In fall 2013, I taught a Composition I course, designed to improve student writing through the development of an organic writing process. To help students recognize and evaluate the rhetorical situation of texts, I encouraged students to think about writing as a "space." The concept of physical locations provided an interesting way to introduce students to discourse communities. Different locations have different restrictions and advantages, and by thinking about writing in terms of a discernable place, a context, they were able to isolate and demonstrate mastery of concepts like rhetorical analysis, evaluation of ethos, argumentation, logic and fallacies.
One location in which writing took place was on Student Blogs. Students were asked to respond to various prompts, to discuss readings, and to freewrite in each unit. Each portfolio they turned in consisted of an introductory letter, which described the process of writing the paper and introduced the material, the final draft of their paper, and any "artifacts" of the process of constructing the paper, including drafts, blog posts, and other written assignments. This encouraged students to participate in the blogs throughout the course, because these assignments had a clear outcome. The final exam asked them to take this process and apply it to the entire course, compiling a portfolio which encompassed their journey and growth as a first semester writing student.
Our textbook, Writing Spaces, is an open-access ebook, and it provided our class with fascinating discussions about access and copyright, patchwriting and plagiarism, blogging and publishing, and how digital spaces have changed the way we think and write.
Composition I (Engl 1100): "Writng Spaces"
"A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.” —Wendell Berry, Thoughts in the Presence of Fear
Our class employed an emergent calendar system, which allowed me the freedom to modify and adapt the course as I saw fit for student interest and opportunities for improvement. It allowed me to learn with my students and tailor my assignments to scaffold and to provide clear outcomes and goals for student work.
Calendars were released the week before the first day of each unit, and we discussed them as a class on the first day of each unit, when the paper topic was assigned. I found that this method helped students to break the course down into manageable pieces, to set realistic goals, and to transition to the next project more smoothly.
Visit the Class Blog, and check out some of the student blogs. This space provided a learning environment inside and outside the classroom.
For Paper 1, students were asked to perform a rhetorical analysis on a website, using techniques we learned in class and through our readings. We discussed how websites portray ethos, and students employed these methods on their own blogsites as they critiqued the use of these devices on a website of their choice.
Paper 2 asked students to examine and compare the rhetorical features of a commercial advertisement. Students were able to employ the skills they obtained in unit 1 and apply these techniques to an ad. This scaffolded into Paper 3 which asked students to analyze the rhetoric of an argumentative political advertisement from The Museum of the Moving Image's collection of political advertisements, the livingroomcandidate.org.
Paper 4 asked students to examine and compare the rhetorical features of a movie review. As part of class, we screened the recent Wes Anderson film Moonrise Kingdom and compared a review by James Franco to reviews from The New Yorker and The New York Times. Students discerned rhetorical devices and fallacies and explored how ethos was demonstrated by the article and the magazine or website it appeared in. The exercise asked them to search databases and analyze multiple sources in preparation for Composition II.
The Final Exam was an exercise in archiving, arranging, and anthologizing artifacts of their writing process. Students were asked to create a short essay which reflected on their writing over the course of the semester. They were instructed to use specific evidence, such as blog posts, paper drafts, and prior portfolios, to analyze and evaluate how they have changed as writers. In class, we discussed examples of collecting words to make new rhetorical texts, such as anthologies and found poetry, and discussed the subtle differences between patchwriting and plagiarism.