Marie Pruitt
Assignments & Activities Archive
Assignment Description
The Collaborative Accessibility Guide (CAG) assignment was originally designed for an upper-level writing course, Technical and Scientific Writing, taught at a Predominantly White Institution (PWI) and large public research university. However, this assignment can easily be adapted for any technical or professional writing course. Over the course of a 3-4-week unit, which culminates with the CAG assignment, students work together in groups of 3 to 4 to analyze accessibility in both physical spaces and documentation projects, explore a new genre, document a physical space on campus, and create a multimodal accessibility guide for a real-world audience. This assignment works particularly well as a group project. The trick is to make sure that the expectations for each person in the group are clearly defined—and preferably written down—to make sure one or two people don’t end up doing all the work. I recommend asking students to assign roles like “project manager,” “photographer,” “content writer,” and “document designer/editor,” depending on the number of students in each group. The CAG assignment opens the door for conversations about genre, audience, collaboration, technical documentation and editing, and document design. Plus, it gets students out of the classroom and encourages them to think critically about the spaces in which they exist and the power dynamics that are inherently built into those spaces.