Aurora Matzke and Angela Clark-Oates
Assignments & Activities Archive
Assignment Description
This assignment is about slowing down the composing process at the beginning, middle, and end of any given assignment to provide students the opportunity to critically examine the technologies they use/d to mediate the composing and designing of texts. Specifically, this assignment asks students to center the concept of consent during critical examination/reflection. To facilitate this reflection, faculty will provide students with a consent framework developed through the work of Varon and Peña that will aid in how students define and understand consent as well as how they apply this understanding through critical reflection. In using the framework to think deliberately about the constraints and affordances of technologies, students are encouraged to understand what is gained and lost when we create with (or refuse) differing technologies. It is especially useful for discussions in and around GenAI but can be used to interrogate the use of any technological tool available and supported pedagogically (presentation software, composition editing programs, synchronous video software, etc.) because all of these technologies have implications beyond the composing process (e.g., privacy, data mining, environmental consequences). When instructors provide guidance about these implications and center student consent, students build critical digital literacy more broadly. By using the framework, students are specifically encouraged to contemplate the concept of consent as more than an individual act, to contemplate the ethical, political, social, economic, personal, and communal costs and affordances of consent. This assignment is highly adaptable and can be utilized in introductory writing settings; advanced writing, rhetorical, or digital courses; or classes focused on teacher-training and pedagogical development. The assignment can also be completed multiple times and is especially useful for prolonged or active reflection that is returned to pre and post course assignment completion.