Alexandria Hanson Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description First-year students often enter introductory writing courses with a wide range of language experiences and backgrounds. To develop critical language awareness, as Shawna Shapiro writes, it is important to help students “recognize the variation within their own linguistic repertoir—no matter how many languages or language varieties they […]
Communication Guide Assignment Read More »
Kelli R. Gill Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description While reflective writing assignments can be an excellent way to have students look back on a past term and ask how their writing has grown, these assignments can also be challenging for both teachers and students. Often these projects come at the end of a term
Reflecting with Zines: A Multimodal Alternative to the Final Reflective Essay Read More »
Sarah Swofford Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description The purpose of this assignment is three-fold: 1) it helps students execute prior knowledge about genre so they are able to effectively compose unfamiliar genres of writing; 2) shows students how their writing skills are useful in professional and not only academic contexts; and 3) teaches students
Proposal for Change on Campus Read More »
Megan Von Bergen Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description Designed as a major assignment in a general education professional writing course, the Instructions & Accessibility/User Analysis (IAUA) assignment asks students to create a multimodal set of instructions for a simple task, while making design choices that improve accessibility. Students also conduct a user analysis of
Joseph S. Vuletich Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description In today’s media ecosystem, politicians dismiss unflattering news stories as “hoaxes” and AI-generated deep-fakes concern us because of their increasingly realistic qualities. Scholars teaching information literacy have responded by developing sophisticated methods for sorting fact from fiction, promoting credibility, and dismissing falsehood. Yet falsehood is not
Impersonation Podcast: Understanding Untruth in Uncertain Times Read More »
Tania de Sostoa-McCue Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description This assignment is intended to be a transition, preparing students for practice in moving from alphabetic to multimodal projects. The goal of this assignment is for students to take a familiar genre (in this case, post-project reflections) and practice how they might transform an alphabetic assignment
The Zine Project: Reorienting Concepts of Composition through Multimodal Reflection Read More »
Andrew H. Yim Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description In this activity, which will take around 3-4 weeks, students are tasked to research one discourse community (e.g., college club, job, volunteer organization) that they have never joined or recently became a member of. They need to pick out the 6 elements of the organization including:
Discourse Communities Manual Presentation Read More »
Michele N. Zugnoni Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description The development of a social support system is one of the greatest factors in college student success. Without such a system, students experience a sense of isolation and loneliness (Tinto 4). 28.4% of college students report feeling socially isolated (“Loneliness, Resilience” 3). 64.7% of college students
The Time Capsule: A Narrative Composition for Developing Social Support Systems Read More »
Erin Breaux Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description This multimodal assignment challenges students to think in a different medium and consider the impact of visual rhetoric. While composing an infographic, they learn skills such as concision, design principles, organization of texts and images, and use of statistics, charts, and graphs. The infographic works well for
Informative or Argumentative Infographic Read More »
Julie C. Bates and Sarah Warren-Riley Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description The Activist Archival Project we assign in our classes is well-suited for a composition course with an emphasis on writing for social change, community-engaged writing, and/or social justice. In this project, students work either in person or online documenting examples of social or
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