their increased investment in it), the activity can help foster a positive attitude toward audience awareness.