DWR Teaching Hub
Welcome to the DWR Teaching Hub, the openly-licensed collection of teaching resources from the Department of Writing and Rhetoric. The Hub contains curriculum materials, teaching guides, and vetted assignments for DWR writing and speech courses. All content on the DWR Teaching Hub is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License unless otherwise indicated.
Note
To upload a syllabus, change your office hours, schedule an observation, etc., visit myDWR. Can’t access myDWR? Be sure you have joined the myDWR user group
About the Teaching Hub
Welcome to the third iteration of the DWR Teaching Hub. In Summer 2021, we decided it was time to migrate the Teaching Hub away from the WordPress platform where it has lived for the last several years. Since the Teaching Hub primarily serves text that is often changing and because of the robust cloud storage options provided by the University, the complexity and vulnerability of a database-centric CMS for the Teaching Hub is no longer warranted.
The Teaching Hub’s new platform is a Python-based documentation generator engine called Sphinx hosted through a service called ReadTheDocs. The primary advantage to this approach is that the Teaching Hub no longer has any significant security vulnerabilities because there is no database. Static, versioned documentation is also a best practice for professional technical communicators.
Editing the Teaching Hub
Anyone can submit edits to the DWR Teaching Hub. If you notice a typo, an error, or outdated information anywhere on the Teaching Hub, you can correct it by clicking Edit on GitHub in the top right of the page. You’ll need to log in to GitHub to submit edits. You can sign in with any Microsoft account or create a brand new account by clicking “Sign Up” in the top right.
Once you’re logged in to GitHub, click the pencil icon to edit the page.
ReStructured Text
All Teaching Hub pages are written in a markup language called ReStructured Text. ReST is similar to Markdown in that it allows you to design complex documents with multiple formats using only plain text. Once you get the hang of it, it’s just as fast as writing a document in Word or Google Docs and you don’t have to worry about how it will be displayed on the web.
More Information
Fixing typos or errors in content doesn’t require the use of ReST markup. Just looking at the raw version of a page in the GitHub editor should show you everything you need to know.
Submitting an Edit
Enter a title and a brief description of your page edits and subnit a Pull Request.
When you are done making edits to a page, write a title and description of the changes you made and click Propose Changes. This creates a GitHub Pull Request on the Teaching Hub main repository. We’ll review the edits and, if accepted, we’ll merge them into the production version of the Teaching Hub.
Don’t worry about messing something up. Pull Requests have to be approved before they alter production pages. If you make a mistake in your Pull Request, we’ll either ask you to fix or or fix it ourselves before merging it into the live Teaching Hub.
Questions? Contact Andrew Davis.
Speech Courses
SPCH 102: Public Speaking
Course Description
Speech 102 explores the fundamentals of organizing, preparing, and delivering speeches in a variety of public forums.
Course Design
SPCH 102 is a skills-building course and allows students repeated opportunities to work through the speech process. The assignment-based design engages Blooms Taxonomy from comprehension to creation a minimum of five times. Reading, discussion, and quizzes occur throughout the course to enhance memory and understanding of core concepts. Peer coaching and/or review, as well as post-presentation journaling enhance analysis and evaluation.
For online version, students should speak to a live audience in a public setting for the informative and persuasive assignments. Live audiences should consist of no less than five adults or peers. If space is available, online instructors may explore a hybrid model.
Sample Syllabus
Required Course Materials
O’Haire, D., Rubenstein, H., & Stewart, R. (2019). A pocket guide to public *speaking (6th ed.). Bedford/St. Martin’s.
Using LaunchPad with the 6th edition textbook is optional; however, you should use whichever option you requested for submission into myolemiss.
If you asked for LaunchPad, the ISBN for LaunchPad was entered into myolemiss. Launchpad includes the eBook and six-month access.
If you asked for the book only, the ISBN for a print copy was entered into MyOleMiss.
You may share all relevant purchasing options for your course on your syllabus. See “Syllabus Sample” for options.
Assignment Sequence
See also
The following series of speech assignments allow students to repeat the process of conceiving, researching, organizing, developing, practicing, and presenting original speeches throughout the course. The short, informative, and persuasive sequence is recommended. The group presentation may be sequenced at the discretion of the instructor (after practice/short presentations are completed).
Two short presentations to orient students to the process (2-4 minutes).
Informative presentation, furthering research and analysis of self, audience, and topic, as well as increasing organizational expectations (5-7 minutes).
Persuasive presentation to explore the fundamentals of argumentation, as well as enhance content evaluation and organizational skills.
Small group presentations add problem-solving and group communication to the speech process. For online sections, the assignment should focus on group communication/problem-solving and have a presentation outcome or element. Examples include, but are not limited to: 1) a kiosk-style presentation to which all group members contribute or 2) a live, group meeting with individual presentations by members addressing a common goal.
Note: More short presentations (under 5 minutes) may be added wherever instructors find the assignments most useful for their individual curriculum.
Assignment Weights
Short presentations (Intro, Special Occasion, Impromptu, etc.) should equal 10% of semester/term grade.
Long Presentations (Informative, Persuasive, and Group) should equal 50% of semester/term grade.
Written Assessments (Quizzes, Tests, Outlines, etc.) should equal 20-25% of semester/term grade.
Participation (Journals, Peer reviews, Discussions, etc.) should equal 15-20% of semester/term grade.
Core Assignment Descriptions
Informative
Presentation of 5-7 minutes should provide relevant, accurate information. Evidence of audience orientation, coherent organization, effective language, verbal fluency, purposeful expression, and sound research are required. Delivery should be extemporaneous. Students should verbally cite a minimum of five, credible sources.
Persuasive
Presentation of 6-8 minutes should build argumentation targeting a specific audience/context. Presentations should include clearly stated thesis and claims, adequate evidence, sound reasoning, audience orientation, purposeful movement, effective organization, and expressive/connective delivery. Students should verbally cite a minimum of five, credible sources.
Group
General purpose may be for informing, persuading, entertaining, or addressing a special occasion. The presentation should be relevant, unified, organized, polished, and extemporaneous.
Grading
Normed rubrics for informative and persuasive assignments are available in the assignment library. Using the rubric to determine grades maintains consistency across sections of DWR courses. Please use normed categories and criteria to enhance assessment outcomes. If you wish to add categories or criteria you may, but please do not remove any. Other rubric assignments are also available in the assignment library but are not normed.
Please share rubrics with students at the beginning of each unit. The goal is to provide grades and feedback to students within one week of presentations.
SPCH 105: Business and Professional Speech
Course Description
Speech 105 is a practical introduction to the principles and skills of effective communication in business and professional settings. The course includes frequent performances in business situations requiring effective communication practices.
Course Design
SPCH 105 is a skills-building course, which allows students repeated opportunities to work through the professional presentation process, communicate and work in small groups, build interview skills, and practice effective dyadic and intrapersonal communication. The assignment-based design engages the presentation process in varied contexts a minimum of five times. Reading, discussion, and quizzes occur throughout the course to enhance memory and understanding of core concepts. Peer coaching and/or review, as well as post-presentation journaling enhance analysis and evaluation.
An online version is not currently being offered but is being developed. The online version will explore professional communication using virtual tools in an authentic manner.
Sample Syllabus
Required Course Materials
Spch 105 is part of the Z-degree option. An Open Educational Resource is provided for use in the Assignment Library. Please share the materials via Blackboard.
Assignment Sequence
See Also
The following series of speech assignments allow students to repeat the process of conceiving, researching, organizing, developing, practicing and presenting in professional contexts throughout the course. Instructors may use the sequence below or sequence can be rearranged so long as: 1) at least one short presentation precedes longer presentations and 2) the informative precedes the persuasive. When developing sequence consider how each assignment will inform the next.
Two short presentations, such as a briefing, an elevator pitch, or panel presentation, orient students to the process (2-4 minutes).
An informative presentation relevant to a specific professional context furthers research and analysis of self, audience, and topic, as well as increasing organizational expectations (5-7 minutes). A Q & A should follow the presentation to enhance interview/response skills.
A persuasive presentation relevant to a professional context explores the fundamentals of argumentation, as well as enhances content evaluation and organizational skills (6-8 minutes). A Q & A should follow the presentation to enhance interview/response skills.
A small group assignment, presenting the results of a challenging group assignment, may be informative or persuasive and adds problem-solving, small group communication, and group performance to the speech process.
An interview assignment may require a live, virtual, and/or print deliverable. The interview unit should cover types of interviews in the workplace, preparing to ask and answer questions, as well as practice with Q & A. The instructor may choose the type of interview students will use for application or instructors may allow the students to choose based on their interests and needs.
Types of interviews
Information-gathering/research
Diagnostic (viable option for students majoring in STEM fields)
Selection (prep and practice should focus on screening interview)
Performance
Disciplinary (viable option for an upper level Business Administration major)
Entertainment/Journalistic (i.e., radio interview or informing the press; viable for performing arts, sports majors, or public policy majors)
The type of interview assigned will determine deliverables due.
Example 1: An instructor may assign an information gathering interview in preparation of an informative or persuasive topic. The deliverables might be transcripts and analysis of the interview, as well as a survey response from the interviewee assessing the student’s interview skills.
Example 2: For a diagnostic interview, the deliverable might be finding/sharing a case study of an unusual issue, submitting an analysis of the case, and the suggested diagnostic approach for similar cases in future. The student would share the diagnostic plan with a professor or professional in the field and interview the professor/professional to receive feedback on the plan. The interviewee would complete a survey assessing the student’s interview skills.
Note: More short presentations or assignments may be added wherever instructors find the assignments most useful for their individual curriculum.
Assignment Weights
Short presentations should equal 10% of semester/term grade.
Long Presentations (Informative, Persuasive) should equal 35% of semester/term grade.
Group/Team Assignment should equal 15% of semester/term grade.
Interview Assignment should equal 15% of semester/term grade.
Written Assessments (Quizzes, Tests, Outlines, etc.) should equal 10–15% of semester/term grade.
Participation (Journals, Peer reviews, Discussion) should equal 10-15% of semester/term grade.
Core Assignment Descriptions
Informative
Presentation of 5-7 minutes should be relevant to a professional context, as well as provide relevant, accurate information. Evidence of audience orientation, sound organization, effective language, verbal fluency, purposeful expression, and sound research are required. Delivery should be extemporaneous.
Persuasive
Presentation of 6-8 minutes should be relevant to a specific professional context, as well as build argumentation targeting a specific audience/context. Clearly stated thesis and claims, adequate evidence, sound reasoning, audience orientation, purposeful movement, effective organization, and expressive, connective delivery are required.
Group Project
The group project should be a problem-solving project with a deliverable. A presentation regarding process and/or results should involve all group members. The presentation should be relevant, unified, organized, polished, and extemporaneous. The presentation may be live or mediated.
Interview
The interview assignment may be a simulation presentation, a project submission (i.e. kiosk-style demonstration or how-to video), or an assigned topic for a core/required presentation (i.e., information gathering for an informative). At minimum, the interview assignment should measure students’ understanding of interview type, recognition of purpose/context, and ability to prepare and apply for type of interview assigned. Preparation phase should include setting, Q & A, and dress.
Grading
Rubrics for informative and persuasive presentations are normed and available in the assignment library. Rubrics for interview and group will be developed as part of the OER project and should be available by mid-August 2019. Please share the rubric with students at the beginning of each unit. Using the rubric to determine grades provides consistency across sections of DWR courses. The goal is to provide grades and feedback to students within one week of presentations.
SPCH 210: The Art of the Interview
Course Description
Speech 210 (1cr) provides intensive skills training to prepare students for job interviews. Particular attention is given to tailoring application materials and increasing virtual presentation skills. Two versions of the course currently exist – full 15-week and 7-week mini-mester.
Course Design
Spch 210 is designed as an intensive, skills-based course focused on deliverables. By the end of the course, students should have engaged in a variety of interview processes and created job search materials, which should be useful as they engage in future employment endeavors. The course allows students repeated opportunities to engage six phases of job interviewing: 1) analyzing career opportunities, 2) examining the role of social media, 3) building a network, 4) tailoring a cover letter and resume to a specific position, 5) identifying types of interview questions, 6) constructing responses to common interview questions during telephone, video, and live, virtual interviews.
Sample Syllabus
Required Course Materials
No text is required. All resources should be freely available online or embedded in the course website.
Course Sequence
Unit 1: Beginning the Search
Syllabus Quiz
Introduction video/discussion
SOAR analysis and discussion (including worksheets & job/internship announcement)
Unit 3: Screening Materials
Targeted cover letter
Targeted resume
Unit 4: Virtual Interviewing
Please use the following sequence for the interviews.
InterviewStream & peer review
Telephone interview & exit discussion
Skype-type interview & exit discussion
Core Assignments
See Also
SPCH 210 Assignment Library
Assignment Weights
Title |
Weight |
|---|---|
Introduction video and discussion True |
10% |
Syllabus quiz |
5% |
SOAR analysis and discussion |
10% |
30-second commercial (i.e., elevator pitch) & discussion |
10% |
LinkedIn Page & peer review |
15% |
Cover Letter and resume |
15% |
InterviewStream & peer review |
10% |
Telephone Interview |
10% |
Final (Skype-type) Interview |
15% |
Introduction video and discussion
The introduction video serves two purposes: 1) to lay the ground work for an online, learning community and 2) to assess the current video/camera, presentation skills of students. The video should be two to three minutes, and students should be asked to make a favorable first impression and encouraged to respond to each other’s posts.
Syllabus quiz
To ensure students have read and understand the course policies and procedures, require a syllabus quiz by the end of the first week.
SOAR analysis and discussion
The SOAR analysis is an off-shoot of the analysis method used in some businesses. Students select a specific job or internship to pursue during the course. Students should be qualified for the position and analyze their strengths in relation to the position and the hiring organization, the opportunities the position will provide for advancing career goals, how personal aspirations connect to the position, and finally their readiness to take on the position. Students should discuss each other’s analysis.
30-second commercial
A fully edited video introduction with good production values, the “commercial” can last 30-60 seconds and is essentially an elevator pitch, which will form the foundation for career fair introductions, LinkedIn summaries, and cover letters. The content should express central ideas discovered in the SOAR analysis.
LinkedIn Page
Students should demonstrate an ability to engage the interest of future employers by crafting an audience-oriented profile and listing relevant experience and media.
Cover Letter and Resume
The cover letter and resume should be targeted to the position or internship the students chose at the beginning of the semester. On the page, students should demonstrate ability to organize and arrange material for easy flow. Special attention should be given to organization, format, content, proofing, and concision.
InterviewStream & discussion
Instructors will make a 5-10 question interview appropriate to the position the student has chosen. Students should demonstrate competency for verbal and nonverbal language and technical ability. Students should peer review or discuss the InterviewStream videos.
Telephone Interview
Instructors will create an individual interview, screening script to engage each student with questions appropriate to the position the student has chosen to pursue.
Final (Skype-type) Interview
Students will create a short presentation in response to a prompt, which should be appropriate for the position being pursued. The presentation should demonstrate oral and virtual communication skills, as well as a conversation starter. Questions for this interview are more flexible and responsive.
Worksheets
Provide necessary preparation for core assignments. During the minimester format, some students may have difficulty turning in worksheets in time for meaningful feedback before an assignment deadline. You may schedule worksheets and/or include the worksheets in the overall scoring; you may also give students the option to turn in worksheets by a set date if the student desires feedback (but not require the worksheets be turned in). Turning in worksheets during the 15-week course is advised to keep students engaged and motivated.
Discussion Boards
Provide social learning and peer-to-peer feedback opportunities. Consider prompts that will challenge students to provide meaningful commentary.
Grading
Rubrics for each project are available in the assignment library. Please share the rubric with students at the beginning of each unit. Please submit the rubric to Blackboard grades to help with departmental assessment. Using the rubric to determine grades also provides consistency across sections of DWR courses. The goal is to provide grades and feedback to students within one week of presentations.
Writing Courses
WRIT 100/101
Course Design
Writing 100/101 is designed as an introductory course to academic writing featuring genres commonly used in other academic situations such as analysis, argument, and reflection. Students choose to take either Writing 100 or Writing 101 and then move into Writing 102 or Liberal Arts 102 after successful completion of either course; they are not placed into either course by test score or writing sample.
Required Texts
Let’s Talk Curriculum:
Let’s Talk
Common Reading Experience Text
UM RhetLab modules
The Writer’s Practice Curriculum:
The Writer’s Practice
Common Reading Experience Text
UM RhetLab modules
New York Times Curriculum:
Semester-long subscription to The New York Times
Common Reading Experience Text
UM RhetLab modules
NPR Curriculum
Access to the internet and the NPR website
Common Reading Experience Text
UM RhetLab modules
Suggested Assignment Sequence
The suggested assignment sequence is as follows: Common Reading Text project, Analysis, Argument, Multimodal, Commonplace Book. The Common Reading Text project emphasizes the critical reading, critical thinking, analysis, research, and synthesis skills that are vital to college writing. This project is the ideal starting point because the assignment is based on the Common Reading Text, which students are given over the summer. With related campus events, the Common Reading Text can help teachers establish a community of readers and writers. The next project, the Analysis, helps students build the critical thinking skills they need to write analytically in many of the other assignments, both in Writing 100/101 and across the university. The Argument strengthens students’ research skills by asking them to work with outside sources and utilize the University library. The Multimodal project, which is a sort of revision or rethinking of a previous paper, takes place later in the semester. The Commonplace Book is an ongoing, semester-long project that requires students to reflect on their learning and writing practices.
See Also
Major Projects
Students are expected to complete five major units, each of which comprises critical reading and response, a drafting process, and reflection. In at least three of the units, students should be assigned a short timed-writing exercise as part of the writing process. A brief overview of each project, with a description of the areas students usually struggle with, is provided below. (Click the arrow next to the project title to expand).
Common Reading Text Project
The Common Reading Text project emphasizes the critical reading, critical thinking, analysis, research, and synthesis skills that are vital to college writing. Students respond to one of the prompts included in the annual Common Reading Resource Guide.
Areas to Highlight
Some students may not have read or finished the source text and will benefit from a pre-semester reminder to read the book. They may have limited experience with reading/interpreting a writing prompt. Students will have varied experience in analysis and argument, and most will have little experience with synthesizing texts/voices. Students may also not be familiar with extensive drafting and the rigor of college expectations. The Common Reading Text Project is roughly a two and one-half week unit.
Analysis
In analysis, students examine an issue or an artifact’s component parts to understand how they work together to make meaning. Analysis is roughly a three-week unit.
Areas to Highlight
Many students don’t have much experience with analysis and often have difficulty moving past summary. Some are unaccustomed to examining individual parts of an issue or an artifact and may need guidance in breaking down the whole. Often, students struggle with identifying an analytic thesis that answers the questions how, why, and/or so what. Once students have a draft in place, the most common problems are organization and focus. It is not uncommon for a student to try to cover many different ideas. These writers need help organizing their thoughts and focusing their essays. Students sometimes struggle with providing enough specific evidence to support their analyses. These writers may need to be alerted to areas that would benefit from additional evidence.
Argument
In argument, students make a claim and support that claim with evidence. While instructors may assign for this project different types of argument, the essay should require background information on the topic as context for the argument, a clearly-expressed main claim, evidence, and consideration of counter-arguments. Argument is a three- to four-week unit.
Areas to Highlight
Students often need help narrowing a topic to a specific, debatable claim. Some students struggle to provide enough specific evidence to support their claims and need help locating and evaluating sources. Students often need help integrating quoted material and paraphrases into their texts as well as documenting their sources. Students may also need help considering opposing viewpoints or counterarguments and refutation.
Multimodal
In the multimodal assignment, students may rework or rethink an earlier project in a different mode or medium. Multimodal is roughly a two-week project.
Areas to Highlight
Students often don’t recognize that a change in mode or medium requires a change in technique, so they need help in understanding how electronic, visual, or spoken text is different from print text and, thus, how to think about audience. Students may also need help with unfamiliar technology.
Reflection
Students will reflect on their writing and learning throughout the semsester. This may involve daily, weekly, and unit reflections, culminating in a final reflection.
Areas to Highlight
Students are generally unfamiliar with self-reflection and metacognition and need many opportunities throughout the semester to practice. Many will need help with being more specific about their learning. Students may have difficulty demonstrating their progress, or lack thereof, through examples, often resorting to more telling than showing. Students may also struggle to understand how tagging can be a mechanism to represent the larger structures of their learning.
Grading
Rubrics for each project are available on the assignment library. Sharing the rubric with students at the beginning of each unit, and using the rubric to determine the project’s final grade, helps students understand the expectations for each project and the reasons for the final grade. Using the rubric to determine grades also provides consistency across sections of DWR courses. Projects should be graded and returned within one week of submission.
Corequisite WRIT 101
About the Corequisite Course
Corequisite Writing 100 combines the DWR’s introductory course to academic writing, Writing 100, with a corequisite course, designed to support students’ work in Writing 100 while simultaneously fulfilling the DS 98 requirement. Corequisite Writing 100 meets five days per week, with Writing 100 scheduled on M/W/F and the corequisite course scheduled on T/Th. Upon successful completion of the course, students move into Writing 102 or Liberal Arts 102.
The corequisite course mirrors the sequence of Writing 100 with a focus on drafting and revising the major projects as well as journaling, discussing readings, working in small groups, and examining ways to improve writing.
The grade for the corequisite course is comprised equally of attendance, preparation, participation, and the journal.
See Also
Active/Rhetorical Reading
Sofa to 5k: Active Reading(from Florida State; suggested time is 40 minutes): This exercise demonstrates the relationship between active-reading and efficient-reading.
Active Reading Before and After(from Texas State; suggested time is 30 minutes): This exercise asks students to consider and improve reading techniques, as well as demonstrating the benefits of active reading to retention and comprehension capability.
Reading Retention(from John Gardner and Betsy Barefoot; suggested time is 30 minutes): This exercise highlights a retention strategy in relation to the transition to college and helping students persist in the first year.
Active Reading Practice: Speed Dating Style(from Texas State; suggested time is 25 minutes): This exercise allows students to gain an appreciation for the variety of opportunities to engage with a common text, as well as to gain comfort in sharing with one another, especially early in the semester.
Double Entry Notebook(adapted from the Hacker Handbook; suggested time is 45 minutes): This exercise helps students identify, analyze, and respond to key passages and/or ideas within a text.
Making Active Reading Work for You: Designing a Textual Interrogation(from Texas State; suggested time is 25 minutes): This exercise helps students gain insight into personalized learning methods and meta-awareness of one’s relationship to a text.
Analysis
A Helpful Breakdown of an Analysis Paragraph(suggested time is 10-20 minutes): This exercise helps students recognize the elements of an analysis paragraph.
Ad Analysis (from Writing Commons, time varies according to reading): These readings include some exercises and questions pertaining to ad analysis.
“Analyzing Advertisements” (from The University of Southern Florida; time is 3 minutes and 32 seconds): This YouTube video gives a summary of rhetorical appeals and the rhetorical triangle.
Analyzing Artifacts(from learner.org, suggested time is 10-15 minutes): This exercise gives practice in close examination of a physical object.
Artifact and Analysis(from Smithsonian, time varies according to exercise): These exercises relate to analyzing a physical object.
Audience Analysis(from Writing Commons, time varies according to reading): These readings include some exercises and questions pertaining to audience analysis.
Conducting a Spatial Analysis through the Lens of Universal Design(from Writing Commons, suggested time is 30+ minutes): This reading and exercise gives students information about and practice in conducting a spatial analysis.
Instructions for Newspaper Analysis(from Bears Den English, suggested time is 30-45 minutes): This exercise gives students practice in analyzing a news article.
Persuading an Audience Using Ethos, Pathos, and Logos(from The New York Times Learning Network, suggested time is 30-45 minutes): In this activity, students explore how writers use ethos, logos, and pathos to persuade an audience.
Rhetoric (from Writing Commons, time varies according to reading): These readings include some exercises and questions pertaining to rhetorical appeals, logical fallacies, and rhetoric in general.
“Rhetorical Analysis of Taylor Swift’s Blank Space” (from www.teachargument.com; time is 15 minutes and 53 seconds): This YouTube video models the close reading and critical thinking required in analysis.
Rhetorical Mad Libs(from Stanford; suggested time is 50 minutes): This activity encourages students to think about audience when writing a rhetorical analysis.
“What is Analysis” (from The Seahorse Project; time is 2 minutes and 25 seconds): This YouTube video defines analysis and gives some concrete strategies.
Argument
Problem/Solution Process Guide(adapted from The Writer’s Practice by John Warner, suggested time is several class periods): These guided questions help students reflect on their choices as they compose the argument project.
Invention/Brainstorming: Writing can Lead to Change (suggested time is 30-45 minutes): These articles showcase how one researcher, a 12-year-old girl, asked an interesting question and changed the video game industry.
Brainstorming: Head, Heart, Hand (suggested time is 20 minutes): These questions help students brainstorm potential research interests.
Information Literacy and Research: Authorial Biases (suggested time is 50-60 minutes): This short reading and handout helps students who are evaluating sources consider the question of authorial biases.
Counter-argument Exercise: Modeling “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (suggested time is 50-75 minutes): This reading/writing assignment gives students practice in crafting counterarguments.
Attendance and Prompt Arrival
Bellringers(suggested time is 3-5 minutes at the beginning of class): This exercise reinforces the importance of attendance and getting to class on time.
Revision
Modeled Grading(suggested time is 20-30 minutes): Through this exercise, students become aware of how writing is perceived by an evaluator, as well as common grammatical pitfalls
Sources
Incorporating Textual Evidence(from teacheroffduty, suggested time is 30-45 minutes): This exercise provides practice in the conventions of source integration.
Integrating Evidence Modeling Activity(suggested time is 30-45 minutes): This exercise provides practice in integrating through quotation, summary, and paraphrase.
Thesis
Brainstorming and Thesis Development Exercise(from Texas State; suggested time is 60 minutes): This activity uses brainstorming to help students move toward developing a thesis.
Putting Theses to the Test(from Texas State; suggested time is 60 minutes): This activity allows students to practice identifying what makes a thesis statement strong versus weak and why.
Thesis Speed Dating(from Texas State; suggested time is 45-60 minutes): This exercise provides practice for students in evaluating thesis statements and talking with other writers about their work.
Thesis Statement Activity(from Excelsior OWL; suggested time is 5-10 minutes): Use this activity to check general knowledge of thesis statements.
Vocabulary
Possible Sentences(from Moore and Moore, Reading in the Content Areas; suggested time is 30-45 minutes): This simple strategy improves recall of vocabulary and comprehension of the text containing that vocabulary.
WRIT 102
See Also
Course Design
WRIT 102 (First-Year Writing II) is a theme-based, first-year, second-semester writing course designed to build on writing skills learned in either WRIT 100 or WRIT 101 and develop critical thinking and research skills appropriate for use in academic writing. The course pays special attention to developing argumentative skills, analyzing texts, and synthesizing information into thoughtful, coherent essays and projects.
The five themes are Business, Environment, Food, Pop Culture, and Power/Privilege. Each theme will use different readings from different textbooks, but the learning outcomes of the course and the assignments remain the same. The prerequisite for WRIT 102 is the successful completion (at least a D) in WRIT 100/101 or other similar course or AP credit. Classes are limited to 21 students. WRIT 102 is similar to LIBA 102 in that both fulfill the same requirements for graduation; Students will take either WRIT 102 or LIBA 102, but should not take both.
Each WRIT 102 instructor will be assigned a subject librarian who can lead or assist instruction in using library services. WRIT 102 instructors should coordinate with this librarian by sharing assignments and learning goals. It is courteous for instructors to stay with the class during this instruction period. If instructors plan to miss class during this library visit, they should arrange to have another W&R instructor there. The librarians have also created courses pages for WRIT 102 which can be found here.
Instructors should hold at least one mandatory conference with students. It is recommended that this is done during the research paper drafts. Instructors may cancel classes to hold these conferences but cancellations should be comparable to the number of courses one teaches and should not extend beyond one week.
As is the case in every writing course, peer review and timely instructor feedback are important to student success.
Sample Syllabus
Required Texts
Each Theme has a Separate Textbook
Theme |
Book |
|---|---|
Business |
Money, Fountainhead Press |
Environment |
American Earth, Library of America |
Food |
Food: A Reader for Writers, Oxford University Press (spring: Food Common Read) |
Power & Privilege |
Rereading *America, 10th edition, Bedford/St. Martins |
Pop Culture |
Reading Pop Culture: A Portable Anthology, 2nd edition, Bedford/St. Martin’s |
Assignment Sequence
WRIT 102 has six major assignments in roughly this sequence: Analysis, Synthesis, In-Class, Research, Multimodal, Commonplace Book. Each paper assignment should teach fundamentals of academic writing, including learning to find and evaluate sources, learning how to integrate and cite these sources correctly, and learning how to create a unique thesis in response to these sources.
See Also
Major Projects
Students compose six major projects. A brief overview of each project, with a description of the areas students usually struggle with, is provided below.
Synthesis
Paper #2 is a synthesis paper where students weigh at least two different arguments and synthesize a thesis in relation to these arguments. The skills learned in the synthesis paper should support the work done for the research paper. To that end, the WRIT 102 curriculum committee has offered two different tracks for the synthesis paper in the assignment library, with the recognition that these approaches are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The first track practices locating, evaluating, and synthesizing sources, and the second track, focuses on developing a unique position in response to given texts. For either track, students should engage with 2-3 sources and practice citation in a 4-5 page paper. The Synthesis paper is worth 15-20% of the student’s final grade.
This is probably the most difficult assignment in the WRIT 102 sequence. Students are confused about what defines a synthesis essay because it does not fit into familiar and practiced models of writing. The WRIT 102 committee, after lengthy discussions, essentially agrees with this assessment because of our own divergent opinions. See the WRIT 102 synthesis in the assignment library for more information on this discussion and the committee’s conclusion.
Areas to Highlight
Instructors should go over plagiarism issues such as correct citation and using paraphrases as well as other skills that will help students succeed in the research paper. Students struggle with balancing their sources; students may also have trouble maintaining their writing voice in relation to the sources. If using two sources, students may need help in avoiding a compare and contrast paper.
In-Class Essay
The in-class essay is a timed writing exercise where students may do similar work as in papers 1 and 2 in that students might be asked to respond to a particular text or argument or evaluate a text’s argument. This may be related to paper #3, the research paper. The in-class essay is worth 5-10% of the student’s final grade.
Areas to Highlight
Timed writing can be intimidating to many students. Going over strategies to alleviate stress will be useful for this assignment and for future timed writing situations. Further, students may believe the writing process does not apply to timed essays but instructors should model how to use brainstorming/outlining, drafting, and revision in this context, with special attention to time management. Students who do not do well in this assignment often do not prepare for the in-class essay or do not read the prompt carefully. Instructors may also opt for a practice timed essay in class. Students who need special accommodation should provide the appropriate paperwork from Student Disability Services.
Research Paper
Paper #3 is the research paper where students will develop a research question relevant to the class theme. This paper should be 7-9 pages and use at least seven credible sources. This assignment is worth 25% of the student’s final grade.
Areas to Highlight
This is the most intimidating assignment for students. Many of them may have never written this length of paper. Some may have only written an “informational” research paper and not an argumentative one. Since the class spends nearly a month of class periods on this assignment, the sequence of homework assignments, in-class work, and other elements of the process are important to a student’s success. Emphasize their many avenues of support – the instructor, their peers, the consultants in the Writing Center, and the reference librarians.
Multimodal
The multimodal assignment revises the research paper into another mode. This assignment is worth 10-15% of the student’s final grade.
Areas to Highlight
This assignment is perhaps the most individualized by theme; however, problems with technology will the biggest issue. Instructors should take advantage of Andrew Davis (Lamar Hall Ste. B, Rm 1) to learn how to teach the technology to students. Instructors should keep in mind that this assignment can be as low or high tech as wanted.
In general, since this assignment is most often paired with the research papers, students may be tired of their subject or be reluctant to cut their papers. Further, failures in the paper version may translate to problems with the multimodal project. Try to return the research paper back as quickly as possible to alleviate this issue and try not to double-penalize them.
Commonplace Book
The commonplace book is a personalized space for recording, organizing, and reflecting on a student’s learning. This semester-long project incorporates daily, weekly, and unit reflections, culminating in a final reflective post. This assignment is worth 15% of the student’s final grade.
Areas to Highlight
Students are generally unfamiliar with self-reflection and metacognition and need many opportunities throughout the semester to practice. Many will need help with being more specific about their learning. Students may have difficulty demonstrating their progress, or lack thereof, through examples, often resorting to more telling than showing. Students may also struggle to understand how tagging can be a mechanism to represent the larger structures of their learning.
Themes
There are five themes for WRIT 102. Each theme is based on the same assignment sequence and outcomes, but may use different texts.
Pop Culture
We are surrounded by a constant stream of pop culture from films, music, television, social media, advertising, and many other media. But how often do we stop to ask ourselves what it all means? In this theme of WRIT 102, we will examine the various ways in which we influence and are influenced by pop culture. Some questions we may attempt to answer are: How are we affected by advertising? What can we learn from television, film, and music? What are the roles of race and gender in popular culture? Students should come into this course prepared to examine critically and thoroughly a variety of media and sources that are often disregarded or taken for granted.
Required Texts:
Maasik, Sonia and Jack Solomon, eds. Signs of Life in the USA: Readings on Popular Culture for Writers. 8th Edition. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2012.
Reading Pop Culture: A Portable Anthology,* 2nd edition, Bedford/St. Martin’s
Power and Privilege
Systems of power and privilege create more than just acts of discrimination in our culture, and yet these systems are invisible to many people. This course, through a variety of readings, videos, and supplemental material, will attempt to uncover and analyze the ways Power/Privilege manifest in the U.S. through issues of race, gender, class, ability, sexual orientation, and others. Students will learn to engage this material through rhetorical techniques and strategies in a way that enables them to join these cultural and social justice conversations with conviction and credibility. The course may explore such questions as: How does socioeconomic status from an early age impact one’s path in life? Why is it so challenging to discuss systemic issues of racism in America? How do traditional gender roles hurt American men?
Required Texts:
Columbo, Gary, Robert Cullen, and Bonnie Lisle. Rereading America 10th edition. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2016.li>
Hacker, Diana, and Nancy Sommers. A Writer’s Reference with Writing in the Disciplines. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011
Food
This WRIT 102 class explores writings and arguments about food in the United States. Among many topics, we may read about the beginnings of food and the politics of the planting, growing, and cultivation of meat and vegetables, exploring such questions such as “should farmers receive corn subsidies?” and “should there be government regulation on genetically modified foods?” We may then study the effects that food has on those who eat it. We may explore such questions as “How and why has our diet changed over time?” and “What has contributed to the obesity epidemic in Mississippi?”
Required Texts:
Rollins, Brooke and Lee Bauknight, eds. Food Southlake, TX: Fountainhead Press, 2011.
Food: A Reader for Writers Oxford University Press (Spring Semesters- SFA/DWR Common Read)
For Spring only: Common read co-sponsored by the Southern Foodways Alliance and the DWR.
Environment
What is the meaning of ecology and nature? What counts as an environment? How do current issues about our environment affect our daily lives? How do we begin to connect with and investigate the real issues of impacting local ecologies and environments? We will read and analyze a variety of genres—literary, social commentary, cultural analyses, theory, and philosophy that relate to our theme.
Required Texts:
McKibben, Bill, ed. American Earth: Environmental Writing since Thoreau. Library of America, 2008
Hacker, Diana, and Nancy Sommers. A Writer’s Reference with Writing in the Disciplines. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011.
Business
How many economic decisions have you made today? From what you had for breakfast to what you decided to wear to class, your choices have been influenced by businesses, both local and global. But there may be some issues of which you are many not even be aware. In this class we will explore a variety of questions related to business, including, but not limited to: is Wal-Mart good for America? Should corporations have the same legal rights as that of an individual person? Is out-sourcing jobs a good idea? What ethical obligations does a business have to the environment? to our health? to the nation?
Required Texts:
Gillam, Kenneth M, ed. Money. Southlake, TX: Fountainhead Press, 2011.
Hacker, Diana, and Nancy Sommers. A Writer’s Reference with Writing in the Disciplines. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011.
Grading
Rubrics for each project are available on the assignment library. There is a general essay rubric which can be used with papers 1, 2, 3, and the in-class essay. The multimodal and ePortfolio project have separate rubrics.
Sharing the rubric with students at the beginning of each unit, and using the rubric to determine the project’s final grade, helps students understand the expectations for each project and the reasons for the final grade. Using the rubric to determine grades also provides consistency across sections of Writing courses. Projects should be graded within one week of submission.
WRIT 102 Resource Guide
Introduction
This guide is for first time instructors and was created in response to suggestions by former instructors. It has three primary functions.
Assignment sheets, rubrics, and other materials will be in the Assignment Library.
Handbook Replacement
Because WRIT 102 no longer uses a handbook, we thought this guide would be helpful to new instructors for collecting resources that they could use in the classroom.
See Also
Two open educational resources that you can use in addition to this guide.
Troubleshooting Guide
The committee also drew on their experiences in the 102 classroom to pull together a troubleshooting guide about areas we noticed that our students consistently struggle with.
Class Management
Because new instructors sometimes find it challenging to pace out a class meeting, we have created detailed class plans that should give you a rough idea of how long different class activities might take. These instructional guides are not mandatory; we invite you to modify any materials based on your comfort and your learning goals for each class.
How to Use this Guide
Includes a weekly and daily calendar for both MWF and T/R classes. It will also reference documents in the assignment library as well as links to Open Educational Resources in Excelsior OWL and Marc Watkins’s WRIT 102 OER Collection.
Classroom Management
Contributed by Charlsie Haire
Although students are very proficient at using SnapChat and Instagram, they may not be able to submit an assignment to the correct submission box on Blackboard. It’s worth spending two minutes of class to show them exactly where to submit each major assignment.
Many international students may not know how to paraphrase appropriately but are usually aware of this weakness. Some domestic students may not know how to paraphrase either but are more prone to think that practicing this skill is a waste of time. Explaining your rationale for repeating something that students may or may not have learned in high school may increase their motivation for completing activities like this.
Students may be vocal about their frustrations with class activities and grades during class, which is not an ideal time to have a discussion about such matters. To avoid this, consider adding a clause in your syllabus expressing that you value their thoughts/opinions/suggestions/questions about grades and activities but to come to your office if they’d like to have discussions about these topics.
College students still use the “my dog ate my homework” excuse, but now it’s the “I left my homework in my dorm” excuse. You don’t have to make an exception to accept late work for this excuse.
There will always be one or two students who come to office hours every time you offer them. These students either want you to do everything for them or are “straight A” students who have a question about a comma.
Have an activity/assignment or two ready to post to BB or send to a colleague in case an emergency prevents you from attending class on short notice. You could have a “back-pocket” activity/assignment for each theme or could have a few “general” back-pocket activities such as creating effective titles, practice with citations, etc.
You probably care more about some students’ progress than they do. Try to find a balance between “hand-holding” and teaching them to be responsible.
WRIT 102 Units
Analysis: Even though students completed an analysis assignment in 100/101, some students may still think the first assignment is a summary. It’s helpful to have a “summary vs. analysis” day during this unit.
Synthesis: Spending a good bit of time looking at sample papers for the synthesis assignment is a good idea, as many students will think they understand the assignment description but may not.
Research: As tempting as it may be, you can’t try to talk about every bit of a paper in a 15-minute conference.
Multimodal: This assignment doesn’t have to be complicated.
CPB: Ensuring that you save enough time at the end of class for CPB posts or that you begin classes with these will reinforce the value of reflection and will also lead to fewer missed posts on the CPB. Be sure that you emphasize that this is a semester-long project at the beginning of the semester.
Feedback on Papers
Providing effective feedback is an ongoing challenge in the writing classroom and there are a number of scholarly essays that explore this area. Novice writers often resist revision. You will find that students may change surface level errors when pointed out and will seem unwilling or unable to change deeper, global concerns. Part of this resistance is seeing first draft as “last draft.” I often tell students that good writing seems like no effort at all and so students strive for a perfect first draft without understanding the process that went into it. You can then imagine that they often feel like failed writers because their first drafts are so weak (the essay, “Shitty First Drafts,” might help alleviate this approach). Students will probably also not understand a number of your comments and will look at the feedback you provide as a code to be deciphered in order to “give what the teacher wants.” Be mindful of this as you leave comments on the paper and try to be consistent in what you say, referencing terms and lessons from class (to create a shared vocabulary).
It’s always good to give some kind of feedback on student writing during the process. You can do a full draft with comments or you can spotcheck different areas like thesis, introduction, etc. During the research paper, however, you should conference with students and review a draft, checking for issues with sources. This a good time to review the draft for any potential plagiarism problems.
The style of commenting may depend on the needs of the student. Some students will need more directive comments (specific suggestions for how to revise a sentence or paragraph) to help them improve. Others thrive on facilitative comments (open-ended questions to get the student thinking about their paper). Some are overwhelmed with the number of comments while others like a lot. You might consider asking students for what kind of comments they like.
Consider this question when commenting on student papers: What was the student trying to achieve and how can my comment help them achieve that? Focus on your student as a writer.
Good practices
Make the reading of comments be a reflective practice. Students often receive their graded papers and then do not read the comments. In fact, Underwood & Tregidgo (2006) recommend that grades and comments be given separately. Students see comments as a justification for the grade rather than help with future writing situations. These authors offer a number of good practices in their conclusion.
Students like positive comments, and it has been shown that such comments make students feel better about writing in general. Their writing, however, does not show much improvement. In summative comments, it’s a good idea to provide a good comment that acknowledges their work.
Underwood, Jody S., & Tregidgo, Alyson P. (2006). Improving student writing through effective feedback: Best practices and recommendations. Journal of Teaching Writing, 22(2), 73-97.
Pacing of the Semester
WRIT 102 is a fast-paced class. It is tempting to spend more time on the analysis and synthesis units as some students will still struggle with these concepts. However, you will need a full month for students to work on the research paper and the last projects — the multimodal and final epilogue reflection — should be given sufficient instruction and process time. It’s the experience of the WRIT 102 curriculum committee that assigned readings will occur more frequently in the first half of the class; the second half of the semester will focus on the students’ research and writing. You may find that you aren’t assigning much from the textbook at this point. Below is a recommendation for how many class periods to devote to each unit.
Days per Unit
Monday/Wednesday/Friday
Analysis |
Synthesis |
In-Class |
Research |
Multimodal |
Epilogue |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
7 |
10 |
1 |
12 |
6 |
4 |
Tuesday/Thursday
Analysis |
Synthesis |
In-Class |
Research |
Multimodal |
Epilogue |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
5 |
7 |
1 |
8 |
4 |
3 |
Library Day: 1
Conferences: 1
Pacing of the individual class sessions
If you don’t have a lot of experience running a classroom, one element that will take time to become comfortable with experience is understanding how long activities will take in a class. Aim for two activities in a 50 minute period and 3 activities in a 75 minute period. Your mileage will vary, of course, depending on the class personality. It’s important to mix up the activities to keep students fresh and attentive. Sitting for a 50 minute lecture is nobody’s idea of fun. Mix up the time with presentations, videos, group work, in-class drafting and reflective writing. The calendars in the assignment library will give you some idea of how you can structure a class.
Grading
Writing is personal and can make us feel vulnerable so students will often view your grading as highly subjective (and may also see it as a comment on how you feel about them). So, it’s important to provide and reference some kind of grading rubric throughout the writing process. There are rubrics provided for each assignment that align with WRIT 102 learning outcomes. You may modify them, but keep in mind the goals for each assignment as you do.
Introduce rubrics early, perhaps in conjunction with a sample paper. Have students use the rubric to assess the writing. Make it clear throughout the writing process the areas you will be assessing specifically for the assignment and model this through a sample paper. Always give a copy of the rubric (printed or digital) to the student in addition to the feedback (though these do not have to be delivered at the same time).
It’s important to return papers with feedback as soon as you can. Aim for a week after you have received the paper but not more than two weeks. Students will need the feedback to help them with their current writing task. If you find you are spending too much time on papers, how much feedback are you leaving?
See Also
Calendars and best practice guides for individual assignments are located in the WRIT 102 Assignment Library
LIBA 102
See Also
LIBA 102 is a first-year writing course conducted within the context of a research area within a specific discipline designed to build on writing abilities learned in WRIT 100/101. The course works to develop critical thinking and research abilities appropriate for use in academic writing within a particular discipline. The course pays special attention to developing argumentation, analysis of texts, and synthesis of information into thoughtful, coherent written projects. Students enrolled in LIBA 102 produce papers that are longer and more in depth than in WRIT 100/101. The course culminates in a final portfolio of the student’s work.
Course Outcomes
The objectives of this course are
to develop writing abilities learned in WRIT 100/101, including the understanding that writing is a process that develops over time through revision.
to write for specific purposes and for specific audiences.
to respond critically to different points of view so that the student creates effective and sustained arguments.
to become proficient at locating primary and secondary research from a variety of sources and at evaluating the reliability of sources.
to become effective researchers and writers of research papers as a member of an active writing, reading, and researching community, understanding that such writing should be free of serious grammatical and mechanical errors while following disciplinary writing conventions.
WRIT 250
Course Design
Writing 250 is designed to continue the learning trajectory students begin in Writing 100/101 and Writing 102. The overall goal of this course is to strengthen the writing and research skills introduced in first-year composition classes so that students can conduct well-organized and -designed research in their major. Writing 250 assignments emphasize documenting sources, maintaining an online portfolio, and analyzing real research results. Students also create a digital presentation in order to gain experience using digital composing tools for writing and presentation.
Required Texts
All WRIT 250 sections use a custom OER textbook designed and written by veteran WRIT 250 faculty.
Assignment Sequence
Beginning in Spring 2014, all sections of Writing 250 were standardized to include the following assignments: 1) exploratory essay; 2) annotated bibliography; 3) literature review; 4) prospectus; 5) multimodal presentation, and 6) eportfolio final reflection/analysis essay. Classwork, homework, and process writing assignments are distributed through the ePortfolio in a “Research Toolbox” section.
See Also
Major Projects
Students compose six major projects. Assignments 2 through 5 comprise a large-scale research project. Students will be working with the same topic for the majority of the semester. A brief overview of each project, with a description of the areas students usually struggle with, is provided below. (Click the arrow next to the project title to expand).
Exploratory Essay
The Exploratory Essay is designed to introduce students to writing in the disciplines and to finding/using Library resources related to their major. This narrative essay requires students to find and compare academic and non-academic sources on the same topic. There are three variations of the assignment that instructors can choose from. The final product takes the form of a process narrative in which students trace their steps in finding and comparing sources. Usually, the exploratory essay ends up generating a topic idea that students will want to pursue for the subsequent assignments.
Areas to Highlight
Students often struggle with understanding the difference between academic journals themselves and the articles within them. This can be particularly difficult in online sections of the class. It is also important to walk students through Library database searches (or request a librarian demonstration), as students sometimes assume that any source that comes from a library search is peer-reviewed. Also, sometimes students make this first assignment more complicated than it needs to be: it’s ultimately a process narrative, and instructors should emphasize that it’s a relatively low-stakes entry-point into researched writing in the disciplines.
Annotated Bibliography
The second major assignment is an annotated bibliography based on secondary research for the research project students have identified. Students will articulate a topic and rationale in a topic proposal ePortfolio/Research Toolbox assignment around the same time as they are working on the annotated bibliography. For the annotated bibliography, students select 8 to 10 academic or professional research sources and write summaries and evaluations of each source. Students also write an introduction to the bibliography, in which they identify trends or concepts that connect the sources to one another.
Areas to Highlight
Students often struggle with selecting good sources, even though they have already had experience with the process with the exploratory essay. Some of the same issues are prevalent, including the use of popular/non-academic sources, as well as sources published in academic journals that aren’t necessarily appropriate for a literature review (opinion pieces, book reviews, etc). Students also struggle with meaningful, detailed summary and specific evaluation of the sources, and sometimes tend to review the sources in very broad terms.
Literature Review
The literature review is a synthesis of secondary research on a student’s topic. Students choose at least five of their secondary sources from the annotated bibliography to include in a literature review that describes the “state of research” in their major on their chosen topic. Emphasis is placed on identifying the gap in existing research, into which the student’s proposed research project will eventually fit.
Areas to Highlight
Students struggle with synthesis of sources and identifying gaps in research. Also, sometimes students have trouble seeing “the big picture” of research, and instead more through their sources in isolation. It’s important to emphasize the balance between direct quotation, paraphrase, and original synthesis, as sometimes students rely too heavily on direct quotation.
Prospectus/Research Study Design
The Prospectus is the culmination of the research project students have worked on for the entire semester. The prospectus serves as a formal proposal for an original primary research project in the student’s major, based on the research question identified earlier in the semester. In the prospectus, the students combine a condensation of the literature review with a discussion of the results of their small-scale primary research project (mini-pilot or in-class survey), and outline an original study that they have designed to answer their research question.
Areas to Highlight
It helps to describe the prospectus as a sales pitch. Students should think of it as an opportunity to “sell” their proposed research project to a group of skeptical colleagues. Ultimately, they have to prove that they have credibility as researchers in their field and that their project is valid enough to stand on its own. The effectiveness of this approach depends largely on how well students can show how their original student fits into the discourse community established in their review of literature.
Multimodal Presentation
Students work on the multimodal presentation concurrently with the prospectus. The presentation is the student’s opportunity to “sell” the research project proposed in the prospectus. Students are required to use different modes of expression in assembling the presentation, including video, audio, and handouts. In a face-to-face class, presentations usually take place during the last week of the semester. In an online class, students create recorded versions of their presentation and share on a discussion board.
Areas to Highlight
Students often don’t recognize that a change in mode or medium requires a change in technique, so students need help in understanding how electronic, visual, or spoken text is different from print text and, thus, how to think about audience. Students may also need help with unfamiliar technology. Students also struggle with making their presentation persuasive (selling their proposed research) instead of informative (reviewing existing research).
Research Toolbox Reflection
The final ePortfolio/Research Toolbox reflection asks students to look back on the writing and research they have compiled throughout the semester, and identify a course outcome in which they believe they have shown as much growth. Students must also compare the artifact(s) they use to identify the outcome to one of their scholarly sources in order to show how their writing and research is similar to (or differs from) scholarly writing that is published in their field.
Areas to Highlight
Students are generally unfamiliar with self-reflection and metacognition and need many opportunities throughout the semester to practice. Some students struggle to limit the discussion in the ePortfolio reflections to one outcome and one project. Many will need help with being more specific about their learning. Students should demonstrate their progress, or lack thereof, through examples and by showing, not telling.
Research Toolbox/ePortfolio
Most Writing 250 teachers agree that regular in-class writing, group work, and emphasis on process help students succeed in the course. The committee has developed numerous activities and smaller assignments, called the Research Toolbox, which correspond to the major writing assignments for the course. These are low-stakes classwork and homework assignments that instructors can feel free to modify or rework to suit the needs of their own classes.
Grading
Rubrics for each project are available in the the WRIT 250 Assignment Library. Sharing the rubric with students at the beginning of each unit, and using the rubric to determine the project’s final grade, helps students understand the expectations for each project and the reasons for the final grade. Using the rubric to determine grades also provides consistency across sections of DWR courses. Projects should be graded and returned within one week of submission.
WRIT 440: Writing for Accountancy
COURSE RATIONALE
Accounting students need to be effective communicators if they are to succeed in their careers, yet many of them lack the communication skills they need. Almost everyone in the field would agree that there is a need to help students become better communicators, especially better writers.
The WRIT 440 class offers a unique opportunity to help accounting students become better writers (and speakers) about accounting. Writing with precision and clarity about accounting topics can best be taught within the context of an accounting class, whether this class is a regular accounting course like principles or intermediate accounting, or a special course in communication for accounting students.
Teaching writing within an accounting context offers at least two important advantages. Assignments in this class are designed to help students learn to write the kinds of documents they will encounter in the workplace. Thus, they will gain practical experience and a chance to build usable, job-related skills.
The second advantage is that students are likely to find the writing assignments assigned to be meaningful, since they can see the connection between the assignments and job requirements. If they find the assignments relevant to future job success, they may be motivated to do their best work and to improve areas where they are weak.
MOTVIATING STUDENTS TO WRITE WELL
If WRIT 440 students are to improve their communication skills, they must be convinced that they will need these skills to succeed in their careers. Even after students are convinced they need to be good writers, however, there still may be attitudinal problems. Many WRIT 440 students dislike writing, and they have not had many courses requiring them to write expository assignments. Some are afraid to write for fear of failure. These negative attitudes might result from bad experiences they’ve had in other classes, especially classes where they received too much negative feedback on their papers.
One way to overcome these attitudes is to stress to attributes about the WRIT 440 class:
They will be writing about accounting, which they both understand and find interesting. Papers written about accounting topics should be easier for them than an analysis of a poem or a research paper for a History class.
Documents written for business, such as memos and letters, should be both simple and direct. Many students will find this type of writing easier than the elaborate rhetorical styles encouraged in some disciplines.
EVALUATING STUDENT WORK
COURSE OUTLINE
This particular course outline is structured for a regular, full-semester online section of WRIT 440. This outline can be adapted or changed depending on the length of term, learning modality, or individual preferences of the instructor.
The course is structured into a series of modules with various readings and assignments due each week within the module. A typical semester course outline is as follows:
Module 1: “Start Here”: Introduction to Blackboard Navigation and the WRIT 440 class
Module 2: Accountants as Writers
Module 3: Standard English: Grammar, Punctuation, and Spelling
Module 4: Understanding Audience
Module 5: Organizing Documents for Clarity and Conciseness
Module 6: Memorandums and Emails
Module 7: Ethics in Accounting
Module 8: Understanding Formal Letters
Module 9: Researching for Accountants and the Literature Review/Annotated Bibliography (either assignment can be used, but students should be assigned a substantive research-gathering assignment where they have to collect and analyze secondary sources on an accounting topic)
Module 10: The Literature Review/The Annotation Bibliography
Module 11: Writing for Employment
Module 12: Introduction to White Papers
Module 13: The White Paper: Part 1
Module 14: The White Paper: Part 2
Module 15: The White Paper Final Draft
SAMPLE MODULE(S) BREAKDOWN AND ASSIGNMENTS
MODULE 2: ACCOUNTANTS AS WRITERS
MODULE DESCRIPTION
The accounting profession has changed dramatically in recent years, due in part to changing technology, the strength of the global business environment, increased regulation, and the evolving needs for accounting services. In spite of these changes, the ability to communicate through writing effectively is essential to the success of the accounting profession and in the business world in general.
MODULE OBJECTIVES
After completing readings and assignments in this module, students should be able to:
Define “soft skills” and understand their importance to a successful accounting career
Summarize the kinds of documents accountants write as part of their professional career
Summarize the six tips for effective writing
Analyze an example of an accounting document and explain how it illustrates effective writing
Gain confidence in the ability to write well
Explain the interaction between writing and other forms of communication, such as a reading, listening, and speaking
Explain the connections between writing and problem solving, thinking, and ethics.
*MODULE ASSIGNMENTS*: (some assignments correspond with Chapter 1 of the textbook)
1. Chris May Video Presentation: this short video from Chris May, CPA MBA, Chief Financial Officer of Mesilla Valley Hospice. In this video, she talks briefly about the different types of writing accountants perform every day in their profession and why they are important. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WBpALy_kUU. After viewing the presentation, write a short paragraph that addresses some of these questions/issues. What surprised you about what Chris said? Did you expect that accountants would have to do those various types of writing tasks? Why or why not? Do any of those tasks she mentioned make your nervous? Do you feel particularly skilled in any one of those tasks? Why or why not?
2. In the Effective Writing: A Handbook for Accountants textbook, read Chapter 1 (Accountants as Communicators), paying close attention to the Tips for the Effective Writer, Figure 1.1 on page 5. Then, read the attached accounting article from Forbes on the IRS wanting to change rules on inherited IRA distributions. After reading the article, consider how effective or ineffective do you find the writing? If you have trouble reading or understanding what you read, is the problem due to ineffective writing? If you find the material understandable and interesting to read, what qualities of writing contribute to this effectiveness? Refer back to the effective writing tips on page 5 to support your points/ideas.
Respond to the questions above in a well-written response of at least 100 words (or about 1, typed and double-spaced page, in Times New Roman or Calibri font only preferred) and submit the response to me an attachment.
3. For this assignment, look at several published corporate SEC Forms 10-K or annual reports for the most recent year from a company and find a section from the financial disclosure section(s) they contain. These can be found by following the links to the listed companies at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) website at www.nyse.com/idex or by going to www.annualreports.com/
Select a small section of the disclosure that you think is poorly written and revise it to make it more clear and understandable. In your submission to me, include the name of the report, where it was found (NYSE or annualreports.com) and include the small poorly written passage and then your revision. The entire length of this assignment should be no longer than one-page, typed and double-spaced using Times New Roman or Calibri font only.
Please submit the completed assignment to me as an attachment.
3. Discussion Board Post 2: “Soft Skills” for Accountants: Research the topic “soft skills” and provide a definition and why you think they are important to the accounting profession. Indicate where you found the information. In your response to your classmates’ posts, do you agree with the definition and its importance? Why or why not? Do you have any personal experience where not understanding soft skills was a problem? Explain
MODULE 3: STANDARD ENGLISH: GRAMMAR, PUNCTUATION, AND SPELLING
MODULE DESCRIPTION
Accounting is much more than financial statements and debits and credits. Properly and broadly understood, accounting is all about communication. Written and oral communication gives the numbers meaning, context, and focus on a decision.
Incorrect spelling or a lack of punctuation may create confusion. Your audience may be left guessing what you are trying to say. Spelling errors and grammatical mistakes may also change the meaning of your message, which might result in misinformation. Some readers may get back to you to clarify, others might not; which, in the case of new prospects/customers, is something you want to avoid. You do not want poor grammar to cost you business opportunities. In addition, reflective writing can help you learn from a particular practical experience. Reflective writing helps you make connections between what you are taught in theory and what you need to do in practice. Reflection equals learning.
MODULE OBJECTIVES
After completing readings and assignments in this module, students should be able to:
Eliminate major sentence errors from your writing: fragments, comma splices, and fused sentences.
Use verbs correctly, including effective tense, mood, and agreement
Use pronouns correctly so that agreement, reference, and gender are clear and appropriate
Avoid problems with modifiers
Write with parallel grammatical structure
Use punctuation according to conventional usage: apostrophes, commas, colons, and semicolons.
Incorporate direct quotations into your writing, following conventions of standard usage
Avoid problems with spelling
*MODULE ASSIGNMENTS:* (some assignments correspond with the textbook)
1. Lecture video on grammar: I recorded a short video lecture on why grammar is important why we still need to understand its rules and functions. This assignment can be duplicated or adjusted based on the instructor preference.
2. Few people have all of the grammar “rules’ memorized. As we become better critical readers and thinkers, as well as writers, our understanding of the functions of grammar improves. For this assignment, take the online grammar pretest, located at this link: https://www.niu.edu/writingtutorial/grammar/quizzes/GrammarSelfTest.htm
When you miss a question, the quiz offers you some clear, concise information to help you review the grammar rule/concept being assessed. After completing the quiz, in the submission box, type in the number of questions your answered correctly and submit that information to me
Grammar Practice Exam:
GRAMMAR PRACTICE EXAM: WRIT 440:
PARTS OF SPEECH
Match each term from the word bank with the underlined part of speech.
| A.Nouns B. Pronouns C. Adjectives D. Verbs E. Adverbs F. Conjunctions G. Prepositions H. Interjections I. Articles |
____ I *am* tired, but he *is calling* me, so I will *answer*.
____ He looked *under* the bed, *in* the box, and *behind* the door.
____ The *beautiful* sunset was a *great* backdrop for her selfie.
____ It was *really* dark, but the stars were *shockingly* bright.
____ *The* student bought *an* apple for his teacher.
____ *Ouch*! *Hey*, what did you do that for?
____ *Although* mom *and* I were tired, we were late, *so* we ran.
____ At *halftime*, the *team* walked to the *locker room*.
____ Oh, *I* think *that I* found *myself* a cheerleader; *she* is always right there when *I* need *her*.
SUBJECT & PREDICATE
Label which sentence has an underlined simple subject (SS), simple predicate (SP), compound subject (CPS), compound predicate (CPP), complete subject (CS), or complete predicate (CP).
____ I *earned* good grades on all tests.
____ The election *is very controversial*.
____ My *binder* is full of papers already!
____ *My two little cousins* played in the backyard.
____ I *baked* a cake and *wrapped* his presents.
____ *Brutus and I* are huge Ohio State fans.
COMPLETE SENTENCES
Label if each sentence is complete (C) or a fragment (F). *Optional: If you want, label the fragments as phrases or dependent clauses. *
____ The commercial
____ Because the commercial was persuasive
____ The commercial was persuasive
____ Brenda chased the pug around the kitchen
____ Clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth
RUN-ON SENTENCES
Identify if each sentence is correct (C) or a run-on (R).
____ Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.
____ They may take our lives but they’ll never take our freedom.
____ It’s the circle of life, and it moves us all.
____ My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father, prepare to die.
DEPENDENT VS. INDEPENDENT CLAUSES
Identify if each underlined section is dependent (D) or independent (I).
____ *Since the movie ended*, I’ve been thinking about it.
____ I watch cooking shows *because I want to be a chef*.
____ If you don’t do your homework, *you can’t go to the party*.
____ With your love, *nobody can drag me down*.
SENTENCE TYPES
Label each sentence as simple (S), complex (CX), compound (CP), or compound-complex (CC). (Hint: You may want to use skills from the previous section to do this…)
____ I am not throwing away my shot.
____ If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.
____ Life is like a box of chocolates; you never know what you’re going to get.
____ We feel cold, but we don’t mind it because we will not come to harm.
DIRECT & INDIRECT OBJECTS
Label if each sentence has underlined a direct object (DO), indirect object (IO), or neither (N).
____ We bought *her* Starbucks.
____ I’m so *fancy*.
____ You can’t handle *the truth*.
____ I’m going to make *him* an offer he can’t refuse.
____ I will always love *you*.
ACTIVE & PASSIVE VOICE
Label each sentence as active (A) or passive (P).
____ I took the pretest.
____ The pretest was taken by a student.
____ The senator made a mistake.
____ Mistakes were made.
PARALLEL STRUCTURE
Label the parallel structure in each sentence as correct (C) or incorrect (I). (Ignore punctuation, and focus on the word choices.)
____ We came, we saw, and we conquered.
____ She’s intelligent, kind, and knows a lot of good jokes.
____ I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.
____ All of me loves all of you.
4. In the Effective Writing: A Handbook for Accountants textbook, read Chapter 5 (Grammar, Punctuation, and Spelling). Read the instructions and revise the memo in Figure 5-10 on page 103. The revised memo can either be typed in the submission box or typed in a Microsoft Word document (Times New Roman or Calibri 12-point font only and double-spaced) and sent to me as an attachment.
MODULE 4: UNDERSTANDING AUDIENCE
MODULE DESCRIPTION
When you’re in the process of writing a document as an accountant, it’s easy to forget that you are actually writing to someone. Whether you’ve thought about it consciously or not, you always write to an audience: sometimes your audience is a very generalized group of readers, sometimes you know the individuals who compose the audience, and sometimes you write for yourself. Keeping your audience in mind while you write can help you make good decisions about what material to include, how to organize your ideas, and how best to support your argument.
MODULE OBJECTIVES
After completing readings and assignments in this module, students should be able to:
Analyze an audience
Select appropriate tone, language, and format to reach a given audience
Determine effective content for a message
*MODULE ASSIGNMENTS:* (some assignments correspond with the textbook)
1. Video Lecture: Understanding Audience: Please view the following video lecture by Dr. Mike Schott on understanding audience . Please let me know if you have any questions about the lecture by typing comments in the submission box. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7lcvemvzKs
Once you have finished viewing the lecture, write a short summary (5 sentences or less). What was your main takeway from the lecture? Choose at least one specific topic/detail mentioned in the lecture for support). That summary can be typed in the submission box and submitted there, or typed in a .doc or .docx document and submitted as an attachment.
2. LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network on the internet. LinkedIn can be used to find the right job or internship, connect and strengthen professional relationships, and learn the skills you need to succeed in your career. The program can be accessed from a desktop, LinkedIn mobile app, mobile web experience, or the LinkedIn Lite Android mobile app.
More importantly, a complete LinkedIn profile is an example of understanding audience because as a student and future accounting professional, the program can help you connect with opportunities by showcasing your unique professional story through experience, skills, and education. You can also use LinkedIn to organize offline events, join groups, write articles, post photos and videos, and more.
Assignment:
Create a LinkedIn Profile with a professional photo.
2. Join an Ole Miss alumni/student connections group (this can be an accounting specific group or it can be a general Ole Miss group)
3. Connect with five (5) professional contacts (besides classmates or professors)
Join three professional groups
Follow three companies that would be potential employers
Fully complete as many sections on the profile as possible
7. The profile should be free of surface errors (grammar, sentence structure, etc).
8. Include the link to the profile in the submission screen/box and submit to me
**NOTE: If you already have a LinkedIn profile, make sure the requirements above are included in your current profile. **
3. Review the following lecture notes on Audience Perceptions and how understanding them can be successful as you write documents to them. Then, complete the short answer statements that follow. The answers to the statements can be typed in the submission box below or typed in a Microsoft Word document and uploaded as an attachment.
Audience Perceptual Strategies for Success
WRIT 440
| Perceptual Strategy | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Become an active perceiver | We need to actively seek out as much information as possible. Placing yourself in the new culture, group, or co-culture can often expand your understanding. |
| Recognize each person’s unique frame of reference | We all perceive the world differently. Recognize that even though you may interact with two people from the same culture, they are individuals with their own set of experiences, values, and interests. |
| Recognize that people, objects, and situations change | The world is changing and so are we. Recognizing that people and cultures, like communication process itself, are dynamic and ever changing can improve your intercultural communication. |
| Become aware of the role perceptions play in communication | As we explored in Chapter 2 "Delivering Your Message", perception is an important aspect of the communication process. By understanding that our perceptions are not the only ones possible can limit ethnocentrism and improve intercultural communication. |
| Keep an open mind | The adage “A mind is like a parachute—it works best when open” holds true. Being open to differences can improve intercultural communication. |
| Check your perceptions | By learning to observe, and acknowledging our own perceptions, we can avoid assumptions, expand our understanding, and improve our ability to communicate across cultures. |
Examine the table above.
The better you can understand your audience, the better you can tailor your communications to reach them. To understand them, a key step is to perceive clearly who they are, what they are interested in, what they need, and what motivates them. This ability to perceive is important with audience members from distinct groups, generations, and even cultures. William Seiler and Melissa BeallSeiler, W., & Beall, M. (2000). Communication: Making connections (4th ed.). Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon. offer us six ways to improve our perceptions, and therefore improve our writing.
- Think of a new group you have joined, or a new activity you have
become involved in. Did the activity or group have an influence on your perceptions?
- When you started a new job or joined a new group, to some extent
you learned a new language. Please think of at least three words that outsiders would not know and explain them.
4. Discussion Board Post 3: Audience Perceptions: For this discussion board post, review the lecture notes on perceptual strategies and the answers to the short response questions. In your discussion board post, address responses to these questions. Remember to follow the guidelines for length and format of discussion board posts, located in the Module 4 folder.
1. Think of a new group you have joined, or a new activity you have become involved in. Did the activity or group have an influence on your perceptions? Explain the effects to your classmates.
2. When you started a new job or joined a new group, to some extent you learned a new language. Please think of at least three words that outsiders would not know and share them with the class and provide examples.
5. Audience and The Rhetorical Triangle: This video explores the third leg of the rhetorical triangle: purpose. The purpose of a piece of writing is determined by its audience. Note the four purposes for professional communication: consulting, informing, valuing, and directing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJOW-6UbVnI In two paragraphs of 6-10 sentences each, examine two examples of writing you have received recently – which of the four purposes applied? How does the purpose impact the content of the communication? Please type the paragraphs in a Microsoft Word document (Times New Roman or Calibri, 12-point font only and double-spaced) and submit the response to me as an attachment.
MODULE 5: ORGANIZING DOCUMENTS FOR CONCISENESS AND CLARITY
MODULE DESCRIPTION
As an accountant, you will be working with a variety of colleagues and clients, including different departments within an accounting firm. Communicating effectively is extremely important for success, especially if you are just beginning your career in the accounting field.
Accountants depend on all sorts of communication methods on a daily basis. They could spend their day answering emails, responding to texts, having face-to-face meetings, or even giving presentations. In all these tasks, one needs to be able to relay information as concisely, quickly, and professionally as possible.
MODULE OBJECTIVES
After completing readings and assignments in this module, students should be able to:
Write clear sentences: appropriate jargon, precise word choices, unambiguous modifiers, and pronouns.
Write readable sentences: voice, variety, and tone
Write unified documents that focus on main ideas and readers’ concerns
Write paragraphs that focus on main ideas, and develop those ideas so that they are clear and coherent.
Organize longer documents, such as essays and discussion papers, so that they are coherent, with main ideas that are focused and developed.
*MODULE ASSIGNMENTS:* (some assignments correspond with the textbook)
1. Reflection Essay 2: In reflective writing, you are trying to write down some of the thinking that you have been through while carrying out a particular practical activity, such as writing an essay, teaching a class or selling a product. Through reflection, you should be able to make sense of what you did and why and perhaps help yourself to do it better next time. Reflective writing gives you the chance think about what you are doing more deeply and to learn from your experience. You have the opportunity to discover how what you are taught in class helps you with your real-world or academic tasks. Writing your thoughts down makes it easier for you to think about them and make connections between what you are thinking, what you are being taught and what you are doing. Your written reflection will also serve as a source of reference and evidence in the future.
For this reflection assignment, reconsider the information learned about audience. What did you learn about audience that you didn’t know before? What, specifically, can help you as an accountant who writes correspondence consider audience more strongly? Were there any assignments that really helped you learn more about audience? Do we need to consider audience more or less when we we write? Why? You can address some of these questions or address any issue related to audience not addressed in these question prompts.
Write a reflection essay addressing the following questions above. The reflection should be around 300 words, typed and double-spaced, and written using Times New Roman or Calibri font only. Good writing principles (including good use of grammar) are requirements for the assignment.
Lecture Notes/Activity: Importance of Organizing Information
Lecture Notes on Organizing Information for Documents
WRIT 440
Organization is the key to clear writing. Organize your document using key elements, an organizing principle, and an outline. Organize your paragraphs and sentences so that your audience can understand them, and use transitions to move from one point to the next.
Successful business writers, even accountants writing documents, must meet their audience’s needs. Organization is one more way to do that. When a document is well-organized, readers can easily get the information they need. Good organization also helps readers see the connections between ideas.
We know that time is one of the biggest constraints in modern business communication. Most people get a lot of emails, and so often must skim. If you can’t capture your audience’s attention in the first few seconds, you risk losing it completely. When organizing business documents, we, therefore, need to ask ourselves some questions:
What is the most important thing for the audience to know?
What does the audience need to know first? Second?
How can I draw attention to key points using organizational aids like headings and bullet points?
Will my audience understand the connections between my ideas? If not, how can I help them?
Should all the information be in the document, or should some of it be in attachments or links?
Using headings and subheadings, lists and paragraphs as some way to organize a message to capture and keep your audience’s attention.
Using Headings and Subheadings
Headings and subheadings help to organize longer documents. Because the text is larger and often bold, the reader’s attention is drawn to them. Headings and subheadings are especially useful when you’re writing a document like a report, which often has different audiences looking for different types of information.
To write effective headings:
Use parallelism: When you start a pattern, you should keep using it. For example, if you started with the heading “Email Conference Attendees” and then used “Print Conference Brochures,” you would disrupt the pattern if your next heading was “Contacting Catering Service.”
Use consistent sizes and fonts: In your document, you might have different “levels” of headings. Apply the same font and size to each “level” of headings in your document.
**Use limited articles: **An article is a word like “the” or “a.” Too many of these can crowd your headings. For example, instead of saying “The Academic Barriers to Student Success,” you could say “Academic Barriers to Student Success.”
Using Lists
Lists are an easy way to show readers the connections between ideas. Bullet points often draw the reader’s attention, so they’re the perfect organizational aid for helping a reader to see the next steps or important recommendations. Lists also remove the need for awkward transition words like ‘firstly’ and ‘secondly.’ To write effective lists:
Use parallelism: Again, if you start a pattern, you should continue it.
**Keep between 3 to 6 bullet points: **Too many bullet points are hard for readers to follow.
Punctuate the list effectively: If you’re using a paragraph list, put a colon after the topic sentence, then capitalize the first word.
Writing Effective Paragraphs
Unlike punctuation, which can be subjected to specific rules, no ironclad guidelines exist for shaping paragraphs. If you presented a text without paragraphs to a dozen writing instructors and asked them to break the document into logical sections, chances are that you would receive different opinions about the best places to break the paragraph. In part, where paragraphs should be placed is a stylistic choice. Some writers prefer longer paragraphs that compare and contrast several related ideas, whereas others stick to having one point per paragraph. In the workplace, many writers use shorter paragraphs and even use one-line paragraphs since this allows readers to scan the document quickly. If your readers have suggested that you take a hard look at how you organize your ideas, or if you are unsure about when you should begin a paragraph or how you should organize final drafts, then you can benefit by reviewing paragraph structure.
Structuring A Paragraph
We’ve already learned that every piece of workplace communication should have a purpose. That’s also true of paragraphs. In general, you should have one purpose per paragraph, although for the overall flow of the document you might want to combine two points. Let’s take a look at this customer service email.
| Purpose | |
|---|---|
Dear Ms. Tran, Thank you for your patience as we investigated your missing clothing order, which you brought to our attention on Tuesday. |
Provides a context for writing. |
| Once we received your email, we contacted both our warehouse and FedEx. The warehouse confirmed that your order was processed on Feb. 19th and FedEx confirmed that a shipping label was created on Feb. 20th. Unfortunately, we were not able to locate the package from that point. | Tells the reader what the writer did to solve the problem. |
We are sorry for the inconvenience. Since we value your business and we know that you have been waiting for your clothes for two weeks, we would like to offer you two choices:
|
Apologizes and offers a solution |
| Please let us know which option you choose and we will immediately process your order. If you have any questions, you can also call me at 604-123-4557. | Tells the reader what to do next. |
Thank you again for your patience. We appreciate your business and look forward to making this right. Sincerely, Makiko Hamimoto |
Ends the communication on a positive note, looking towards the future. |
As you can see, most of the paragraphs have only one point. In short communication, it’s enough to simply understand what role the paragraph plays in your writing. In longer or more important communication, you may choose to use topic sentences to structure your paragraphs.
Exercise:
Which of the following sentences are good examples of correct and clear business English? For sentences needing improvement, describe what is wrong (briefly) and write a sentence that corrects the problem. You can type answers into the submission screen or in a Microsoft Word document and submit as an attachment.
Marlys has been chosen to receive a promotion next month.
Because her work is exemplary.
At such time as it becomes feasible, it is the intention of our department to facilitate a lunch meeting to congratulate Marlys
As a result of budget allocation analysis and examination of our financial condition, it is indicated that salary compensation for Marlys can be increased to a limited degree.
When will Marlys’s promotion be official?
I am so envious!
Among those receiving promotions, Marlys, Bob, Germaine, Terry, and Akiko.
The president asked all those receiving promotions to come to the meeting.
Please attend a meeting for all employees who will be promoted next month.
Marlys intends to use her new position to mentor employees joining the firm, which will encourage commitment and good work habits.
3. Analyzing Layout and Intent in Writing: In the Effective Writing: A Handbook for Accountants textbook, read Chapter 3 (Coherent Writing: Organizing Business Documents). Then, complete exercise 3-1 on page 53. If you decide to use the Accounting Today website, you will need to create a guest account, which is free.
The response shoud be around 300 words. Please type the response using Times New Roman or Calibri font only, and double-space the document. Please submit the response to me as an attachment and also include either a copy of the article you read or a link where I can access it. The response will be evaluated using the writing assignments rubric provided in Module 2.
Discussion Board Post 4
For this discussion board post, review the scenario below and answer the question prompt. Be sure and use information learned from this module in supporting the ideas/points raised in your answer.
Scenario:
The accounting department at the The Maple All-Suite Hotel has indicated to the management that funds are available to make an upgrade to the key card system at the hotel. The Maple All-Suite Hotel is a boutique hotel that is located in Vancouver and has 90 rooms. The recently upgraded key card system has received numerous guest complaints that their key cards were malfunctioning. The employees find it challenging to use the manual to fix the problem because it uses long and uses technical language. The Duty Manager, Donneil Chance, was asked to extract the relevant information from the 500-page manual and simplify the language to make it easier for the team to understand. While doing so, she notices that the manual has troubleshooting instructions related to all potential guest and employee issues with the new system. However, this information has no clear sections or headings. In hospitality, the goal is to resolve all guest issues as quickly as possible. It would be time-consuming for an employee to find the information they need to solve any problems promptly using the manual in its current format.
How should Donneil organize the required information into a simplified manual?
MODULE 6: MEMORANDUMS AND EMAILS
MODULE DESCRIPTION
All accountants, no matter their specialty, write memorandums and emails to a variety of people. Memorandum, sometimes called “memos” are often used for communication within an organization—between departments, for example, or between a supervisor and other members of the staff. Emails are used almost universally for both personal and business use. This module deals with how to compose a memorandum and how to use business emails appropriately for communication within an organization and with external constituency groups, such as individual or corporate clients. For example, a tax accountant might write a letter seeking data about a client’s tax situation or to clarify issues for a client. This module deals with those issues.
MODULE OBJECTIVES
After completing readings and assignments in this module, students should be able to:
Summarize and apply the basic guidelines for writing memos
Organize a coherent memo, with a focus on main ideas
Write memos in an effective style and tone
Communicate via email in a professional, effective manner
*MODULE ASSIGNMENTS:* (some assignments correspond with the textbook)
1. In the Effective Writing: A Handbook for Accountants textbook, read Chapter 10 ( Memos and Briefing Documents) along with the PowerPoint notes on writing memorandums. I have attached a handout which can serve as a template for constructing memos.
Then, using the following scenario below, construct a memo that explains the information. Please type the memo using Times New Roman or Calibri font. You can use the template I provided as a guide, if needed. The memo will be evaluated using the attached rubric.
Memo Scenario:
*You discover that the client’s previous tax returns from last year, which someone else prepared, listed a deduction of $3,000 in excess of the actual expenditure. This mistake was not intention and the IRS will probably not detect the error. You can present the client with two options: change the error, which might cost the client additional liability OR prepare the return from the previous year so that the mistake was yours (as the tax preparer). Create a price structure for each option. Indicate to the client that you want to meet to discuss these options. *
For this assignment, feel free to add any additional information that you feel the client would want to know about each option (this can come from your own experiences, knowledge from other courses, etc). You can be creative with some of the information in the memo, such as name, date, etc.
Please submit the completed memo as an attachment.
**Memorandum **
Your instructor has asked you to write a memo, which is the most common form of written communication in business. In order to perform this task successfully, you should conform to general business standards of content, format, structure and language use. Business Memo’s also follow the “ABC” Abstract/Body/Conclusion Format.
| WRIT 440: Memo Rubric | ||
| 1. | Format and Adherence to the Assignment (10 points) | |
|
||
| 2. | Style (10) | |
|
||
| 3. | Grammar, Mechanics, and Punctuation (5) | |
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2. In the Effective Writing: A Handbook for Accountants textbook, read Chapter 12 ( Memos and Briefing Documents) Read Chapter 12 in the textbook, which focuses on E-Communication and Social Media. Next, review the following Youtube presentation on writing effective emails, located here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAqkBwruxT8* *
In the submission box, think about a poor email that you received (either from a colleague, friend, family member, etc). What made the email poor? What could the writer have done to make it better? The answer to this question should be a well-written paragraph of six-to-ten (6-10) sentences.
Please type the answer in the submission box and submit it to me.
3. Review the information contained within the memo assignment. Review the decision you made in the memo with the client (either to send in an amended tax return or do complete the return yourself). Then, using the proper email conventions, compose an email to your boss, Howard Knotts, explaining what you are doing on behalf of the client and how much time this will take.
As with the memo assignment, you can be creative with the date, amount of time it will take, name of the client, etc. Please type the memo using Times New Roman or Calibri font and submit the memo to me as an attachment.
The email will be evaluated using the attached rubric.
WRIT 440: Business Email Rubric
| 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | Total | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Email Header | Email has no heading | Email has incomplete heading; missing the address or date. | Email has complete heading, but missing appropriate punctuation. | Email has a complete address and date with proper punctuation | |
| Salutation | Email has no salutation | Attempts salutation, missing title, proper punctuation | Has salutation, but missing proper punctuation | Complete salutation. | |
| Body | Email has no organized paragraphs. | Email has a body of one or more organized paragraphs and these paragraphs are not indented. | Email has a body of one organized paragraph and this paragraph is indented. | Email has a body of two or more organized paragraphs and each paragraph is indented. | |
| Closing | Email has no closing. | Email has incorrect closing. | Email has appropriate closing, but missing proper punctuation. | Email has complete appropriate closing. | |
| Signature | Email has no typed signature. | Email has incorrect project signature. | Email has appropriate typed project signature, but missing proper punctuation. | Email has appropriate typed project signature. | |
| Mechanics | Email has four or more spelling errors and/or grammatical errors. | Email has three misspellings and/or grammatical errors. | Email has no more than two misspellings and/or grammatical errors. | Email has no misspellings or grammatical errors | |
| Typing Skills | Email has many typing errors. | Email has three or more typing errors. | Email has no more than two typing errors. | Email has no typing errors. | |
| Total | ____/25 |
MODULE 7: ETHICS IN ACCOUNTING
MODULE DESCRIPTION
Objectivity and independence are important ethical values in the accounting profession. Accountants must remain free from conflicts of interest and other questionable business relationships when conducting accounting services. This module discusses ethics in accounting and provides an opportunity to analyze and reflect upon some ethical scenarios in accounting.
MODULE OBJECTIVES
After completing readings and assignments in this module, students should be able to:
Learn the importance of honesty in accounting
Identify the effects of poor ethics in accounting
Learn the importance of honesty in accounting
Analyze sample ethical scenarios for content and reason
Write a small analysis defending choices made to resolve an ethical dilemma in accounting
*MODULE ASSIGNMENTS:* (some assignments correspond with the textbook)
Understanding Ethics and the Accounting Profession
Before opening the attachments connected with this assignment/lesson, please view the following Youtube link about Ethics in Accounting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeBFPAOU-3U
Please review the following information on ethics in accounting, which focuses on what an ethical issue in accounting actually “is,” the effects of poor ethics in accounting, and the importance of honesty in accounting.
Then, view the following case study on “It was Just a Careless Mistake” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwFyASop8nc. Please note: this case study was completed using a computer graphics and simulation program and could be difficult to follow. Close-captioning can be activated (by selecting the option on the lower-right hand side of the screen) if needed for additional understanding of words/phrases/sentences.
Once you have finished viewing the case study, review the “Learning Points” information at the end of the presentation. Which item(s) in the list did you find the most damaging or most unethical? Why? Is there one specific employee that should ultimately be held responsible? Why or why not? The response to these questions should be around one page in length (typed and double-spaced, using Times New Roman or Calibri font only).
Please submit the response to me as an attachment.
**Ethical Issues Facing the Accounting
An accountant working in the public or private sector must remain impartial and loyal to ethical guidelines when reviewing a company or individual’s financial records for reporting purposes. An accountant frequently encounters ethical issues regardless of the industry and must remain continually vigilant to reduce the chances of outside forces manipulating financial records, which could lead to both ethical and criminal violations.
Pressure From Management
The burden for public companies to succeed at high levels may place undue stress and pressure on accountants creating balance sheets and financial statements. The ethical issue for these accountants becomes maintaining true reporting of company assets, liabilities and profits without giving in to the pressure placed on them by management or corporate officers. Unethical accountants could easily alter company financial records and maneuver numbers to paint false pictures of company successes. This may lead to short-term prosperity, but altered financial records will ultimately spell the downfall of companies when the Securities and Exchange Commission discovers the fraud.
Accountant as Whistleblower
An accountant may face the ethical dilemma of reporting discovered accounting violations to the Financial
Accounting Standards Board. While it is an ethical accountant’s duty to report such violations, the dilemma arises in the ramifications of the reporting. Government review of company financial records and the bad press caused by an accounting scandal could cause the company’s rapid decline and may lead to the layoff of thousands of employees.
Executives and other corporate officers could also face criminal prosecution, leading to heavy fines and prison time.
The Effects of Greed
Greed in the business and finance world leads to shaving ethical boundaries and stepping around safeguards in the name of making more money. An accountant can never let the desire to earn a better living and acquire more possessions get in the way of ensuring that she follows ethical guidelines for financial reporting. An accountant who keeps her eyes on her own bank account more than on her company’s balance sheet becomes a liability to the company and may cause real accounting violations, resulting in sanctions from the SEC.
Omission of Financial Records
A corporate officer or other executive may ask an accountant to omit or leave out certain financial figures from a balance sheet that may paint the business in a bad light to the public and investors. Omission may not seem like a
significant breach of accounting ethics to an accountant because it does not involve direct manipulation of numbers or records. This is precisely why an accountant must remain ethical.
2. Ethics in Accounting Case Studies Open the following link below, which presents two different ethical scenarios in accounting. Choose one of the case studies. Then, answer the question associated with the case study, drawing on information from the handouts as well as your own values, beliefs, experiences, etc. and the information provided within the case study itself. The response should be no more than 300 words. Please type the response in Times New Roman or Calibri font only and double-space the document. Submit the document as an attachment. The response will be evaluated using the writing assignments rubric from Module 3.https://www.cpajournal.com/2017/10/12/icymi-ethical-dilemmas-facing-cpas-three-case-studies/
Discussion Board Post 5: Whose Money is it, anyway? Please review the following accounting ethical scenario. Then, respond to the question associated with the scenario. Then, respond to at least two (2) of your classmates’ posts. Your initial response is due by Wednesday, March 8 at midnight. Responses to your classmates’ posts are due by Friday, March 10 at midnight.
Scenario:
Rosalie works as the controller in a moderate-sized non-profit organization dedicated to enhancing access to clean water and food in developing countries. The organization she works for is fairly well-known because of the organization’s fundraising strategy. Specifically, Rosalie’s company buys numerous long TV spots that air during the overnight hours. Using images from some of the organization’s most important projects, viewers are shown just how much their donations could help people of these impoverished, often war-torn regions.
A recent change at the executive level has placed her in an increasingly unenviable position. The new CEO is not quite ‘’by the book’’ in terms of his expense account. Walking in to the office one day, Rosalie is surprised to see a truly magnificent salt-water fish tank, a new addition to the lobby. The tank is several hundred gallons in size, and holds several thousand dollars worth of exotic fish. When she asks a colleague where it came from, her co-worker tells her the CEO purchased it. ‘’I guess everybody has their hobby.’’ Rosalie mutters under her breath.
Her mild annoyance at the expensive hobby turns decidedly darker a few weeks later when the CEO’s purchasing card has charges totaling nearly $3,000 for what he labeled ‘’miscellaneous facilities expenses.’’ As Rosalie suspects, most of that money was ‘’invested’’ in the fish tank. Later that night as Rosalie watches TV, one of her organization’s 2-minute TV spots rolls. The spot claws at the heart as it depicts people whose lives have been destroyed by poverty and violence. When the spot ends with the usual appeal for a’’gift’’ of $30 a month, Rosalie feels ill. ‘’I doubt anyone picking up the phone right now is aware that part of their donation is funding a massive fish tank!’’ What, if anything, should Rosalie do right now if she wants to demonstrate the highest regard for professional ethics?
Teaching in the Major
The Teaching Guide for the Major in Rhetoric is under development.
Recommend a Student
Rhetoric majors gain the skills and tools of effective communication by learning to speak and design effectively while also becoming discerning critics of the communication practices saturating our world. Students take speech, writing, and rhetorical theory classes that examine communication in interpersonal, community, civic, academic, professional and historical contexts.
Syllabus Language
All Writing and Speech faculty should consider placing a blurb about the B.A. in Rhetoric and the Minor in Professional Writing in their course syllabi.
Syllabus Language
Enjoying this course? Consider the Rhetoric Major or Professional Writing Minor! Rhetoric majors take 11 writing, speech, and rhetorical theory courses. They learn how language and other symbols shape meaning, experience, identity, and point of view, and they become powerful speakers and writers. Professional writing minors take six professional communication courses that build the writing, speaking, teamwork, and project management skills employers are seeking. For more information contact: Karen Forgette, Rhetoric Major Advisor, kforgett@olemiss.edu; or Dr. Karla Lyles, Professional Writing Minor Coordinator, kmlyles@olemiss.edu).
Elevator Pitch
- Define rhetoric
The study and practice of effective communication
- Connect to course
How does your course do this?
- What they could do with/in major
Rhetoric majors go on to graduate school, work in things like corporate communication, writing, editing, public advocacy, or anything that involves writing and/or speaking.
- Call to action
Have Karen reach out to them for more information!
Example Class Announcements
SPCH 102 |
First-Year Writing |
|---|---|
Our department houses the BA in Rhetoric, which is the study and practice of effective communication. In SPCH 102 we do this by learning how to adapt to an audience and create messages that will reach them. Rhetoric majors go on to graduate school or work in industry doing things like corporate communication, writing, editing, public advocacy, or anything that involves writing and/or speaking. I am happy to fill out the recommendation form so you will hear from the advisor, Ms. Karen Forgette, so you can get more information about the major. |
Our department houses the BA in Rhetoric, which is the study and practice of effective communication. In writing classes, we do this by learning how to adapt to an audience and create messages that will reach them. Rhetoric majors go on to graduate school or work in industry doing things like corporate communication, writing, editing, public advocacy, or anything that involves writing and/or speaking. I am happy to fill out the recommendation form so you will hear from the advisor, Ms. Karen Forgette, so you can get more information about the major. |
Marketing Materials
A committee was formed in Summer 2021 to develop a marketing plan for the new B.A. in Rhetoric. The Box folder below contains some examples of the marketing material you will see around campus.
2021-2022 Major and Minor Marketing
Teaching in the Minor
The Minor in Professional Writing prepares students to be successful communicators in their future careers. Coursework teaches students common workplace communication genres and equips them with skills such as teamwork/collaborative communication, problem-solving, project management, digital composing, technical writing, editing, and critical thinking.
The Teaching Guide for the Minor in Professional Writing is coming soon.
Common Reading Resource Guide
See Also
Using Callings in the Classroom
Why does UM have a Common Reading Experience Program?
The Common Reading Experience is a shared intellectual event for members of the UM community. Through reading and considering a common book, students engage with each other and UM faculty in exploring issues relevant to today’s global community. The Common Reading Experience helps students understand the expectations of college-level academic work, the nature of scholarly inquiry, and the values of an academic community. The program also enriches students’ campus experiences through co-curricular programs and events related to the book. The Common Reading Text is used in EDHE classes, Writing 100/101 classes, and other classes on campus. For more information about the Common Reading Experience visit http://umreads.olemiss.edu/.
What are the Common Reading Experience student learning outcomes?
By reading, writing, and learning together through the shared venture of the UM Common Reading Experience, students:
Develop critical thinking, reading, writing, and research skills and abilities.
Gain an emerging sense of confidence as learners, thinkers, readers, and writers.
Develop a sense of community among peers, neighbors, and instructors.
Develop connections among ideas, experiences, disciplines, and academic and personal goals.
Relate the issues raised by the common book to their lives as new or returning students.
Why was Callings selected?
Callings is a collection of stories about the jobs and careers held by a wide-ranging group of Americans. Isay and his team selected the contents in Callings from over 65,000 stories collected by StoryCorps, and the accounts run from street-corner astronomer to beer vendor to physician to U.S. Congress member, with so much in between. These stories illustrate the devotion the subjects have for their work and the journeys they took to their chosen fields. The book is a product of Isay’s StoryCorps project, the goal of which is to record and archive the stories of America’s diverse and fascinating population.
Who is Dave Isay?
Dave Isay is an author, radio producer, and the founder of StoryCorps and Sound Portraits Productions. He has won numerous awards for his work, including six Peabody Awards, two Hillman Prizes, a TED Prize, and a MacArthur fellowship. Some of Isay’s most notable edited collections include Listening Is an Act of Love: A Celebration of American Life from the StoryCorps Project and Mom: A Celebration of Mothers from StoryCorps.
How do I teach non-fiction?
The Common Reading Experience provides students and teachers in all disciplines a chance to interact with a shared text. Critical analysis of texts may feel like foreign territory to some teachers; however, analysis is a skill that is useful in all areas of education and beyond and can be approached in ways with which teachers are comfortable. Writing classes use the Common Reading Text as the basis of a major project, but work with the book in other classes does not need to be so in-depth or take up entire class periods. Try to implement short in-class discussions, homework assignments, response papers, or journal writings using the themes and prompts listed in this guide. Or ask students to examine the choices Isay makes as an editor and how they impact us as readers. Remember that you can concentrate on a few stories that relate specifically to the themes of your course. This resource guide should provide starting points for discussions, homework, and/or writing assignments that will challenge students.
How do I encourage students to read?
Before assigning reading:
Preview Callings with students. Introduce the book during class. Explain how the book will be used in the course and how it will help students meet learning outcomes. Share your own excitement about the book, perhaps describing some favorite passages, events, or people.
Help students understand the depth of reading required. Display a passage, and model critical reading strategies such as text annotation and marginalia.
As students read:
Provide focused questions for students to consider while they are reading. Ask them to respond to those questions in writing before the next class.
Have students identify and submit a discussion topic or question via email or Blackboard after they have read an assignment but before the next class meeting. Use their topics and questions as the basis for class activities.
Require students to keep a reading response journal in which they comment on or question the reading assignment.
Ask students to underline/highlight several passages from a readingassignment. In class, ask students to discuss one of their underlined/highlighted passages.
After students have read:
Use class time and activities to build on, rather than summarize, the reading assignment.
At the start of class, assign a one-minute paper in which students identify both the most crucial part of the reading assignment and an unanswered question they have about the reading assignment.
During the first few minutes of class, ask students to write about links between the reading assignment and the topic being discussed in class.
Distribute one or two questions that build on the reading assignment. Use the think-pair-share protocol. Students first consider the question(s) on their own. Then they discuss the question(s) with a partner. Finally, they share their results with the class.
How do I lead a class discussion?
A good class discussion, like any part of teaching, should be structured yet open to improvisation. Following are some pointers for leading a discussion based on what students have read (or even their attendance at an event).
Preparation before the class meeting:
Though you may have already read the stories, be sure to review what the students are reading for your class meeting. Make a list of what you would like your students to learn from this exercise in order of importance.
For instance, you might prioritize that students understand what they read.
Then, you might select a couple of scenes or events in the book that seem important or interesting (or even puzzling – just because you are leading class discussion does not mean you need to have all the possible answers).
Perhaps you have selected several themes in the stories as your focus. You might choose scenes that relate to collegiality, perseverance, or the influence of mentors.
You might also ask students to respond to a specific quotation or passage.
Jot down a few notes so you can access them easily during your class discussion.
Annotate your own text.
Class time:
Establish respect. Class discussion is a time for exploration, and the classroom is a safe environment for students to say what they are thinking. Remind students of the first rule of the University creed: “I believe in respect for the dignity of each person.” Be sure students are listening carefully to each speaker and taking his or her ideas seriously.
Before discussion, ask students to reflect on a directed, yet open, question in a five- to ten-minute writing. Encourage students to keep writing throughout the allotted time even if they run out of things to say. They will surprise themselves with this unstructured writing. This writing is not a quiz with one correct answer. Ask them questions such as “What do you think is the significance of X?”; “How has X changed over time?”; “Why did X dowhat he or she did?” You could also ask them to do a close reading of a particular passage, perhaps even comparing it to another passage.
Avoid general questions such as “What did you think of the reading for today?” or “What did you find interesting?” These can be dead-end questions that will lead to short discussions.
To mix things up, you may also have them work together in small groups to find discussion starters or answers to your questions.
Other ideas and approaches:
Different classes have different personalities. Just make sure the environment in which students speak is a safe one, and continue to encourage discussion in different ways if something is not working.
Some students will direct their comments just to you. Encourage them to talk with each other.
If you had them write a response, invite students to share what they wrote.
If you had them work in groups, invite representatives from each group to share what they found.
Encourage students to point to specifics in the text. Ask them where they see what they see.
Invite students to read sections out loud.
Be open to where the conversation takes you. Sometimes students will pick up on details that you didn’t see.
Try not to let the class discussion go over fifteen to twenty minutes. Students are most productive in that time frame.
At the end of the discussion, recap the major points made or ask students to do so.
Course-specific discussion prompts are included in the course-specific sections of this guide.
How do I deal with controversial topics?
Some issues in Callings may spark controversy in the classroom. Issues that may generate controversy include but are not limited to gender discrimination, mental health, and same-sex marriage. The Yale Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning’s Teaching Controversial Topics can help you consider different approaches to discussing these issues.
Remember that the common read discussion should always serve your course outcomes. If a student raises an issue with which you have no expertise or are uncomfortable tackling, you might respond by explaining the topic is more suited for discussion in a different course (such as English, Sociology, or Political Science). For example, you might say, “[Controversy X] is an important issue, and it’s one that you can study in depth in [Course Y]. [Course Y] is taught by an expert in that field. For the purposes of this course, let’s keep the focus on [your course outcome Z].” Additional guidelines are below.
If a student raises a controversial issue unexpectedly, you may want to:
Acknowledge the student’s remark.
Acknowledge that other students may hold different views or positions.
Assess your willingness to continue the discussion further.
Assess other students’ willingness to continue the discussion further.
The following guidelines may be helpful for facilitating planned discussions of controversial issues:
1. Articulate a clear purpose for the discussion (for example, how the discussion is related to course objectives).
2. Establish ground rules, such as listening without interrupting the speaker, questioning ideas rather than criticizing individuals, offering at least one piece of evidence to support each point made, using “I” statements rather than “you” statements.
3. Be an active facilitator by redirecting students who are off topic or participating too actively, ensuring students are not put on the spot as spokespersons for certain groups, providing opportunities for all students to participate (orally or through writing), and being attuned to students’ emotions.
4. Summarize the discussion at the end of class and obtain student feedback.
How do I build instruction around the stories’ themes?
The stories capture many themes: formal vs. informal education, happiness, work-life balance, friendship, family, mental health, money, wellbeing, and others.
A class focusing on the theme of formal vs. informal education might look like this:
Individually, students identify and write about a passage that examines formal and/or informal education. (five to seven minutes)
As a class, students discuss the passages they have chosen. (ten to fifteen minutes)
With partners, students list why formal and/or informal education is essential for a certain job/career and why this matters in a larger context. (five to ten minutes)
Student pairs report their findings to the entire class. (ten to fifteen minutes)
Homework: Students write a personal reflection on how formal and/or informal education will play important roles in the pursuit of their desired jobs/careers, perhaps examining why a college degree (or degrees) is or is not required for the positions or related positions they are interested in pursuing.
What library resources are available?
Visit the UM Libraries Common Reading Research Guide. Explore this library research guide about Callings to learn more about the author, upcoming events and the stories inside the book. Previous UM Common Read texts and guide links are also available.
Where can students find extra copies of the book?
All first-year students received a paperback copy of Callings during summer orientation.
UM Libraries has one electronic copy of Callings that can be read online or downloaded for up to three days on a single device. Go to libraries.olemiss.edu and search for “Callings Dave Isay” in the OneSearch box. You will have to log in with your Ole Miss WebID and password to access the e-book.
Inside the J.D. Williams Library, students may check out a Reserve copy of Callings at the main desk on the 1st floor for one day. On Reserve for EDHE 105/305 are two copies of Callings, one copy of The A Game, and one copy of The Ole Miss Experience, under the instructor name: Melissa Dennis.
There is one print copy of the book in the main stacks of the library that students can check out using this call number: HD8072.I83 2017.
Finally, a copy of all Common Read titles (2011-present) are available in Archives & Special Collections (but these can only be viewed inside the library).
If anyone needs help with finding books or finding other library materials for the Common Read, please email Melissa Dennis at mdennis@olemiss.edu
What events or speakers are being planned for the fall semester?
Thought-provoking events are an excellent way to get students involved with the book outside of the classroom. Please consider encouraging your students to attend an event and reflect on the overall message being delivered. For the most up-to-date list, visit the UM Common Reading Experience 2023 Callings Library Guide.
What if one of my students has a disability and needs a copy of the book in a different format?
Students with disabilities should visit Student Disability Services in 234 Martindale as soon as possible at the beginning of the semester. SDS provides classroom accommodations to all students on campus who disclose a disability, request accommodations, and meet eligibility requirements. SDS will be able to help your student acquire a copy of the CRE book in an appropriate format. The SDS website, https://sds.olemiss.edu/faculty/, has some helpful resources for instructors.
Callings Critical Thinking Exercises
The UM QEP, Think Forward, defines critical thinking as the ability to conceptualize problems, gather pertinent information, interpret data, appraise evidence, distinguish diverse points of view, and articulate personal insights in order to present reasonable and effective arguments, responses, or conclusions.
These small group exercises may help students develop critical thinking skills.
(1) Barbara Abelhauser says she took a pay cut to go to a job she loves, being a bridgetender, and leave behind a job where she was “miserable” (17-21). Many people have to weigh pay vs. happiness when considering work. Why do you think this is an either-or scenario for so many people? In small groups, discuss careers you are considering, and then research salaries for those careers and possibly related ones (consider sites such as the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics at https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm). How much can people expect to make as beginners in the positions you looked at? What is the typical pay range? Does it meet your expectations? Research information on how happy people are in that line of work. Do the results meet your expectations? How so or not? Consider the particular career paths you researched, potentially including related careers/jobs, and then discuss the results as a group. You might also discuss areas such as benefits, travel expectations, balancing work with a family, etc. Finally, make an argument as a group about how people might best balance the type of pay they seek with the happiness level they expect and why such balance is meaningful.
(2) Several women featured in Callings overcame gender barriers to reach their career/job goals. Anne Lucietto’s father Ledo says people asked him, “What do you want to send her to college for? She’s only a girl. They’re only good for making babies” (66). Anne went on to become a mechanical engineer. Dr. Dorothy Warburton explains that her own father couldn’t see her in science (43-4), yet she became a leading genetic researcher. Why are women still so underrepresented in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields? In small groups, discuss Lucietto, Warburton, and/or any other women from Callings who had to fight through gender barriers. Also, do some research in places such as the American Association of University Women website: https://www.aauw.org/resources/research/the-stem-gap/. What can we do in America to make sure more women are in STEM jobs? Each group should make an argument about why the numbers of women in STEM fields are what they are today and what might occur if the numbers become more balanced.
(3) In the introduction to Callings, Isay says, “Listening has always been at the heart of StoryCorps’ mission” (3). Watch the TED Talk, “5 Ways to Listen Better,” by author and sound consultant Julian Treasure. Discuss Treasure’s contention that we are losing our ability to listen well. Then divide students into pairs or small groups to practice Treasure’s mixer exercise. Ask them to leave the classroom and find a place, inside or out, to sit together. Groups should remain at their chosen locations for 5-10 minutes, with each group member listing the channels of sound they hear. Then group members should compare notes, making a master list of all the sound channels they heard. Groups should then return to class to share their results and consider how those channels affected their environments. Following the sharing, discuss the channels operating in other environments, like the classroom. How do these channels (students whispering to one another, students watching online videos, students listening through headphones to something else, etc.) affect the classroom experience? What about the channels operating in the dorms? On the Square?
(4) Use this exercise, adapted from StoryCorps Lessons, to encourage students to consider and practice the role of wait time in active listening.
Display and discuss author Diana Senechal’s quote: “Listening … involves a certain surrender, a willingness to sit with what one does not already know … [it] requires us to stretch a little beyond what we know, expect, or want.”
Ask students to interview each other, using the following prompt:
Who has been the most important person in your life?
As they interview each other, they will practice using short silences. Whenever the interviewee stops speaking, the interviewer should pause for six to eight seconds (counting quietly to themselves) before asking a follow-up question. During this silence, the interviewee is free to add any details to their story. The interviewer will then need to wait for another opportunity to ask a follow-up question. Each interview should last five minutes.
Following the interviews, bring the class back together to discuss the following questions: How did it feel to pause before the follow-up question? Do you think people generally use these short silences in real life conversations? What does it feel like when someone interrupts you? Why do people interrupt?
CRE Community of Voices Essay
An Essay Challenge Connecting Diverse Ideas, Experiences, Disciplines, and People
The Creed characterizes the University of Mississippi as “a community of learning dedicated to nurturing excellence in intellectual inquiry and personal character in an open and diverse environment.” As part of that mission, the UM Common Reading Experience helps students develop a sense of community among diverse peers, neighbors, and instructors, while making connections across varied ideas, experiences, and disciplines. The CRE Diverse Voices Essay Challenge provides an opportunity for students to further engage with that mission by examining issues related to the common book. Below are challenge and submission details:
The annual challenge is open to all UM undergraduate students.
One winner and two finalists will be chosen by a panel of judges.
The winner will receive $400.
There is no length requirement. Writers will determine the appropriate length required to effectively answer the prompt
Submission details:
All essays should include the student’s name, ID number, and classification (first-year, sophomore, junior, senior).
Entries must be submitted through the online submission portal.
The deadline to submit is Dec. 31, 2023, with the winners and finalists announced in early 2024.
Submit essays through the online portal by following these steps:
Access the Department of Writing and Rhetoric Awards site at https://rhetoric.olemiss.edu/awards/.
Click the Common Reading Experience: Community of Voices Outstanding Essay button.
Click the Submit an Essay button.
Fill out the form and attach the essay.
Fall 2023 Prompt
In Dave Isay’s 2016 book Callings, he presents stories of people describing the career paths they chose to pursue, their inspirations for choosing those paths, and the connections to their communities created through their work. The book is part of the StoryCorps project, whose mission is to “preserve and share humanity’s stories in order to build connections between people and create a more just and compassionate world.” Our UM community is also built from these connections shared among students who are pursuing their callings, and like the people in Isay’s book, the diversity of those stories creates a vibrant portrait of our students’ lived experiences. For this year’s Community of Voices essay contest, we want to hear your stories. What calling are you pursuing? What inspired you to follow that path? What challenges have you faced along the way, and how have you worked to overcome those challenges? Why is your calling important, and how do you plan to use it to connect to your community both now and in your future? Consider these questions and write a personal narrative that tells the story of your own calling.
While the Common Read is a text provided to incoming first-year students, we encourage participation from all UM undergraduate students. The following links lead to some of the recorded interviews that are included in Callings. Each recording is around two minutes. Students who don’t have access to the book might consider listening to some of these stories on the StoryCorps site for inspiration. Note, though, that the recordings are interviews and not essays. Use them for inspiration to think about your own story, but present your work as a narrative essay for the contest. For more links to the interviews behind the essays, use the UM Common Reading Experience Library Guide.
https://storycorps.org/stories/barbara-moore-and-olivia-fite/
https://storycorps.org/stories/don-and-mackenzie-byles/
https://storycorps.org/stories/carl-mcnair/
https://storycorps.org/stories/barb-abelhauser-and-john-maycumber-160415/
https://storycorps.org/stories/james-taylor-and-darlene-lewis/
https://storycorps.org/stories/al-siedlecki-and-lee-buono/
https://storycorps.org/stories/ayodeji-ogunniyi/
https://storycorps.org/stories/dawn-maestas/
https://storycorps.org/stories/burnell-cotlon-and-lillie-cotlon-150821/
Integrating Callings into EDHE 105/305
The Common Reading Text is used each year in EDHE 105/305 courses primarily as a framework for class discussions, projects, and writing assignments that explore social themes and/or issues from the book. EDHE 105/305 instructors use the book (with a focus on those themes and issues) to teach students how to explore their personal reactions, to understand and appreciate both the things that make them different from their peers and the things that they have in common, and to effectively and respectfully voice their own opinions and viewpoints.
Affordances of Callings
The short story structure of Callings affords instructors and students some options previous Common Reading Texts have not. Most of the stories are short enough to be read in the first ten-fifteen minutes of class. Also, each story can stand independently from the others, so each can be treated as a primary text.
Class Discussion/Writing Prompts
Dave Isay’s Callings is about finding and living your passion. Think about your major and your aspirations for after college. Do they inspire the passion that we find in the stories we have read?
Library Assistant Storm Reyes talks about a chance encounter with a bookmobile staff member that set her on her path to loving books, which ultimately broadened her view of the world. Reflect on an interaction you’ve had with someone who turned out to be pivotal in changing your perspective or view of the world.
Bridgetender Barbara Abelhauser discusses leaving the corporate job that she was miserable in to go to the lower paying but more Zen-like job of bridgetending. What are some of the pros and cons of choosing happiness over monetary compensation?
Tool and Die Maker Phil Kerner reflects on the difficulty of losing his business and talks about how it inspired him to start an organization to help small businesses. Think about a time in your life where you had to face a “crushing” disappointment. How did you respond to it? Were you able to find a way to use the experience for growth?
Farmer Johnny Bradley remembers his father saying, “Son, you can’t whip a man that don’t quit.” Think about a time when you persevered through adversity; share the situation and the outcome.
Street-corner astronomer Herman Heyn was inspired by “Miss Wicker’s class” to share his love of astronomy. Think back on the interactions you have had in your life; write/discuss how a teacher may have influenced your life’s direction.
Angelo Bruno and Eddie Nieves were the sanitation workers who found a great partnership in helping their community. Think about the ways the people around you can help fuel your ability to find your calling.
Beekeeper Ted Dennard talks about being totally in the moment when he’s working with his bees. What is an activity or pursuit that keeps you completely engaged? Reflect on what you experience through your various senses “in the moment.”
Marc Anderson Lawson discusses his video game inventor father with his sister. When he decided to go to college, he said to himself, “What could I do for a living that I would want to do for free?” He decided to do programming, like his father. If asked that question, how would you answer?
Building contractor Lyle Link talks about how successes don’t teach you much, but mistakes are learning situations. In college you’ll encounter both successes and failures. Think back on your life; what is a mistake you learned more from than you did from any of your successes?
GROUP/INDIVIDUAL PROJECT ASSIGNMENTS
Research Project/Presentation: Think about your own calling. Interview a person who is in that field. Ask them about their pathway to finding their calling. Present your findings to the class.
Research Project/Presentation: Create a PowerPoint presentation on the career of your choice. Include pertinent information, such as salary, education requirements, nature of the work, working conditions, occupational outlook, and pros/cons of the career.
Talk Response: Callings (StoryCorps) is also a podcast that can be found on all major podcast platforms. Go to the StoryCorps website and search for your favorite story by the person’s name. While the written word can be very powerful, think about how you feel after you listen to the podcast in their own words. Links to the stories in each chapter of the book are available for your convenience on the UM Common Reading Experience Library Guide.
Vignette Writing Assignment: All of the stories in Callings connect humans to their passion. Think about your life at the University of Mississippi and how you will be able to connect with your future self as you find your passion. How do you see yourself in five, ten, and/or fifteen years? Write a vignette (experience) about your future self in the midst of your own calling.
Outside-of-Class Activity: Choose a Career Fair that piques your interest and attend. Write a reflection on your attendance and interactions.
Research Project/Presentation: Write an aspirational resume that will help you realize what you should be striving for with regard to skills for the job you aspire to attain.
Integrating Callings into WRIT 100/101
The first-semester, first-year writing courses—WRIT 100 and WRIT 101—use the Common Reading Text as the basis for a major writing project. This project emphasizes the critical reading, critical thinking, analysis, research, and synthesis skills that are vital to college writing. In this assignment, students are given a prompt pertaining to the Common Reading Text and asked to compose an essay that integrates the Common Reading Text with the student’s own ideas and perhaps outside sources. The prompts are intentionally complex to introduce students to the expectations of college thinking and writing. First-year writing courses use the Common Reading Text as a basis for student reading and writing rather than as a literary study.
Affordances of Callings
The short story structure of Callings affords instructors and students some options previous Common Reading Texts have not. Most of the stories are short enough to be read in the first five minutes of class. Also, each story can stand independently from the others, so each can be treated as a primary text.
Discussion Starters
(1) Some people learn early in life what their passions, or callings, are. Lee Buono, for example, was encouraged by his eighth grade science teacher, Al Siedlecki, and knew he wanted to be a neurosurgeon (177-81). What are the advantages and disadvantages to being sure of your passion/calling at a young age? How does school, in particular, college, help or muddle people’s pursuit of their passions/callings? Why does this matter?
(2) Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, an actor, says about talent, “you only get a portion of the gift, and if you’re patient, the rest of it will come” (95). What does Pitts-Wiley mean by this statement? Do you agree with him? Is being “patient” the way to maximize a talent? Why or why not?
(3) In her 2018 commencement address to the Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism, Oprah Winfrey shared this career advice: “Your job is not always going to fulfill you. There will be some days that you just might be bored. Other days, you may not feel like going to work at all—go anyway.” Choose a few of the stories you have read in Callings, and consider when or how those jobs might be boring or unfulfilling. How do you imagine people cope with the less engaging parts of their work? What keeps them moving forward despite boredom or fatigue?
(4) The subtitle to Callings is The Purpose and Passion of Work. As a class, read or listen to Samantha Todd Ryan’s Forbes article, “The ‘Why’ Behind Our Work: What Is ‘Purpose’ and Do We Need It?” Then, discuss what purpose means. Can you agree on a definition? If not, why? Borrowing from the question in the article title, do we need purpose in our work? Why or why not?
(5) Introductions and conclusions are hard to write. Look at the opening and closing of your favorite story. What techniques does the storyteller use to draw the reader in? What techniques help bring the story to a graceful close?
(6) Callings is broken into five sections: Dreamers, Generations, Healers, Philosophers, and Groundbreakers. Some of the stories, though, seem like they could be classified under different sections. Discuss the stories in Callings and select one you feel is in the wrong section or at least could be in a different section. Why does or could the story fit somewhere else? Where should it or could it go? Should the book even feature sections? Why or why not? Why do we feel the need to label or categorize so much? How is it helpful? How is it limiting?
(7) Isay ends his introduction with the line, “May their words help give you the strength to listen to that still, small voice inside—that voice which can help you discover the work that you were born to do.” Discuss the idea that we are each born to do a certain type of work. Is that thought limiting or inspiring? Would the individuals featured in the stories all agree they were born to do the work they are doing?
Reflection Prompts
(1) Herman Heyn, a street-corner astronomer whose story is featured on pages 11-16, says he was inspired by his grade school teacher Miss Wicker. Reflect on who inspired a particular interest for learning in you. Have you told that person? If so, how did that make you feel? If not, what would you say to them now if you could? Why?
(2) Callings features short excerpts from interviews and includes a picture of the people at the end of each story. Reflect on how the photos impacted your reading process. Why do you think they are included? Do they make you think differently about the people you just read about when you see them at the end? Why or why not? Did you always wait until the end of each story to look at the picture? Why or why not?
(3) Some of the stories in Callings feature people who are in their 70s—some even beyond that—well past the average retirement age in America. Why do you think these people still work? Reflect on whether these stories make you think more about your choice for a future career or future careers. Why do they or don’t they?
(4) In the “Introduction” to Callings, Dave Isay quotes author and activist Parker Palmer when he writes, “Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you.” Reflect on how you might take this advice as a student new to college. What opportunities might college provide to help you “listen to your life”? Why does listening to your life matter in the bigger picture?
(5) Sharon Long, a forensic artist, says that she can get lost in her work, forgetting about everything else for hours. Reflect on what type of work or activity makes you lose track of time. Why? What does this tell you about yourself and what you might like to do for a career/job?
(6) When library assistant Storm Reyes was a little girl she visited a bookmobile at the farm fields where her migrant family worked. During one visit to the bookmobile, the person working told her “the more you know about something, the less you will fear it” (41). Reflect on what this means when applied to work. Does this mean we should follow a career/job path in something familiar? Does this mean we should not be afraid to chase dream careers/jobs? What does it mean to you, and why?
(7) Callings features dozens of short stories about work, some of which feature people who went into their line of work because of something important that happened to them in their childhood or teenage years. Reflect on something from your childhood or teenage years that has helped shape your career/job goals. What and/or who helped shape you? Why was this meaningful? Did your approach to academics change in any ways afterward? If so, how? If not, why?
(8) When Noramay Cadena was at M.I.T. she managed school and having a young daughter by focusing on one week at a time and telling herself “next week will be better” (79). Cadena knew that graduating was the one thing that could help her and her family the most. Reflect on your own approaches to getting through difficult times in school. Do you have something that you do or tell yourself to help stay focused? If so, what, and why does it help? If not, why, and is that something that might be valuable to you in college?
(9) Some of the people featured in Callings followed in the footsteps of a parent or parents for their careers/jobs. Reflect on the influence your parents, or other close relatives, have had on your thoughts about future careers/jobs. Have you been heavily influenced by family or not? Whatever your answer, what impact has this had on your choices and why?
(10) In a review of Callings for NACADA, the Global Community for Academic Advising, Ashley Wegener writes that a “theme present throughout the book was the importance of mentors in providing accountability, support, and inspiration for callings.” Reflect on the role of mentors in your life. What does the word “mentor” mean to you? Do you have a mentor? If so, who, and how does this person help you? If not, why, and do you have someone who might serve as a mentor? Why is college an important time to have or consider having a mentor? Are mentors people who just help with areas such as school or careers/jobs? Why or why not?
(11) In one of the stories in Callings, firefighter Dekalb Walcott Jr. says of his career aspirations, “you shoot for the stars, and if you land somewhere in between, you’re still in good shape” (55). Reflect on your preparedness to handle changes or even setbacks if college or your plans beyond college don’t go exactly as you thought they would. Do you need to accomplish all of your goals to be truly happy? Why or why not? What do you think Walcott Jr. means when he uses the words “land somewhere in between” and “good shape”? What would that mean for you?
(12) StoryCorps’ website includes this statement: “At StoryCorps, we know the power of one great question. When we sit down face to face, ask to hear someone’s truth, and listen to it, we begin to recognize where our lives intersect.” Reflect on a moment of “intersection” that you felt when you read one of the stories in Callings. What was that connection like for you? Why do you think it resonated?
Essay Prompts
(1) In the “Author’s Note” section, Dave Isay points out that “[w]ords and phrases that read well are not always the strongest spoken moments, and the reverse is also the case.” Many of the stories in Callings are available as audio recordings on storycorps.org (enter an interviewee’s name on the top of the page using the “Search” feature). You can also find some of them in the UM Common Reading Experience Library Guide. Select one story to work with that is available on audio, and listen to the recording a couple of times. Then, compose a thesis-driven essay in which you analyze the differences between the written and spoken story, arguing which is more rhetorically effective to you and why. Think about the differences rhetorically, that is, how the different formats work to reach you and other readers or listeners. Is one more emotionally impactful? If so, why? Do the editing differences between the audio recording and the written story impact the experiences in any ways? If so, how? To Isay’s point, are there words or phrases in either the recording or the story that are stronger or more clear in one form over the other? If so, why? How does hearing the voices in the interview differ from reading their words, and why does that matter in considering the subject matter? Be sure to cite from the text and the interview.
(2) In his story, Lyle Link reflects back on being a contractor and says that he was essentially a “salesman” (256). Really, a lot of jobs that aren’t classified as sales involve being a salesperson in some way(s). Why is this? Select two other stories from Callings to work with, and examine how the people are selling something in one form or another. Keep in mind that you might be liberal with your definition of sales. Then, compose a thesis-driven essay in which you define how you are using the term “sales” or “salesperson,” and examine how you see your chosen subjects as being salespeople. You might construct a thesis that lets you contrast your subjects or focus on similarities, or perhaps some combination. Be sure to cite from the text.
(3) Sharon Long says of her field, forensic artistry, that now “they have state-of-the-art equipment” (25) and that “technology is moving so fast” that she would be left behind if she were to keep working. What roles might technology and artificial intelligence play in the careers/jobs people currently hold? Select two other stories from Callings for a focus, and examine how AI or technology in general might impact the fields in the future. Will humans still be necessary for these positions? If so, will it be in the same ways as in the past? Do you see the technology having a positive or negative impact on the positions? Do the stories you selected contain any information that helps you shape your argument? Consider doing a little research to help you, and then compose a thesis-driven essay in which you argue how technology will impact your chosen positions in the coming years. You are welcome to bring in outside sources, but be sure to cite Callings, as well.
Read the StoryCorps mission statement below:
StoryCorps’ mission is to preserve and share humanity’s stories in order to build connections between people and create a more just and compassionate world. We do this to remind one another of our shared humanity, to strengthen and build the connections between people, to teach the value of listening, and to weave into the fabric of our culture the understanding that everyone’s story matters. At the same time, we are creating an invaluable archive for future generations. – About StoryCorps, storycorps.org
How can reading about the work some people do help “strengthen and build the connections between people”? Why does “everyone’s story” matter? Think about StoryCorps’ mission statement, and consider the different stories in Callings. Then, select two stories to focus on. Why should we care about what your chosen subjects have to say? What do they help us understand about humanity? How do they make us or help us think about being “more just and compassionate”? What does reading these stories teach us about listening? And why does this matter in relation to StoryCorps’ mission statement? Why is compiling an “archive for future generations” important? Construct a thesis-driven essay in which you argue how the stories and people you chose exemplify and help perpetuate StoryCorps’ mission statement. Be sure to cite from the text.
(5) Read Jeremy Hsu’s Scientific American article, “The Secrets of Storytelling: Why We Love a Good Yarn,” paying particular attention to his discussion of narrative transport factors (familiarity, empathy, learning, and social cohesion). Choose two or three stories in Callings that appeal to you and apply those narrative transport factors to your experience in reading the stories. Construct a thesis-driven essay analyzing how these factors affected your experience as a reader of these stories. Be sure to include evidence from Hsu’s article and from the Callings stories to support your argument.
(6) Read “Speaking my truth: Why personal experiences can bridge divides but mislead,”Van Bavel et al.’s commentary in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences). Consider their argument that stories of personal experience can help readers engage with outgroups, build respect, and humanize marginalized individuals. Choose one or two Callings stories featuring individuals whom you perceive as very different from you. How did these stories help you understand these individuals in new and positive ways? Which of the factors that Van Bavel et al. covered were in play? Then consider Van Bavel et al.’s point that stories of personal experience can be exploited. How might the stories you have chosen be subject to exploitation in larger cultural conversations about income inequality, fair labor practices, gender or racial stereotyping, etc.? Construct a thesis-driven essay in which you analyze how the stories you have chosen may bridge divides but also mislead. Be sure to include evidence from the PNAS article as well as the Callings stories to support your analysis.
(7) The stories in Callings paint a portrait of work as fulfilling and life-enriching. Is that how everyone views work? Watch Gallup’s “The State of the Global Workplace 2022 Report” and download the report. Pay particular attention to the key findings on global engagement/well-being and employee stress. Think about how the stories in Callings address those issues. Construct a thesis-driven argument about how and why workplace leaders should or should not address these issues, using evidence from the Gallup report and the first-hand accounts in Callings.
(8) In an Oral History Review article, “Under Storytelling’s Spell? Oral History in a Neoliberal Age,”Alexander Freund cautions against conflating storytelling and history, arguing our current fascination with storytelling is rooted in neoliberalism, hyperindividualism, and therapy culture. Read Freund’s article and think about the stories in Callings. Construct a thesis-driven argument agreeing with or refuting Freund’s case, using the stories in Callings as evidence.
(9) Read Simone Stolzoff’s essay, “Please Don’t Call My Job a Calling,” in The New York Times and his Forbes interview, “Understanding What is the Good Enough Job.” Think about his arguments that the term “calling” can lead to worker exploitation and that work-centric lives may not be healthy. Then think about Callings as a complete text. In what ways does the book intrinsically or extrinsically foster worker exploitation and work-centric lives? In what ways does it not? Compose a thesis-driven argument supporting or refuting Stolzoff’s argument, using evidence from Callings to shore up your points.
(10) Multimodal option: For this assignment, you will create your own story like the ones featured in Callings. The process should help with skills such as interviewing and writing interview questions, editing through making rhetorical choices about content, and thinking critically about different forms of media.
First, you will decide on a subject to interview. The person you select should be someone whose career/job is interesting to you and something you would like to learn more about. Whom you interview is entirely up to you.
Write a series of interview questions that will get your interviewee talking about their career/job. These questions may range from origin stories (how the person became interested in or got into the career/job) to questions about the day-to-day work to questions about how the work is rewarding and fulfilling.
Obtain permission from the interviewee to record and edit the interview for your assignment purposes.
Interview the subject, ideally recording at least ten minutes of material either through video/audio or just audio.
Edit the interview so your final product is between three-five minutes in length (editing should cut down the length of the project, not change meaning).
Make sure the interviewee is the focus of the final product (i.e., even if you are part of the final product asking questions or participating in small ways, the interviewee should be the one mainly featured).
Submit the final product as an audio file or a video using approved file forms or platforms.
Remember, the subtitle of Callings is The Purpose and Passion of Work, so your goal should be to interview someone who enjoys their work and/or feels fulfilled. An interview featuring a subject complaining a lot about a job wouldn’t fit well in Callings, so it won’t work well for this assignment either.
Appendix
Sample Rubrics
Reflection in First Year Writing
Since 2010, writing courses at the University of Mississippi have emphasized reflection, revision, and transfer of knowledge.
The Reflection Blog, or Commonplace Book, asks students to engage in frequent, diverse, and sustained reflection over the course of the first-year writing experience. Students use their blogs as a space to collect and unpack ideas. Through the different types of composition in the Reflection Blog, students will develop a more sophisticated understanding of what it means to be an academic writer and they will cultivate an “academic identity” as they move beyond their general education experience.
Setup
DWR Reflection Blogs make use of the Edblogs@UM platform. Edblogs is based on WordPress, so if you’ve kept a blog before, you’ll be very familiar with the interface. This page of the guide should address any technical concerns you have with using student blogs in the classroom.
There are two ways to connect to your students’ blogs. You may have students add you as a user to their sites and use WordPress Reader to access their posts or you may use the “My Class” plugin to centrally manage your students’ sites. Instructions for both methods are below.
Classes
The Classes plugin connects you to student blogs in a teacher/students configuration. Even if you don’t plan to maintain a class blog, you’ll need to have one in order to use “My Class.” Your default blog is located at “edblogs.olemiss.edu/MY-WEB-ID.” Many teachers use their default blog as a class blog. (If your default blog is not set up for some reason, go to the EdBlogs Signup Page to create a new one).
To activate your class blog, go to the dashboard of the site you want to use as your class blog (probably your default site) and click My Class and Create a Class. On the Settings page, check the box next to This is a class blog. This will enable the rest of the settings and options for the Classes plugin. Here is an explanation of each one:
Allow students to post on the class blog: Only change this setting if you want to require students to post to your blog in addition to their own. Most teachers do not do this. If you decide to use the class blog in this way, you can decide whether you want to moderate student posts.
Moderation on student blogs: Most teachers leave these boxes unchecked. This function is primarily for K-12 teachers who use the Campus Press platform.
Privacy: Set student site privacy to Only registered users of this site can view it by default unless you have a specific justification for requiring public student blogs. The nature of the Commonplace Book assignment lends itself to private blogs.
Reader: Leave this option unchecked unless you want students in your class to have access to each other’s posts. If you want to create peer review groups or reading pairs, adding individual users is a better option.
Teachers: If you are team teaching a course or want to invite another teacher to observe your class blog, you can add other users as Teachers.
Student Permissions: Check all the boxes to grant students full control over their sites. The Commonplace Book assignment is predicated on student ownership of the digital space, so there’s no good reason to restrict access to WordPress core functions.
Default Blog Template: You can automatically assign the Commonplace Book template to new student blogs only if you use the Invite function or request a batch job to enable your class blog at the beginning of the semester.
Adding Student Blogs to the Class
Students can request to be added to your class blog by going to **My lass > Join a Class **from their WordPress dashboard (after they’ve created a site).
They should search for your class blog by entering just the last part of your class blog’s URL. For example, for edblogs.olemiss.edu/mysite, students will instead search for the last part of the URL. Using this example, they would search for mysite..
You can approve student join requests by clicking on **My Class **and selecting which students you want to approve.
Reader Lists
You do not need a separate class blog to use Reader lists to read student Commonplace Books. This option does not use the Classes plugin and instead relies on WordPress’s native subscription/user system.
Creating Reader Lists
Instead of pulling your class rolls from MyOleMiss, this time you’ll pull them from Blackboard.
Go to the Full Grade Center in your Blackboard course. From the toolbar at the top of your gradebook, click “Work Offline” and select “Download.”
On the “Download Grades” page under “Data,” select “User Information Only.” Leave the rest of the options the same, and click “Submit.”
On the next screen, click “Download”. You can save the file to your computer or open it directly in Excel. You will see the following warning message. Click Yes:
The spreadsheet will show the first and last names of the students in the section and their usernames. Click and drag to select all the usernames in your class, and copy them to your clipboard (Ctrl/Cmd + C).
Now, log in to Edblogs at edblogs.olemiss.edu. Go to your WordPress dashboard. You should see the Reader. Notice “My Lists” in the right sidebar.
Click “Create New List.” You can name the list by section if you want to divide your reader by section. Or, if you want all your students combined, just name the list with the semester. Paste the usernames that you copied from the Excel spreadsheet into the box and click “Create.”
You can now click on the list from your Reader to view only the student blogs from the named section or semester. You can manage the list by clicking the small sprocket next to its name. From the manage screen, you can add or remove student blogs or delete the list completely.
You can repeat this process for multiple sections if you keep your classes separated.
For Students
Student instructions are available on the student startup page of edblogs.olemiss.edu.
Edblogs Requests
Use the links below to request various maintenance jobs on the UM EdBlogs network. Please allowed at least 24 hours for completion (more at the beginning and end of the semester). You will receive email confirmation when the requested job is complete.
Background
The Commonplace Book assignment is based on three core principles:
The definition of a Commonplace Book: “a book into which notable extracts from other works are copied for personal use” (An important element in this definition is that not everything is collected, just what the writer of the commonplace book deems most notable.)
The DWR program objective of reflection: “Reflection is a major component of the first-year writing sequence … . Reflection, or the ability to independently assess one’s status in relationship to a learning experience, is bound up with the act of writing. Furthermore, the ability to self-reflect is an increasingly essential skill as the process of higher education becomes more and more heterogeneous and fragmented … .” (The important element here is that the emphasis is on reflecting on learning not practicing composition, although, of course, the act of creating the commonplace book is practicing composition.)
The big-picture objective “to give students raw material from which to generate their vision of the academy.” (The important element here is that students begin to create a structure or system for their vision of learning.)
Using those principles as context, faculty working on this project defined the objectives for the commonplace book project as offering students:
the space to collect the ideas and artifacts they consider to be most valuable to their learning
the opportunity to reflect on what they have collected in order to make sense of their own learning
the opportunity to devise a structure for articulating that learning as they begin to generate their vision of the academy
Thus, the commonplace book is framed by a series of four practices:
daily reflection through which the student identifies and collects the most important one or two concepts/strategies/practices from each class session (1-2 minutes per class)
weekly reflection through which the student collects the most important artifacts (i.e., a passage from an NYT article, a peer review, a progymnasmata exercise, a comment from a writing conference, a rhetorical situation from another class, etc.) from each week with just a brief notation or comment as to why it was saved (5-10 minutes from one class each week)
unit reflection, developed from the DWR eportfolio unit reflection assignments (one class period extending into homework if necessary)
end of semester tagging and explanation of tagging through which the student develops categories to articulate and systematize major concepts and strategies that are the building blocks of his/her vision of the academy (two weeks)
In Spring 2016, we sat down with students and an instructor who participated in the Commonplace Book pilot program. This video includes their insights and reflections on the project.
Pedagogy and Rationale
The Commonplace Book is situated with the CCCC Position Statement on the Principles and Practices in Electronic Portfolios:
Principle #6: Integration and Curriculum Connections Students link artifacts in a flexible structure that (1) synthesizes diverse evidence and ideas, (2) invites linear or non-linear ways to read and evaluate e-portfolios, and (3) makes connections to portfolio-related evidence and relationships distributed across the Internet. Students may therefore use linking to represent how e-portfolio artifacts inter-relate with other courses in the larger context of whole-curriculum learning.
Why a commonplace book?
The commonplace book integrates the role of ePortfolio into the daily and weekly coursework of WRIT 100/101 as well as providing an opportunity for students to identify and articulate connections among ePortfolio artifacts. Like the standard WRIT 100/101 ePortfolio, this project incorporates unit reflections on major projects, but the commonplace book expands the scope of the ePortfolio to include daily quickwrites and weekly classical rhetorical exercises. In this way, the project becomes an ongoing “writer’s gym” or “writer’s workbook” that students access every class period. In daily quickwrites, students respond for 1-2 minutes to a creative or reflective prompt. In weekly progymnasmata, students complete sequenced exercises focusing on specific rhetorical strategies. In the final two weeks of the semester, students create categories that articulate their learning and tag each entry in the commonplace book with one or more of those categories, using the tags to identify connections among the diverse artifacts.
Commonplace Books and Blogging
The electronic space that most closely mirrors the classical commonplace book is a blog. Blogs are ultimately organized chronologically, the same way that a bound commonplace notebook would be, but the added classification features of categories and tags allow for dynamic organization of compositions. Commonplace as Blog also encourages student agency and ownership of design, organization, and purpose in physical terms as well as in conceptual terms. Another useful comparison is Commonplace as Pinterest for text. Though the visual design metaphor for Pinterest is less applicable, the notion that users construct meaning, set goals, and work through problems on the Pinterest platform is similar to what we are asking them to do in the Commonplace.
Teacher Testimonials
Below we share words of advice, reflection, and encouragement from the teachers who piloted the commonplace book curriculum in 2016.
Daily Writes: The Road is Long with Many a Winding Turn (Karen Forgette)
The Bowling Green State University Center for Teaching and Learning has a great handout on teaching students to reflect. That handout provides a list of bullet points delineating the hallmarks of good reflection, including:
Evidence of serious thinking and questioning
Self-awareness and honesty
Concrete and specific examples
The ability to show relationships between prior and new knowledge
When I see evidence of these hallmarks in my students’ commonplace books, I know they are moving into reflection territory. However, they journey through a lot of barren, flat landscape before reaching the Promised Land. Reflection, like all ways of knowing or habits of mind, takes practice and time.
Exhibit A
One of the reasons the DWR shifted from the ePortfolio model to the Commonplace Book model was to give students more opportunities to practice reflection. The daily writes are an integral part of that practice. Early daily writes tend to be summaries of class, like this one:
Today in our group discussions on The New York Times, I learned how other people maneuver the page and find articles that interested them. The other students that were in my group said that they decided on their topic mainly by what was appearing more frequently on the home page. My group also liked to write about things that dealt with them, including their religious beliefs or their home town.
This student is giving reflection a shot. He is describing what we did in class that day and trying to frame it within the larger context of his learning, but mostly, he’s just recapping what he did. But that was September. By November, here’s what that same student’s daily writes looked like:
Today in class we had to listen to several other multimodal projects. I can honestly say that after listening to about fifteen seconds of other pieces, I could tell how awful mine truly was. Once again I was witness to the writing rule that your first draft is pretty much absolute crap and so are the next five or six tries. I also learned that I wrote my script filled with evidence, which would be great if my audience were forty five year old high school teachers that desperately want to see evidence. Sadly, that’s not my audience. I learned that I have to make this script more interesting, and can possibly do so by taking away some facts and evidence and putting them into the project visually instead of audibly. I can guarantee that two days from now my script will be nothing like it is now.
Here the student moves beyond summarizing what happened in class to analyzing what he learned in class and considering how that learning fits into the larger scheme of his writing knowledge. He links his prior learning (writing is a process, audience awareness) with his current practice and devises a plan for improving his project. In terms of the hallmarks of good reflection, he takes his learning seriously, demonstrates self-awareness, provides concrete examples, and establishes connections.
The Takeaway
So how did he get there? He practiced (daily writes, weekly writes, and unit reflections). He paid attention to feedback (mine, his classmates’, models of good reflection, and his own consideration of his commonplace book). He took ownership. By recording and thinking about what he was learning, he started to build his own intellectual framework for how he operates as a writer. Reflection is a long and winding road, as this student’s work illustrates, but, as John Dewey said, “We do not learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on experience.” The more practice our students have in reflection, the more they will learn.
Taking Advantage of Ritualistic Reflection – A Comment on Daily Writes (Amber Nichols-Buckley)
I am a Writing Project teacher. So beginning class with a writing prompt has always been a natural part of my pedagogy. Since most of my teaching experience has been at the high school level, I’ve always had ample time for daily writing. But shifting to a college composition course with three 50-minute classes per week made it more and more difficult to get that daily writing done. Enter the 2014-15 academic year and my work on the commonplace book pilot. When I started using the commonplace book last year, I wasn’t sure what the end result should really be. I knew I wanted to be a part of the pilot because it emphasized the importance of frequent reflection, and my hope was that students would reflect more authentically than I had seen them do previously. I also felt that the daily write portion of the commonplace book would force me to make time for reflection, which is essential to our students’ growth as writers, sure, but more importantly, as academics. I realized quickly, though, that reflection is a difficult concept for our novice writers. And I realized that I struggled to teach it. Many daily writes seemed shallow, and a part of this was that students were rushed to finish them. In a 50-minute course, expect that most daily writes will be 3-5 minutes max. And expect that some days, you just won’t fit it in at all. To help combat some of these issues, I brought it to the table at one of our pilot meetings. Karen Forgette shared some reflection terms from Kathy Yancey that truly resonated with me. Those are: Reflection in Action, Constructive Reflection, and Reflection for Presentation (you can read more about this in her e-book). I realized pretty quickly that daily writes are very much “Reflection in Action,” which is loosely defined as composition that is written as an explanation to others for the purpose of understanding an event better ourselves. Daily writes are, at their core, “summaries” of the day. Often, I would prompt students to write about where they were in their process. Here is an example student response:
“I have no process at the moment. Right now I am just trying to get my life together. Something that I have been working on is preparing my mind mentally for this research paper. I am completely not even here today which is really unfortunate. But I think that I am going to do my paper on family dynamics. I was really into the essay about technology helping family relationships and not necessarily hurting them. I want to go somewhere in that direction.”
Sometimes, I would allow the daily write to be a venting sesh on what was going on in their worlds. We played with other prompts as well, such as “#hashtagtheclass” or “Today’s class got me like…” I would try to bring in common phrasing from social media because this helped students understand their audience for daily writes, which is ultimately themselves. Here are some favorite hashtags:
#todaywasreallyHELPFUL!
#thestruggleisreal
#needmorerhetoricalstrategies
#ethosgameonehunna
#shouldawrittenthat
#OhThatsDueToday?!?!
#PrayForAnA
#gottagetmyshitstraight
#workthatprocess
In fact, #workthatprocess became like a class motto for students last year, and “#hashtag the class” really became one of our favorite go-to prompts, especially when we were pressed for time. Not only do daily writes help students reflect as ritual, but they are so helpful for the teacher. I never realized how much I would come to depend on daily writes for my own formative assessment. I could tell when students “got it” or when they were utterly confused. I could tell when they felt overwhelmed. I understood when remediation was needed. In fact, on those days when I just couldn’t fit a daily write into the day, I missed them. I almost felt like, “How do I plan for the next class without a daily write?” Ultimately, the daily writes served as good mini-reflections that would end up feeding into stronger, more authentic reflections (weekly writes, sometimes…unit reflections…often, end of semester final reflections, definitely). And to be honest, students’ later daily writes were places where I feel like I saw the truest glimpses into their writing voices. I’m not sure if it was because the daily writes were so low-stakes (ungraded) or because they were so short. Whatever the reason, the daily writes proved integral to helping students enter a deeper layer of reflection, what Yancey calls “Constructive Reflection” (which is essentially reflecting on prior reflections…reflections that are cumulative in nature). Expect that, at first, students will be writing their daily writes for you more than anything. With time, as you get to know them better, and as they get to know each other better (and, God-willing, get to know themselves better), you will notice their daily writes becoming more personal and authentic. And you’ll see this feed into their larger reflections as well.
Commonplace Book: Expectations vs. Reality (Colleen Thorndike)
Daily Writes:
Be flexible with when you give the daily write prompt: you could start class with it by having them reflect on the previous class or on their homework; you could toss out the daily write prompt in the middle of class as they’re transitioning from one activity to another; and, of course, you can have them write it at the end. Changing up when they do the daily write keeps them on their toes and they are more likely to have quality posts. Don’t be afraid to get creative and have fun with the daily prompts. Some of my favorites have been silly ones. Here are three daily write prompts and examples from student blogs: PROMPT: What hashtag(s) would you use to describe today’s class and why?
#whenInDoubtWriteItOut I only had fragments of a working thesis and some scatterbrained paragraphs walking into today’s class and I decided to just “brain dump” my topic and it turned into a darn good working thesis. The power point helped a lot too, I will definitely be pulling up those slides when I’m working later.
PROMPT: 5 words to describe today’s class
Tiring
Helpful
Slightly irritating
Interesting
Insightful
PROMPT: Use pics/gifs to complete: This weather and the end of the semester got me like… |1| |2| |3| Each of these examples from different students’ blogs show different levels of reflection, but highlight student engagement with the Commonplace book space. The last example is not reflective of the class itself, but of the student’s mindset at the time (this was during a week of almost nonstop rain towards the end of the semester). This was a daily write I did because so many students were just tired and stressed and burnt out, so they needed a jolt of fun to snap out of the rain and end of the semester induced funk.
Overall blog
One Woman’s Perspective on the CPB (Jenny Jackson)
I adore the Commonplace Book, and if you were to mention the CPB to me in passing, you would be stuck listening to me sing its praises (seriously, feel free to ask me about it). The Wordpress platform is easy to navigate and use and the possibility for students to make their CPBs their own (through theme and design) within Wordpress is more than there. While there is so much to say about how useful and effective the Commonplace book has been for my classes the past two semesters as a space for collecting writing and reflecting upon their work and experiences both inside and outside of the writing classroom (and how useful I believe it will continue to be), what I want to emphasize here to instructors who are about to complete the CPB for the first time is that it can also be fun. Yes, actual fun in the writing classroom. Teacher fun and student fun! One of the best memories I have from class last semester was brought on by a CPB activity thought up collaboratively with my lovely teaching circle. The activity prompted students to make a list of “the top five ways to survive the end of the semester” using only GIFs and to post these lists to the class blog instead of their personal blogs. My students and I were cracking up at GIFs of dogs running in circles or babies making faces at their parents, whatever they found to represent their stress and stress-relief tactics. It was the perfect activity to break up the tension of the end of the semester and to remind students to breathe, laugh, and relate to each other. Yes, the CPB has proven to be to be a great space for students and classes to collect writing and reflection in an organized and manageable way. However, the CPB is also just fun to use and offers opportunities to shake the typical classroom goings-on up a little. That’s what I really love.
Resources
Readings on Reflection for Instructors: Start Here!
Yancey, Kathy. Reflection in the Writing Classroom. Utah: Utah State University Press, 1998
In this concise, readable book, Yancey explores the role of reflection in enhancing student learning in the writing classroom. Chapters on reflection-in-action, constructive reflection, and reflection-in-presentation detail the many ways reflection can be woven into writing courses and enhance student learning.
Full-text available at J.D. Williams and online through Utah State University Digital Commons.
Available in J.D WIlliams
Brockbank, Anne ,and Ian McGill. Facilitating Reflective Learning in Higher Education. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1998.
Brockbank and McGill provide an overview of the theory and practice of reflection in higher education. Chapters 5, 7, and 8 detail reflection and developing reflective practices.
Brookfield, Stephen. Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995.
Brookfield guides teachers through the process of reflecting on their own classroom practices and includes several useful instruments to facilitate student reflection.
King, Patricia M., and Karen Strohm Kitchener. Developing Reflective Judgment. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1994.
King and Kitchener explain the intellectual stages of developing reflective judgment. The book details their own longitudinal study as well as other research and offers ideas for encouraging reflective judgment in the classroom.
Schon, Donald. Educating the Reflective Practioner. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1986.
This classic work, one of the inspirations for Yancey’s Reflection in the Writing Classroom, argues for the redesign of professional education as a combination of applied science and coaching in the process of reflection-in-action.
Available online
Lang, James M. “Small Changes in Teaching: Making Connections.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. 8 February 2016. http://chronicle.com/article/Small-Changes-in-Teaching-/235230
Lang explains how a commonplace book can help students make connections between what they are learning in the classroom and the outside world.
O’Neill, Peggy. “Reflection and Self-Assessment: Resisting Ritualistic Discourse.” The Writing Instructor. 2002:04. http://www.writinginstructor.org/oneill-2002-04
O’Neill offers cautionary advice about the potential pitfalls and difficulties of assigning and assessing reflective writing.
Student Samples
We have curated several example commonplace books from students who participated in the 2015-2016 pilot courses. These exemplars were chosen by pilot instructors because they model best practices for commonplace book, and demonstrate authentic reflection. Students consented to the release of their work to be shared with faculty and other students.
Spring WRIT 100 (single semester) Examples
FASTrack WRIT 101 and 102 (full year) Examples
Be sure to ask your students if they would like to share their commonplace books as exemplars, or if they would like to submit them to be Featured Edblogs on the sign-in page.
Teachers have used class blogs in various ways. Learn more about how class blogs work on the Technical Support page. Below are some class blogs from pilot year 2015-2016 teachers.
If you would like to feature your class blog here, please contact Andrew Davis.
Teaching Speech & Writing Online
Teaching Civil Discourse
See Also
Developed in Fall 2018 by: Karen Forgette, Kate Hooper, Rachel Johnson, and Don Unger
On March 21, 2019, at 6pm in Fulton Chapel, Alexander Heffner, host of PBS’ The Open Mind, will give a lecture titled “Politics, Media, and the Future of Civil Discourse.” (For more information about Heffner, check out The Open Mind website. We hope to use this lecture to initiate a wider discussion at the University of Mississippi on the nature of civil discourse and the roles that reading, writing, speaking and listening play in shaping it. To that end, a group of writing and speech instructors, led by Rachel Johnson, met over fall 2018 to discuss how the topic enters into our curricula and to develop materials for our spring 2019 courses. This teaching guide resulted from those meetings. As you are contemplating your syllabi, assignments, readings, and activities for next spring, we encourage you to use these materials, or others, in order to engage students in conversations about civil discourse. This first section lists texts on civil discourse and related issues. The list items represent scholarly and popular press articles, as well as podcasts, websites, and other multimedia that may help shape your knowledge of civil discourse and/or serve as readings for your courses. We divided this list into categories that reflect some aspects of the national conversation on civil discourse. These categories include:
Defining Civil Discourse
Challenges of Civil Discourse
Argument and Civil Discourse
Academic Freedom and Civil Discourse
The second section describes classroom activities related to civil discourse. The third section provides a sample civil discourse mini-unit for first-year writing courses. Finally, the fourth section offers other instructor resources.
Reading Materials
Defining Civil Discourse
*On Being* Podcast Episodes Several of these podcasts model civil discourse between people from opposing views and/or interview people with specific ideas/methods about how to practice civil discourse. See also the Civil Conversations Project from On Being.
*Justice Talking* from NPR Features podcast episodes about controversial topics in which experts debate and discuss the issue (models civil, yet passionate discourse). Some of the links are older and may be broken, so anything assigned from this may need to be downloaded and hosted on a Blackboard page.
National Institute for Civil Discourse Podcast Series The University of Arizona’s National Institute for Civil Discourse hosts a series of podcasts devoted to civil discourse on a range of issues including fake news, global trade, and the role of satirical media in political debate. These podcasts run from 20 minutes to a bit more than an hour and could be used in class or as homework assignments.
Voters Not Politicians Voters Not Politicians is a nonpartisan coalition working to change redistricting laws in Michigan. Their movement and website are examples of “civil discourse in action.” Students could listen to the
1A episodedescribing the movement and then analyze the website’s rhetoric.
Janus Forum Lecture Series (Brown University) This YouTube channel features lectures organized by Brown University. The event usually features two prominent thinkers or researchers who present their opposing viewpoints on an issue of concern. The dialogue between the speakers following their short lectures models civil discourse and demonstrates how the speakers tend to agree about several aspects of a problem – perhaps more so than they disagree.
Civil Discourse 101, from the Civic Education Video Series produced by MetroEast A quick video tutorial for engaging in conversation. The video could be used as a pre-discussion or extended group work primer in any class.
Challenging Civil Discourse
“Dialogic Civility: A Narrative to Live By” by Shelley D. Lane This article provides a blueprint for engaging a public narrative of dialogic civility. Written for communication instructors, the article informs on dialogic civility and can spark ideas for incorporating the practice in a variety of communication courses, including online. Find more on this topic by Shelley D. Lane in the book Understanding Everyday Incivility: Why are They so Rude?
*The Open Mind* (PBS with Alexander Heffner) - Interview with Teresa Bejan This video clip features Teresa Bejan discussing portions of her book Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration. Offers a counterpoint to calls for politeness and civility and a lot of really interesting history.
“There’s Nothing Virtuous About Finding Common Ground” by Tayari Jones This op ed posits that arguments about moving to the middle or finding common ground aren’t inherently virtuous (e.g., where is the middle ground in arguments about slavery? Indentured servitude?). It gets at contemporary issues undergirding what civil discourse means and how part of this discussion means deciding who we want to be as individuals and as a nation.
“You don’t have to be nice to political opponents. But you do have to talk to them.” by Teresa Bejan Professor and political theorist, Teresa Bejan, discusses the limits of civility in public discourse and portions of her book Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration. She offers a lot historical examples of uncivil discourse from figures students might be surprised to learn were rather uncivil - like Martin Luther. Here is a link to ascholarly forum about Bejan’s book. Each response is concise and provides a specific perspective on her arguments.
The Real Roots of American Rage: The untold story of how anger became the dominant emotion in our politics and personal lives—and what we can do about it” by Charles Duhigg.
Article was published in January 2019 issue of The Atlantic. Based on a psychological study of a contented, suburban town, the article explains how anger is a useful communication tool, which can be used to create positive change and promote resolution in interpersonal relationships, as well as harnessed to facilitate social change. Though anger has an upside, history shows anger has also been manipulated for unethical reasons and that left unchecked, rage can create lasting, harmful effects on individuals and segments of society. Duhigg offers a way to recognize and understand anger and deescalate rage before it turns destructive.
A longer article, an intriguing discussion or project starter for any class looking at emotion in relation to civil discourse.
Argument as a Basis for Civil Discourse
“Sustaining Arguments” from *The Ethical Practice of Critical Thinking* by Fowler This short chapter introduces the idea of a “sustaining argument” as the ethical obligation of a critical thinker. Fowler defines these as “arguments which matter, about things which matter, to people who matter to each other” (5). He goes on to identify specific features of such arguments and explains that argumentation following this model is more likely to find an audience.
“Reasoning and Critical Thinking” and “Clarifying Meaning” by Hughes and Lavery in *Critical Thinking: An Introduction to the Basic Skills* (5th ed.) These two chapters are student-friendly in their length and tone. They approach critical thinking as a function of understanding argument. These chapters would be great for having students develop a vocabulary about how to evaluate and understand features of arguments and understand the principle of charity. They would pair nicely with activities related to argument dissection and reconstruction.
“Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love” by Jim Corder This article, published in Rhetoric Review, addresses how people develop as narratives, and even arguments, or put another way, how to approach these narratives and arguments as who someone is. While such a sensibility might seem a bit abstract and the article is a bit dense for first-year students, I think that they can understand how the arguments that we construct are part of what makes us who we are. Working from this standpoint, the article serves as a reminder for readers/listeners to consider how identity, narrative, and argumentation are deeply intertwined, and Corder encourages readers to show care for another by using rhetoric conscientiously. This article could be used in contrast to articles that emphasize the writer or speaker’s agency as Corder focuses on the listener/reader’s agency.
“Transformations in a civil discourse public speaking class: Speakers’ and listeners’ attitude change” by Barbara Mae Gayle Published in Communication Education, Gayle’s research suggests researching and presenting a speech or argument from one perspective may limit a students understanding. A method often used in debate classes, Gayle’s research suggests students are more likely to adjust their beliefs on an issue after crafting a speech or argument from opposing views.
Academic Freedom and Civil Discourse
“Academic Freedom: A Basic Guide” by James Liszka in *Start Talking: A Handbook for Engaging Difficult Dialogs in Higher Education* edited by Kay Landis This short essay offers a legal history on the concept of academic freedom. It also discusses when speech is covered or not covered by the principle of academic freedom. The concluding portion of the essay discusses several case studies where free speech became an issue in a classroom or higher education setting and discusses how such cases were decided or resolved.
Class Activities
Argument Dissection and Reconstruction The article linked above describes how to incorporate argument diagramming into a first year writing course to teach critical thinking skills. The activities/assignments described could work well as one day lessons or as an entire unit focused on developing or writing sound arguments.
Developing a Classroom Code of Civility Designed for presentation courses such as Public Speaking but may be adapted for any course in which civility may be promoted. At the end of this single-class activity, students will have an understanding of civility in order to: (1) identify civility and consequences of behaviors, (2) create their own communication civility code for classroom behaviors and presentations, and (3) practice civility throughout the semester.
Inquiry-based Civil Discourse This lesson from the journal Communication Teacher is appropriate for speech or writing classes focused on civil discourse, argumentation, debate, persuasion or political communication. The unit activity will help students build an understanding of civil discourse and its function in society. Students will: (1) increase their capacity to examine arguments critically, (2) enhance their own ability to self-reflect critically, and (3) improve their ability to engage in civil discourse. This activity will employ inquiry-based learning strategies to apply students’ understanding of civil discourse in a dialogue with the broader campus community by partnering with campus media to develop and publish original opinion-editorial pieces. Because the DM may not be able to accomodate, classes could partner with various papers around the state, DWR could potentially host a FB or other social media page for published works in relation to the Civil Discourse, or speech students could verbally present their ideas to partner classes or an invited public audience.
`Interactive, Immigration Timeline <http://www.choices.edu/teaching-news-lesson/immigration-timeline/>`__A one day lesson plan from the Choices: Teaching with the News curriculum by Brown University allows teachers to highlight civil discourse skills. Developed for K12, it is also appropriate for freshman-level speech or writing classes and might be an excellent choice for Power & Privilege sections.
“Circle of Viewpoints: A Routine for Exploring Diverse Perspectives” This activity from the University of Arizona’s Civil Discourse Institute employs a skeleton script to help students brainstorm new perspectives about a topic as well as related agents and questions. It can be used after an assigned reading, to introduce a topic, or to open discussions about controversial issues. Appropriate for speech or writing classes. (Requires part of or an entire class period)
“Text, Talk, Revive Civility & Respect” In this small group exercise, from the University of Arizona’s Civil Discourse Institute, groups receive text messages that guide them in participating in a civil discussion on two of the following issues: climate change, immigration, health care, same sex marriage, abortion, or campaign finance reform. Each group needs access to one cell phone. Appropriate for speech or writing classes. (Requires 1 -2 hours)
Train for Thanksgiving with our Angry Uncle Bot This quick and quirky New York Times article includes a simulation exercise developed by a psychiatrist through which students can navigate a conversation with a relative who holds opposing political views. It offers a five-step method for holding difficult conversations. Appropriate for speech or writing classes. (Requires 15-30 minutes including discussion)
“The Need to Revive Civility and Respect in our Communities” In this one-on-one activity, from the University of Arizona’s Civil Discourse Institute, students identify someone whom they perceive as being on the “other side of the political aisle” and use a scripted protocol to hold a conversation on civility. Appropriate for speech or writing classes. (Requires 30 minutes-1 hour)
“Here Now There Then” This whole class discussion exercise, from Visible Thinking at the Harvard School of Education’s Project Zero, uses a protocol to help students examine fairness issues and how thinking changes over time and place. Can be used with a variety of issues. Appropriate for speech or writing classes. (Requires part of or an entire class period)
“Making It Fair: Now, Then, Later” This whole class discussion exercise, from Visible Thinking at the Harvard School of Education’s Project Zero, helps students identify and evaluate actions that might make a situation more fair. Can be used with a variety of issues. Appropriate for speech or writing classes. (Requires part of or an entire class period)
“Reporter’s Notebook: A Routine for Separating Fact from Feeling” This small group activity, from Visible Thinking at the Harvard School of Education’s Project Zero, is designed for students who are midway into an investigation of a controversial issue. Small groups use a recording sheet to distinguish facts from feelings regarding the issue in order to provide clarity and make informed decisions. Appropriate for speech or writing classes. (Requires one class period)
“Tug of War: A Routine for Exploring the Complexities of Fairness Dilemmas” This whole class activity from, Visible Thinking at the Harvard School of Education’s Project Zero, helps students examine the forces that tug at both sides of a fairness or equity issue. Appropriate for speech or writing classes. (Requires part of or an entire class period)
Civil Discourse Mini-Unit for First-Year Writing
See Also
Other Resources
“Revive Civility from the National Institute for Civil Discourse” The resource page has a “civility toolbox”with activities that would work as in-class exercises across several classes as well as infographics on related topics such as managing stress during difficult conversations, how to set up an environment for civil discourse, and fostering civil discourse on social media platforms.
Civil Discourse: Addressing Differences in the Classroom This podcast, from Emory University’s Center for Faculty Development and Excellence, features professors discussing civil discourse in the classroom.
Civil Discourse in the Health Sciences This podcast from, Emory University’s Center for Faculty Development and Excellence, features a discussion of the challenges of hot button issues in classes in the health sciences.
Civil Discourse in the Humanities This podcast, from Emory University’s Center for Faculty Development and Excellence, features a discussion of the challenges of hot button issues in classes in the humanities.
A Crucible Moment: College Learning and Democracy’s Future Commissioned in 2012 and sponsored in part by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, this report calls on institutions of higher education to reclaim a mission of civic learning and democratic engagement.
Teaching Critical Thinking - Some Lessons from Cognitive Science Discusses a 6 part approach to promoting critical thinking in undergraduate classroom
Argumentation Step by Step Describes an approach to teaching argumentation that could be adapted to a first unit a writing or speech course.Focuses on achieving a milestone or competency before being able to advance –almost gamified as it is based on martial arts pedagogy.
Center for Teaching: Difficult Dialogs A step-by-step guide for teachers who may be wary of difficult dialogs. The guide will help you consider when and how to address difficult dialogs.
Teaching with UM RhetLab
UM students enter Writing 100/101 classes with wide-ranging levels of exposure to rhetorical terms and strategies. UM RhetLab is designed to level the playing field for students by addressing the rhetorical content knowledge that DWR teachers emphasize. RhetLab modules consist of pre-tests, short readings with embedded activities, and end-of-module quizzes. Students work on these modules mostly outside of class, using the personalized learning features of the courseware to address their own needs and to take ownership of their learning. In annual surveys, two-thirds of 100/101 students have reported that the modules have helped them with their larger papers and projects. In this guide you will find best practices for teaching and learning with the Lumen modules.
Why are we using UM RhetLab?
The Lumen modules address three issues in our Writing 100/101 classes: students’ varied levels of preparation for college writing; the limited means of assessment in composition courses; and the expense and generalized nature of copyrighted textbooks and courseware.
We know from the annual Condition of College and Career Readiness Report (2016, 2017, 2018) that less than ⅔ of ACT-tested high school graduates meet ACT college readiness English benchmarks and less than ½ meet reading benchmarks. Percentages are even lower for African-American and Hispanic students. Several studies (Pane et. a.l, 2015; Kiang et. al., 2016) have suggested that personalized learning tools can improve college readiness. The Lumen modules focus on the foundational rhetorical strategies and concepts first-year students need to meet the demands of college writing. Students use the modules in ways that suit their level of preparation. Some modules may serve as review of foundational knowledge while others introduce learners to new material and provide opportunities for practice.
The essay is the standard means of assessment in composition courses, which is appropriate. But the composition of an essay demands a solid grasp of foundational rhetorical concepts and facility with varied rhetorical strategies. Drilling down into an essay to pinpoint the concepts and skills students are struggling with is difficult, both for students and instructors. In How Learning Works (2010), Ambrose et. al. note that “adding structure and support — also called instructional scaffolding — to a practice activity in or out of class promotes learning when it helps students practice the target skills at an appropriate level of challenge” (132). The activities and quizzes in the Lumen modules operate as part of the instructional scaffolding students need to meet the challenges presented in a full-length essay or multimodal project. Because work in the modules is self-paced and quizzes can be taken more than once, students can work with a concept until they understand it, demonstrate their learning, and be affirmed for their knowledge, even if they cannot yet apply that concept in an essay.
While many textbook companies offer personalized learning courseware, those products are designed for mass audiences, protected by copyright, and come with a high price tag. Because the content of the Lumen modules was suggested and composed by DWR teaching faculty, it aligns closely with UM’s first-year writing curriculum. As each module is an independent entity, faculty can easily order and implement modules to fit their individual course calendars. That close alignment and flexibility frees instructors from having to mine generalized, pre-packaged content for material relevant to their courses, and because the content of the modules is OER, their cost is low.
Integrating RhetLab with Blackboard
The Lumen Waymaker courseware integrates seamlessly with your Blackboard course.
Installation Instructions
Find the RhetLab Blackboard package and Installation instructions on myDWR
Best Practices
If you use course copy to quickly generate your Blackboard environment from a previous semester’s course, do not copy the Lumen Package from the previous semester. Make sure it is unchecked when you select the content to copy. Copying the package from one course to another breaks the LTI links between Waymaker and Blackboard.
Once the package has been imported, you can move and rename any of the Waymaker folders and links as if they were any other Blackboard content item (though if you use course copy, you’ll have to remember where you put everything so you can remove it before copying).
Waymaker automatically creates Grade Center columns for each module quiz. By default, these columns are worth 20 points and are not assigned a category. We recommend you adjust the grade center columns as follows:
Hide the Waymaker columns from student view. They see their scores when they complete each quiz; generating a Blackboard notification each time they take a quiz tends to make them more concerned about grades than they should be.
Assign the columns to a category that corresponds to how they are weighted in your syllabus. If you combine the quizzes with other homework, just make sure your homework columns are in the same category as the quizzes.
Consider keeping the category with the Waymaker quizzes out of the course grade calculation until the end of the semester. This can help with grade anxiety.
Student Payment Options
There are two ways that students can pay for the Lumen Waymaker modules. The first is to purchase an access code at the campus Barnes & Noble bookstore. The second is a direct pay option using either a debit or credit card. For either payment method, students will need to access the Lumen Waymaker modules through the tab on your course Blackboard page. From there, students will see two folders for each module: one a “Study Plan” and the other a “Quiz.” The content, or “Study Plan,” is made up of open educational resources (OER), so there is no payment option when accessing this material.
The quiz assessments are where students will be asked to enter payment. When students attempt to access any of the Lumen module quizzes, they will see a “Course Assessment Activation” screen where they will have three options: enter an access code purchased from the bookstore, pay directly using a debit or credit card, or use one of two free passes to take a quiz at the present time and pay later. (Note: the direct pay option using a debit or credit card is the cheaper option as there is no bookstore markup involved.) Finally, if a teacher feels like a student isn’t completing quizzes because of a problem affording the materials for the class, the instructor can contact the DWR’s Instructional Designer for assistance.
Payment Screen for Students
Making RhetLab Part of the Class
It is essential for students to see the Lumen Waymaker modules as valuable to their learning and as an integral part of the class. As such, the modules should be part of a homework score worth between 10%-15% of the final course grade. Teachers may count the modules as the sole component of the homework grade, or they may include other assignments and factor the work altogether. This range works best because it is substantive enough to demand students’ attention, but it leaves the vast majority of the final grade to be determined by papers, projects, and other writing.
Teachers should help students see the modules as an important part of the class. This can happen in several ways:
Teachers can talk about them in class:
For example, a teacher may briefly cover the highlights from a module after students have completed their work on it. Ideally, this would involve explaining connections to the major paper or project that the class is working on at the time.
Teachers can refer to them in feedback:
For example, a teacher may make a comment on an analysis draft for the student to refer back to the “Rhetorical Appeals” module to bolster an idea involving ethos, logos, pathos, and/or kairos.
Teachers can mention them in student conferences:
For example, a teacher can talk to a student in a meeting about the argument paper on how to strengthen her thesis statement and avoid logical fallacies using the advice from the “Argument” module.
And teachers can ask students to reflect on them both during and after major papers or projects. See below for a couple of reflective ideas:
Daily Write example – “Reflect for about five minutes on how the ‘Evaluating keys to successful analysis’ module has impacted how you constructed your thesis on the analysis paper. How is this significant in your understanding of college-level analytical writing? Why does this matter in terms of your growth as a writer and learner?”*
Part of a Unit Reflection example – “How did the Lumen Waymaker modules that you completed during this unit impact your work and/or your approach to the assignment? Why does this matter?”
Assigning UM RhetLab
It is advisable to give students specific instructions and deadlines for their work on the modules. Like some students do with reading and other homework, they might be tempted to not take the modules as seriously as they should unless teachers make it clear that the rhetorical content knowledge and other material contained in the modules is important to their learning and to their class success. Teachers should inform and remind students that the modules can take on average about an hour to complete so they should budget their time appropriately (though many students do complete the work in a shorter time). Additionally, instructors should reinforce the fact that students can attempt the quizzes more than once to help improve their scores. This may mean students need to spend some additional time working.
Below are a few ideas for assigning the modules:
For a M/W/F class, assign one or two modules on Monday or Tuesday of a week, and require the work to be completed within seven days. For example, assign the first two modules on Monday, the first day of class. Make the due date the following Monday by class time. (Note: Some teachers might want to list a due date/time that is earlier than class time in case they want to look at the results in advance of the meeting.)
For a T/TH class, assign two modules on Tuesday of a week and require that one is completed by Friday and the other by the following Tuesday before class time.
For any course, assign one module as the only homework and require it be completed by the next class meeting.
As noted previously, teachers may want to plan on using a few moments of class time to discuss the modules after they are due in order to emphasize their value in the course and make connections to the larger assignments.
Dealing with Problems
Some teachers may experience low completion rates or poor work. In these cases, it is important to communicate with your students before a pattern is established. If a teacher assigns the first module or two and many students don’t complete the work, make an announcement in class reminding students that the modules are designed to help them build up their knowledge and that they count for a significant portion of the final grade. Or, talk to students individually and let them know you are reviewing all the work in the class. Whatever the case, do not ignore the problem. All students – but especially first-year students – can benefit from a reminder that someone is accounting for their work.
If a teacher feels like the work on the modules is poor or substandard on a class level, emphasize again that students can take quizzes two times. And remember that teachers have the ability to grant extra attempts at quizzes for any student by going into the given quiz on Blackboard, then clicking “Manage Quiz Attempts,” finding the particular student or students, and choosing the number of extra attempts.
Why Quizzes?
All of the individual quiz questions in the Waymaker courseware are tied to an identified skill, which in turn is linked to a learning objective. Learning objectives are linked to module outcomes, which are themselves linked to course outcomes. Thus, each individual quiz question is connected in some way to a production-based learning outcome in WRIT 100/101. One concern faculty may have about the courseware is that the quizzes are only valid assessments of module content knowledge and that there is no substantive relationship between module content knowledge and writing skill. However, if we accept the validity of our course outcomes, as measured with rubric-based assessment of student writing, we must also accept the validity of these quiz questions as a measure of essential rhetorical skills.
This question appears in the analysis module quiz:
Which of the following best describes how evidence should function in an analytic writing?
Here is the full skill map for this question:
Level |
Outcome |
|---|---|
Skill |
Recognize keys to successful analysis writing, Recognize and evaluate keys to successful, analysis writing. |
Module |
Evaluate keys to successful analysis |
Course |
Exploration and Argumentation: Students will use writing and other modes to analyze texts, explore unfamiliar ideas, engage with thinking different from their own, develop sound arguments, and reflect. |
All of the skills and objectives in the courseware target the first two levels of Bloom’s taxonomy. If we accept the validity of Bloom’s taxonomy, foundational knowledge and comprehension are prerequisite for application, which is in turn prerequisite for analysis, evaluation, and other higher-order knowledge work. Students cannot analyze texts in their own writing until they can evaluate keys to successful analysis. In order to evaluate, they must first recognize those keys.
Bloom’s Taxonomy of Verbs
When we evaluate student writing, we base our assessment on an application of learning objectives from the top three tiers of Bloom’s Taxonomy: Evaluation, Synthesis, and Analysis. For example, when we decide if a student’s thesis statement is “supported by sound reasons” or if it “demonstrates awareness of the depth of the issue,” we’re looking at the student’s application of higher-order critical thinking skills. Are they able to construct a logical thesis that is supported by the right mix of evidence which targets a specific time and an identified audience?
Does assessing higher-order skills necessarily tell us about a student’s lower-order skills? If a student cannot construct a thesis statement with sound reasons, can we know conclusively that it’s because he or she doesn’t understand logical fallacies? In the strictest sense, we cannot know. The instrument of assessment– our rubric– is not a valid measure of the lower-order skills. It’s only a valid assessment of the criteria it explicitly measures.
Since students have gaps in knowledge or other significant preparation barriers coming in to college writing, it is important that we know where those gaps are. Assessing lower-order skills does not detract from our ability to teach and evaluate higher-order skills. A concern we hear about the courseware is that the quizzes just do not relate to the work the students are actually doing in class. This perception is not accurate: every quiz question in the modules aligns to specific skills, objectives, and learning outcomes. They target the three lower tiers of Bloom’s taxonomy. This is by design: when we designed the courseware, we wanted to focus on lower-order skills. We already know that student writing itself is the best way to measure high-order skills. Nobody would try to replace reading and responding to student writing with multiple choice quizzes. Rather, these modules serve to measure skills that we were not otherwise looking at explicitly. Previously, we assessed this foundational rhetorical knowledge through assumption and guesswork. All the quizzes do is provide actual data about how students understand basic rhetorical skills.
Take a look at the chart below. It breaks down one of the WRIT 100/101 rubric categories into specific outcomes and traces how the courseware skills align to those outcomes. Notice how the rubric targets the top of Bloom’s taxonomy while the courseware skills target the bottom.
Oxford to the Ballot Box
This guide provides Department of Writing & Rhetoric (DWR) faculty members with information about the Oxford to the Ballot Box project. This guide provides:
An overview that details the project’s rationale and partners
General assignment ideas provided by the project advisory board
Topics for common assignments in DWR courses
Sample prompts and assignment sheets for various DWR courses
Incorporating tutorials from the project coordinators
Resources (e.g., readings, videos, films, websites, etc.)
As you design your curricula and materials for fall 2020, we hope that you consider participating in the Oxford to the Ballot Box Project by adapting an assignment or incorporating a new one that helps students address the importance of and challenges related to voting. Some of your students’ work from these assignments could be featured in online venues and events that the project advisory board is developing.
If you decide to include an assignment related to the project in your fall 2020 course(s), if you have any questions about incorporating assignments into your class, please contact Don Unger. If you have questions about the overall project, please contact Jon Winet and Allen Spore.
See Also
Overview
This overview was developed by the project coordinators, Jon Winet and Allen Spore. It provides you with the project’s aims, some event examples, and a list of advisory board members. Every four years the U.S. Presidential elections, from the early primaries in Iowa to the Inauguration, offer an important opportunity for engagement in the country’s democratic process. It is our goal that the project will encourage thoughtful, civic discussion about the election and democracy, reflecting on the vital issues for our country and this election–from participation in voting by young people and women to the history of voter suppression, to race, health care and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic–while providing an opportunity for a broad and diverse range of people in the Oxford and University communities to voice their ideas and creative expression, capitalizing on the affordances of digital and online tools.
The project has been conceptualized over the past three years through meetings with a variety of Oxford participants. With the arrival of the pandemic we see our project making less of a pivot to digital, remote programs and more of a redistribution of efforts to already planned elements of our program. The content of the project remains substantially as initially conceptualized, with of course, a consideration of COVID-19 issues and the unknown social parameters of the “New Normal.” As the project is fundamentally based in public digital arts & humanities practices, we feel the project can still be realized with great impact and success. This may in fact be one of those “now more than ever moments.” We see the current moment as an opportunity for an even greater community focus and collaboration, as organizations pull together to get through this time.
The project will result in an archive of materials we believe will be of interest and of value to future historians. Anticipated program elements include:
Public programs (roundtables, talks and screenings) and satellite displays developed with our Advisory Board of humanities scholars, and in consultation and collaboration with community and University of Mississippi (UM) partners. With the uncertainty of the future, we plan to make our public programs flexible with the possibility of having them both online and live, the latter dependent on public health directives. We will conduct ongoing planning sessions to determine best practices in the “New Normal.”
Roundtables, lectures and panels at the Power House and on the University of Mississippi and/or on line featuring civic leaders and election stakeholders, Confirmed programs for September include:
Secretary of State Michael Watson will visit campus to speak to one of Professor and Project Advisory Board member Sue Ann Skipworth’s classes at the University of Mississippi about election issues. The public is invited. [Tuesday, September 15]
A lecture and Q&A by Professor Marvin P. King, Jr. on the history of voting in Mississippi, and on voter suppression and the impact of race on the state’s politics and efforts to ensure widespread voter participation. [date TBA]
A panel composed of students to discuss voter participation, and/or the lack thereof, coordinated by Professor Sue Ann Skipworth. [date TBA]
Educational Programs We are currently working with University of Mississippi Writing & Rhetoric Department to design curriculum components that actively engage students in research and documentation of the election process, creating public multimedia, multimodal projects on campus, and in Oxford and northern Mississippi using text, photography, video and audio–focusing on the election and social issues as part of the fall 2020 curriculum of their classes. Concurrently we will design a community multimedia “how to” document for people wishing to contribute to the project. Professor and Advisory Board Member Don Unger is our lead coordinator on this.
Additionally, we hope to collaborate with the League of Women Voters Oxford/North Mississippi on the role of women in politics, past and present, marking the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage, the 19th amendment and the League. At the time of the submission of the application, the League’s Board is meeting to consider the collaboration.
We plan to work with the Overby Center for Southern Journalism and Politics, UM Student Union, and HottyToddy.com on presenting work from the project online, as well as using the numerous high definition electronic displays on campus and around Oxford. We have made initial contact with Charles Overby, and with HottyToddy.com News Editor Alyssa Schnugg (see October 2, 2020 news story by Julia Peoples, “Research Duo Announces Documentary Project In Oxford”).
A dynamic website and **social media**(e.g. Facebook Twitter, TikTok and Instagram) featuring original content–commentary, photography, and video and audio interviews from the project by community members, students as well as relevant material harvested from the Internet. The website will also serve as a permanent archive of the project. Community participation is key to the success of these and all elements of the project. Working with our partners at the Arts Council and University, we will actively reach out to Oxford’s diverse communities to invite their input and engagement. In the Time of Covid-19 we anticipate this to be a combination of electronic and in-person conversations.
An exhibit at the Power House, centrally located in Oxford, featuring photography, video and electronic displays. The project leads, Jon Winet and Allen Spore, and local Advisory Board members will coordinate with community residents and UM students and faculty to invite the contribution of texts, photography, and video to be displayed on large high definition displays. We plan to encourage contributors to create an image of Oxford, their families and neighbors, neighborhoods and civic spaces, campaign and issue-driven events and headquarters, all against the backdrop of the national election.
The Power House is an extraordinary and extraordinarily inspiring space, and consistent with YAC’s ethos and commitment to community-based practice to provide a space for informal dialog. Throughout the month of September, we will invite community members, political activists, Republican and Democratic Party volunteers and operatives to community forums and discussions of the issues. When unobtrusive and appropriate we will conduct interviews as well.
Working with YAC and UM, we will continue to design initiatives to engage and involve participants over the spring and summer of 2020. Anticipated audience and participants include YAC attendees and supporters; UM students, faculty; the Republican and Democratic political parties; local political activists; library patrons and civic organizations.
Project Advisory Board Members
Jon Winet: Professor Emeritus and Public Policy Center Fellow, University of Iowa
Allen Spore: Photographer, Former Americorps Vista for the North Panola School District
Eric Crystal, PhD: Anthropologist, University of California, Berkeley
Chris Rossi, PhD: Executive Director Humanities Iowa, University of Iowa
Sue Ann Skipworth, PhD: Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Mississippi
Don Unger, PhD: Assistant Professor of Writing and Rhetoric, University of Mississippi
Assignment Ideas
These assignment ideas were provided by the project advisory board in February 2020. They provide broad suggestions for assignments and topics that could be included in many different courses. Following this list, we provide specific assignment examples and resources for popular DWR courses.
Interview a Republican/Democratic party leader or local candidate about a specific issue (student loans, inequality of income distribution, access to healthcare, Mississippi flag, impact of COVID-19, civil rights, etc.) Ask specific questions about their position and the rationale behind the position. Analyze their response in terms of logic, factual support and conclusion. State your own position on the issue with supporting logic and facts. Note that this could include photography, a short video clip and audio.
Participant-observations: Attend a political lecture or event (Overby Center, League of Women Voters-sponsored event, Political Science event, ). Summarize the main points of the presentation. Discuss points that you agree or disagree with and why. Note that this could also include video clips and photography and spot interviews with participants.
Conduct historical research on a specific issue (voter suppression, women’s suffrage and/or candidates, healthcare, role of social media in elections, etc.). Summarize and analyze historical and contemporary positions on the issue.
Interview students/Oxford residents. Ask them what for them is the most important issue in this campaign–and why. Provide some reflection and analysis of the logic and facts behind their positions.
Interview and record (via Zoom or another video or audio application) a family member (grandparent, parent, aunt, etc.) on their earliest experience of voting. Photographs can be included, contemporary or from the time of their experience.
Explore the role of social media and other news sources, asking people about their preferences and how they feel it helps form their opinions.
Read *Why Facts Won’t Change Our Minds*by James Clear. Summarize and analyze the key points and discuss how these issues affect our elections.
DWR Topics
WRIT 100, WRIT 101, WRIT 102, and SPCH 102
Each of the topics listed below could be included in assignments aimed at informative, argumentative, and scholarly research essays or speeches and approached from multiple perspectives. They could also inform daily writing prompts. In terms of WRIT 102 specifically, these topics might also work for the synthesis assignment.
How and when one is eligible to vote (various protections and restrictions)
How one registers to vote (and if this differs by place)
College students and voting
Registration issues
Polling locations
Costs of absentee voting
Pandemic voting
Safety of poll workers and voters
Naturalization on hold–how will affect first-time voting for some citizens?
Social media use and its impacts on voting decisions
How the election and voting processes work
Campaigning and campaign funding
Mail-In voting
Early voting
Absentee ballots
How parties and primaries work
Women’s suffrage (2020 is the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment, guaranteeing and protecting women’s constitutional right to vote).
Civil Rights Movement & voting (2020 is the 55th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965)
National legislation aimed at ensuring enfranchisement
19th Amendment
Civil Rights Act of 1957
Voting Rights Act of 1965
Political machines (e.g., Tammany Hall, etc.)
Methods of disenfranchisement/historical issues
3/5th compromise
Radical reconstruction
Jim Crow laws
Poll taxes
Grandfather clauses
Literacy tests
Political machines (e.g., Tammany Hall, etc.)
Violence and fear of violence
Shelby County, AL v Holder Supreme Court Case of 2013
Security issues and voting
WRIT 250
Faculty members can bring voting into class discussion by assigning an election-themed research journal post, e.g., Identify a local or regional election issue that directly relates to your major or discipline. Find a scholarly source that deals specifically with the issue in question. Practice summarizing the source, and then list questions that apply to practices or perspectives from your discipline. Note that this activity may work well in many DWR courses.
Sample Prompts
This section is broken into two parts: a. prompts and assignment sheets. For each sample assignment prompt, we provide an overview and directions. Following these prompts, we provide a sample assignment sheet for a researched argument.
SPCH 102 Fundamentals of Public Speaking
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a theory by Abraham Maslow, which puts forward that people are motivated by five basic categories of needs: physiological, safety, love, esteem, and self-actualization. Political campaign advertisements use these exact motivations to persuade voters. For this assignment, you will make the connection between these five basic categories and political advertisements. Directions Present to class one political advertisement example per category. Describe the use of the category in the political advertisement. Class members should understand why the political ad is a good example of the category and how it persuades voters. Maslow’s Five Basic Categories of Needs:
Physiological needs (to have access to basic sustenance, including food, water, and air)
Safety needs (to feel protected and secure)
Social needs (to find acceptance; to have lasting, meaningful relationships)
Self-esteem needs (to feel good about ourselves; self-worth)
Self-actualization needs (to achieve goals; to reach our highest potential)
WRIT 300 Foundations of Technical & Professional Writing
Develop documentation and training materials for poll workers.
WRIT 350 Writing for Digital Media
Conduct a usability study of Mississippi’s electronic voting system interface and physical apparatus.
WRIT 410 Grant Writing
Locate and analyze a voting/elections-themed RFP, develop a preliminary proposal. Partner with an election-oriented nonprofit to develop a preliminary grant proposal. Some suggested organizations that focus on fair elections include:
See Also
Tutorials
If you are interested in including an assignment related to the project in your course and would like support from the project coordinators, Jon and/or Allen can lead the following activities and tutorials for you:
Presentations on “Oxford to the Ballot Box” and previous election year projects
Recording Interviews with Zoom: A nuts and bolts tutorials for recording interviews on Zoom and best practices for interviewing, drawing out the differences between an interview and a conversation.
Photography - Environmental Portraiture | techniques and best practices - engaging the subject, collaboration, telling a story
Zoom to iMovie to YouTube: A post-production tutorial to help students turn Zoom videos into edit videos and publish them online
Zoom to Audacity to SoundCloud: A post-production tutorial to help students turn Zoom recordings into audio files and to publish those files online
Zero to WIX in an Hour: An hour-long tutorial on using Wix to build websites
Resources
While the resources listed below do not cover all the topics listed previously, they might help get you started in considering supplementary resources that you can use in your class.
Readings
*Drawing the Vote: An Illustrated Guide to Voting in America* by Tommy Jenkins & Katie Lacker A well-documented 208-page graphic novel that details the history of voting rights in the US. This may serve as a supplemental source, or faculty might use portions of it that we can make available.
*This Is What Democracy Looks Like, A Graphic Guide To Governance*by the Center for Cartoon Studies A 32-page comic book that defines democracy (or traces lines of thought), describes how the US government is structured into branches; levels of government–from federal to local; the Constitution; voting; and protest in America. It’s a somewhat basic overview, but it’s free or cheap (donation based), available online, reads quickly, and can get students on the same page in contextualizing voting as part of a larger civic arena.
Videos
“50 Years and Forward: The Voting Rights Act in Mississippi” by the Mississippi Department of Archives & History and Southdocs.org A 13-minute documentary addressing the impact of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 on Mississippi
“A History of Voting Rights” from the NY Times A 3-minute video focused on the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Shelby County, AL v Holder case of 2013.
“The March@50 Episode 2 Voting Rights” from PBS A 9-minute video that describes the Shelby County, AL v Holder case of 2013.
Podcasts
”Facts Aren’t Enough: The Psychology Of False Beliefs” from Hidden Brain A 51-minute podcast episode about misinformation online and why we often don’t challenge it.
Films
*1964: The Fight for a Right* by Mississippi Public Broadcasting As the synopsis states, this 57-minute documentary describes the Jim Crow discrimination that Black people have faced in Mississippi, and the 10-week voter registration campaign in 1964.
*American Experience*: “The Vote, Part 1” from PBS One hundred years after the passage of the 19th Amendment, “The Vote” tells the dramatic culmination story of the hard-fought campaign waged by American women for the right to vote. (1 hour and 52 minutes)
*American Experience*: “The Vote, Part 2” from PBS Part Two examines the mounting dispute over strategy and tactics, and reveals how the pervasive racism of the time, particularly in the South, impacted women’s fight for the vote. (1 hour and 52 minutes)
*Eyes On The Prize*: “Part 5, Mississippi Is This America 1962–1964” from PBS This 56-minute documentary focuses on Freedom Summer in Mississippi in 1964.
*Iron Jawed Angels* Two-hour movie about the women’s suffrage movement in the 1910s, focusing on Alice Paul and Lucy Burns in particular. The film is posted to YouTube.
*Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America’s Elections* from HBO Documentary A 90-minute documentary that focuses on the technological vulnerability of the U.S. election process.
Websites
2020 Election: Secure Your Vote by NPR This page on NPR’s site collects all their articles pertaining to voting in upcoming US elections. You can find articles/raido snippets about virtually every current issue on our topics list here.
Campus Vote Project The website for a voting advocacy group for college students.
Election Central: An Educational Guide to the US Elections from PBS This website offers a ton of short video grouped into various topics, from campaigning and campaign finance, to voting rights and how voting works, to media literacy, and finally, resources on current political issues.
The Long 19th Amendment from Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library This resource includes a #SuffrageSyllabus and a “Suffrage School” with lessons aimed at folks of all ages. The materials teach users about the struggle for the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees women the right to vote. The 19th amendment was ratified on August 18, 1920, so 2020 marks the 100th anniversary.
Mississippi Secretary of State: Elections & Voting Procedures This page provides links to all the state regulations on voting and election procedures in Mississippi.
Voters Toolbox from the League of Women Voters This website includes a list of FAQs about voting for various stakeholders, including students.
Academic Continuity Planning Guide
Introduction
If you’ve never taught online before, moving your face-to-face writing or public speaking class online without much notice may seem impossible. However, as most veteran online teachers know, online teaching really isn’t that different from face-to-face teaching. There are different tools, different affordances, and different workflows, but ultimately, your expertise and experience as a teacher is what matters.
This guide provides resources and practices that we thought might be useful. Don’t feel like you have to choose a digitally-sophisticated solution to a challenge if it makes you uncomfortable. There are multiple solutions to every problem that comes up when teaching online. Ultimately, your authenticity and transparency matters a lot: if you are discouraged or overwhelmed by a tool or approach, your students will feel the same way. We want teaching online in a pinch to be as painless as possible for you and as non-disruptive for students as possible.
We have included pedagogical best-practices, tools and resources, and subject-matter specific guidelines in this guide. We always welcome revision suggestions or new contributions from faculty.
Ethos
While email does allow for instant communication in an online course, the online environment can provide other means of being “there” for students, means that go beyond the email communication of traditional face-to-face classes. Here are some techniques that veteran online teachers have found useful for reaching students when they need more than a standard email:
Apps such as Google Hangouts and Skype tend to work fairly well for conferencing with students, but we’ve had the best experience with Zoom. Zoom allows instructors to start a meeting with a student by sending that student a link to the meeting via email. Students don’t need to set up Zoom accounts; as long as the instructor has the student’s email address and an account of her own, the meeting link will work. All faculty members in the DWR have UM Zoom accounts. Contact Andrew Davis if you can’t access your account.
During your office hours, log on to whichever conferencing app you’ve chosen. If you’ve chosen Skype or Google Hangouts, any students logged into these apps will see that you’re available. Even if they choose not to contact you during that time, your visibility sends an important message.
Offer multiple conferencing apps if you can. Both Skype and Zoom, for instance, or both Google Hangouts and Zoom–and remain logged into these apps during your office hours. Some students might already have accounts with one app or another, so offering a range of meeting platforms makes it easier for students to contact you. For some students, mobile apps, such as FaceTime and Duo, may be the only option. Try to be flexible and adjust your expectations for formality if face-to-face conversation is essential.
If your teaching style involves posting weekly announcements, don’t simply email these announcements as text. Instead, try making a YouTube video of just you narrating the announcements to your students. Often, these announcements merely reiterate what students can find on their weekly schedule or in the syllabus, but having this kind of weekly reminder can help students stay on task, and help keep your face and voice in a very text-heavy environment. You can post links to your YouTube video directly in the course and email it to students. Pair your link to the YouTube announcements with a bullet-point synopsis, and use YouTube’s closed captioning feature. Pairing text with video helps keep this content accessible.
If a student emails you with a persistent problem, question, or issue, invite them to set up a conference with you, and do so repeatedly. Even if students don’t take you up on this offer–and many tend not to–make it clear that they are welcome to do so. This is the equivalent of keeping your door open during office hours; it also sends the message that, within the time you’ve set aside to teach the class, students are welcome to come meet with you. Not extending this welcome repeatedly and actively can make an online instructor seem aloof and distant.
And, of course, make it clear when students can’t contact you. If you tell students from the first week that you won’t be able to respond quickly or at all on weekends, most students will be understanding and respectful of this boundary. However, you might want to consider setting aside some late afternoon or evening times during the weekdays, since these times tend to be the most available for online students. Students are often taking online courses because their schedules are otherwise full. While the boundaries on your time need to be clearly stated, a little flexibility can go a long way. While teaching online precludes the possibility of being physically present for most students, techniques such as those outlined above can help establish the ethos of a face-to-face instructor, while offering a scheduling flexibility that the traditional classroom might lack.
Office Hours
Holding office hours virtually can be tricky. How do you provide the accessibility your students’ need, especially if you live in a different town or city? What’s the best way to help your students with assignments from afar? What do students find most comfortable and convenient for them? There are several options to make your office hours convenient for both you and your students. Here is the Department of Writing & Rhetoric’s policy regarding office hours:
Teachers in the W&R are expected to hold regular office hours for the purpose of supporting the teaching mission through student conferencing. All teachers in the W&R are asked to hold a minimum of one weekly office hour per section taught, but no less than two hours per week. Please submit your office hours, posted on your syllabus, electronically to Glenn Schove no later than three working days prior to the first day of classes each semester.
In order to fulfill the Department’s policy, you will need to maintain between two to four office hours per week (depending on the number of sections you teach). These are times that your students should be able to contact you to discuss their writing. Here are several options that online students tend to favor:
Continually check email during your posted office hours (remain logged into email account). We have found that most students tend to prefer to communicate through email rather than video conferencing or by phone.
You can provide students with a phone number to call to discuss their writing during office hours.
You can leave a video conferencing meeting open in a specified platform, letting students know they can access it at any time during your office hours to conference.
You can also combine several of these, or offer all of them, depending on your and your students’ preferences. For example, you can leave your email running during your office hours, and let students know they can email to ask questions, or email to request a video conference. At which time, you can send them a link to meet. The most important thing is to let your students know that you are available to assist them with the various writing and multimodal assignments they will compose during the semester. It is also vital that you provide clear instruction as to how your office hours will work, and how students can take advantage of that time if they so choose. The best way to do this is to create an “Office Hours” tab in blackboard. When students click that tab, they should be able to read when you are available, and how they can access whatever platform you choose to use during office hours. We have also noticed that online students tend to have very demanding schedules, where they balance work, school, and families. For this reason, we highly recommend that you remain available to meet with students by appointment. That way, if your office hours are not convenient for some students, they will know they can still meet you with at a mutually convenient time.
Office Hour Scheduling Tools
Blackboard
Most DWR faculty use Blackboard to complement their face-to-face courses. However, moving a course fully online requires you to be familiar with Blackboard features you might not ordinarily touch. This section of the guide will walk you through some of the essential Blackboard content and assessment types.
Lectures
Narrate your PowerPoint slides or record a screencast as a way to deliver course content. You may use a computer with a microphone or a tablet to create this type of lecture. Your recording can then be uploaded to Blackboard for student viewing. External materials such as articles, blogs, videos, or websites may also be posted on Blackboard.
Assignments
Regular Assignments are the best assessment option for student writing. To create an Assignment, click Assessments > Assignment in any Blackboard content area. You can customize the assignment’s presentation from the setup options. Once the link is created, students will go to it to submit their work. You can then access their submitted work from the Grade Center. See below for more information about the in-line grading tool.
Journals
Blackboard Journals are appropriate for shorter writing activities and classwork. If you aren’t concerned with document format or in-line grading, journals can be much quicker to read and grade than traditional assignments. The Journal assessment type allows for multiple separate journal assignments. It’s often clearer for students if you create a separate journal assignment for each assigned activity. Journals can be created from any content area by click Assessments > Journals.
Class Discussions
For a discussion-based class, create an online discussion board on Blackboard. In any content area, click
Grading Blackboard Assignments
The in-line commenting and grading feature in the current version of Blackboard is an essential tool for online teachers. Instead of downloading student essays, marking them up in Word, and reuploading them to Blackboard, instructors can now leave comments directly on student papers inside of Blackboard, post comments, and enter grades, all from one screen. You can find Blackboard’s tutorial video for online grading below. Here are some things we have learned about the in-line grading feature and how well it works in writing courses:
Be conscious of the time-out feature. The inline editor times out after 60 minutes, so if you are in the middle of marking up a paper and you get up to do something else, make sure you click “Save Draft” and exit the in-line editor. You can come back to it later and pick up where you left off. If you leave the editor up and come back to it after an hour, any markup you attempt to add will not “stick.” This can also become and issue if you have a sketchy internet connection. Your best bet: Click “Save as draft” often just to be safe.
If you want to leave styled comments, or use video/audio comments, click the “A” underneath “Feedback to Learner.” You’ll have the full Blackboard content editor in a popup window.
Use “Grading Notes” to leave notes to yourself about the paper. These aren’t visible to the student, and can be really useful if you’re going to conference with a student later.
The grade center column for the assignment must be visible to students in order for them to see your feedback. If you want to release all your feedback at once, hide the column from student view, complete your feedback, then unhide the column.
Students can access your feedback from two places: 1. Go back to the original assignment link where the essay was submitted. Once the feedback is released, the comments and grade will show up. Until then, the paper the student actually submitted will show up (so they can always check to make sure that their submission “went through” correctly. 2. Go to My Grades and click on the actual graded item (the drawback to this method is that they can see the grade here without actually reading the comments.
You must leave some kind of grade in order for feedback to be visible to students. This can be tricky when you’re leaving feedback on drafts. The best rule of thumb here is to be consistent. If points for drafts aren’t a part of your grading scheme, make sure that students know that if they see “100/100” as the grade for their draft, it just means that they submitted it and you commented on it, not that they actually received an A+.
“Point Comments” work most consistently. Some of the other markup tools are more frustrating.
The in-line editor accepts most common file types (PDF, Doc, Docx, RTF), but not .pages files. See the section on file type naming for more tips about this.
Blackboard Tutorial: Using In-Line Grading
Google Classroom
Google Classroom provides an alternative to Blackboard that many teachers find preferable, especially for writing classes. You must have a go.olemiss.edu Google account to use Google Classroom (activate your account on MyOleMiss). Access Google Classroom at classroom.google.com. When you create a new class, you can email the access code it generates to your students so they can join the course. You can also manually add them by their go.olemiss.edu email addresses in the “People” tab.
GC is not a full LMS and should not be considered a 1-to-1 replacement for Blackboard. However, for courses that aren’t content heavy, like writing classes, its integration with Google Docs makes it more appealing.
Unlike most LMSs, Google Classroom is not hierarchical. Instead, the interface is designed around the feed/timeline metaphor. By default, all your activity shows up in the student’s “Stream.” You can also post announcements to the course stream that will be distributed to students as email.
You can organize your content in the “Classwork” tab. Instead of folders or learning modules, Google Classroom uses Topics to organize other content. Topics, like all other content on Classroom, are draggable. You can arrange them in whatever order you want. If you use Topics, make sure you select which topic you want something to go in when you create it. If you forget, you can always drag it to the correct position.
The four content types in GC are “Assignment,” “Quiz Assignment,” “Question,” and “Material.” Each one of these has its own use cases for your course.
Assignment
Anything you want students to turn in for a grade should be created as an Assignment. The Assignment popup screen allows you to give the assignment a title and add a description and attach any relevant documents or links. If you click “Add” and upload your assignment sheet as a Word document, it will automatically be imported into your courses Google Drive. You can add several other content types this way, or create new Google Docs content by clicking “Create.” Google Classroom does have rubric functionality now. Check out this help page if you want to know more. Otherwise, you can assign a point value and due-date for the assignment just like in Blackboard. Be sure to put the assignment in the correct Topic if you use them. Finally, If you don’t want students to see the assignment right away, clicking the arrow next to “Assign” will reveal options for “Schedule” and “Draft. Students submit assignments as Google Docs (or Word documents). You’ll then provide feedback and a grade in Google Docs as well and return their document to them when you’re done with summative comments.
Quiz Assignment
GC quizzes are delivered through Google Forms. The process is pretty straightforward, and if you’ve ever created a regular Google Form, creating a quiz works exactly the same way.
Question
Questions are good replacement for discussion forums. You can create a question thread and allow students to respond in short answer form (and to reply to each other). It isn’t as robust as Blackboard’s discussion forums, but it’s also much easier to use on the student’s end. Questions aren’t gradable, so if you want to assign a point value to student responses you’ll have to keep track of it elsewhere.
Material
GC “Material” is basically everything else. Whereas Blackboard distinguishes among several different content types, most content can be added to Google Classroom as Material. If you need to add links to readings, PDFs, videos, recorded lectures, etc, just add them as Material and make sure to put them in the correct topic.
Google Classroom is a great option to consider if you hate Blackboard or if you’re already comfortable with Google Docs. We’ve created a very basic WRIT 101 Google Classroom course for you to explore. To add it as a student, go to classroom.google.com and use the code noyclsp to join the class.
To be added to the class as a teacher (to copy it or see the teacher-only features) just contact Andrew Davis.
Video Tools
There are a variety of tools to support synchronous video communication between you and your students and among your students themselves. Each platform has its own affordances and advantageous use cases.
Zoom
All UM faculty, staff, and students have centrally managed Zoom accounts for video meetings. Please visit Zoom’s Getting Started page for more information about downloading and using Zoom.
When signing in to Zoom, select “Sign in with SSO” and enter the domain “olemiss.” You can also go directly to https://olemiss.zoom.us. You will be prompted to sign in with your MyOleMiss credentials.
All UM Zoom accounts have Pro licenses for unlimited meetings.
Zoom is a good choice for larger meetings, webinar-style presentations, or open “office hours” style meetings. Zoom also allows the host user to record the meeting to their computer. This is very useful if you’re using Zoom for lecture capture. Feel free to contact Andrew Davis if you want to discuss use cases.
Zoom integrates with Blackboard, allowing you to schedule and manage class meetings without leaving your Blackboard Course.
Google Hangouts Meet
Google Hangouts Meet is the Google Suite video conferencing solution. It integrates with go.olemiss.edu calendars and email. Like Zoom, a user can go directly to https://meet.google.com, sign in to a go.olemiss.edu account, and initiate a new video meetng. Also like Zoom, a user can generate an access link to send to anyone else who needs to join the meeting (including non-go.olemiss.edu users).
Google Hangouts Meet is an ideal solution for Google Calendar users because it’s already integrated. When you go to create a new event in your go.olemiss.edu calendar, you can click “Add Conferencing” to automatically pair a Hangouts Meet link with the event. When you add a student to the event, they’ll receive an invitation in their email and it will go on their Google calendar.
add Google Meet to an eventFor more information about Google Hangouts Meet, visit the Google help pages.
FaceTime, Duo, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, etc
There are countless other video chat apps that your students may use. Try to be as flexible as possible with platform if it’s really important that you meet a student face-to-face. Video conferencing works best on a laptop with a good broadband connection. For some of our students, that’s not realistic for a variety of reasons. Sometimes, a good ole-fashioned phone call is the best way to resolve confusion and technical frustrations.
Best Practices
Adapted from UM Academic Outreach
For managing your students
Choose one form of communication with your students and stick to it. In focus groups, students said they preferred information to be posted in the announcements section of your Blackboard page, and then sent to them via Blackboard email to their UM email.
Communicate with your students early and frequently. Cultivating a sense that you are present with the students in a meaningful if non-literal sense is crucial to successful online teaching. Begin the online experience with some kind of very low stakes community-building exercise, deployed as early as possible, to help students feel like they’re part of a community rather than individuals accessing course materials in parallel, isolated from each other.
Use tools and approaches familiar to you and your students: Try to rely on tools and workflows that are familiar to you and your students, and roll out new tools only when absolutely necessary. If a closure is caused by a local crisis, it may be already taxing everyone’s mental and emotional energy; introducing a lot of new tools and approaches may leave even less energy and attention for learning.
Contact Andrew Davis if you have a student who is utilizing classroom accommodations so you can be sure to maintain those during periods of academic disruption.
Be sympathetic and flexible for students in distress, who lack the resources to fully access your class online, or who are unfamiliar with online learning.
Check in on students working behind or who are not logging into Blackboard during the academic disruption. They may be confused, sick, or distracted by caregiver responsibilities.
For managing your course
Focus on learning outcomes even if you need to adjust the specific activities that contribute to those outcomes. Keep students moving toward those outcomes. Avoid “busy work.”
Prioritize course activities and focus on delivering the ones with the most significant impact on learning outcomes. You will have to reconsider some of your expectations for students, including participation, attendance, communication, and deadlines. As you think through those changes, keep in mind the impact this situation may have on students’ ability to meet those expectations, including illness, lacking power or internet connections, or needing to care for family members. Be ready to handle requests for extensions or accommodations equitably.
Rearrange course activities if needed to delay those activities where face-to-face interaction is most crucial.
Provide Regular Feedback: Giving students detailed feedback on their writing and/or speaking is extra important when you can only communicate with students virtually. Do your best to return work promptly and maintain constant communication with students about their submitted work. You may want to reconsider your stance on responding to drafts or accepting revisions since your students wont have the in-class support they might have come to expect.
Student Technology
Keep in mind, not all students may have appropriate technology or high-speed Internet at home. If you and your students will be meeting synchronously or sharing video files, check technical recommendations below. Though students may be able to engage if they do not fully meet the recommendations, they will have less difficulty if they can meet them. If a student reports they are having issues, refer them to IT for help. If they continue to have difficulties, you will need to work individually with students to determine what is plausible.
Browser: Latest version of Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox (AVOID SAFARI when interfacing with Bb).
For operating system: minimum of Windows 7 or Mac OS X v10.12 (“Sierra”). Computer should meet the minimum hardware requirement for its operating system (see website for Apple or Windows for info).
For reliable audio-visual sharing: a consistent Internet upload speed of at least 2Mbps. You can check your connection on https://speedtest.net.
Processor: 2.0 GHZ or better.
Memory: 2GB or better.
External or built-in webcam/microphone/speakers/mouse.
It’s a good idea to gauge student internet/bandwidth access in order to anticipate possible assignment difficulties down the road. This could be as simple as an email to your class asking students who have poor or inconsistent bandwidth access to contact you or as complex as a survey about specific technologies.
Try to be as flexible as possible with students. It’s a good idea to have low-tech alternatives in mind for your assignments that have high-tech requirements.
Writing Centers
In the event of a public health closure of UM campuses, the University Writing Centers are prepared to continue meeting the needs of our students through our online services. While we may not be able to run our centers at full capacity due to possible staffing limitations, we will continue to offer access to our two types of online appointments.
Live Chat Appointments
Live chat appointments are ideal for getting immediate feedback and answers to questions. The student and writing consultant are able to type messages, share drafts of writing projects, and make changes in real time. This type of appointment requires a consistent internet connection for the length of the appointment. Live chat appointments are best when conducted with a personal computer or laptop rather than a mobile device.
Correspondence Appointments
Correspondence appointments are asynchronous and ideal for getting feedback and answers to questions over a longer period of time. Students provide their draft along with information/requirements for a writing assignment prior to the reserved appointment time. About an hour after the reservation time, the student will receive an email notification that feedback has been uploaded by the writing consultant. These appointments can be completed without a consistent internet connection. A student can upload their paper from any wi-fi connection and return to our scheduler at a later time to download their written feedback. If you or your students have any questions, please visit our website for more information and step by step instructions: https://rhetoric.olemiss.edu/writing-centers/online/
You can find the most current information on UM’s response to coronavirus at https://olemiss.edu/coronavirus.
Note: In the event of an institution wide closure, please do not require your students to use the WCs as we will likely be operating at a lower staffing capacity. You are welcome to offer extra credit or incentives, but please keep in mind that our online services may be in high demand across all campuses and department
Library
Library Building Hours
The library building is open for the time being, from 7am-5pm this week and 7am-7pm for the following weeks. This is subject to change, but you can go to the Library hours page for a full up-to-date schedule. All carrels are open, books can be checked out, library computers/printers/scanners are available, and `StudioOne is open <https://calendar.lib.olemiss.edu/allspaces`_> for filming and reservations.
The IDEALab, Starbucks, and group study rooms are currently closed.
Extended Due Dates
All material currently checked out will be due May 8th. To return items through the mail, contact the library at libadmin@olemiss.edu or 662-915-7091 for details.
Interlibrary Loan
We have suspended ILL of physical items, but continue ILL of articles and chapters to the extent that other libraries can supply them. Be prepared for some possible delays.
Scanning Course Materials/Reserves
The Libraries can digitize materials needed for your course; if you have materials on course reserve, or need your course texts available electronically, apply using the digitization request form.
For further information about copyright and fair use in times of crisis, you can read a detailed statement here.
Book Ordering
Book ordering is open until April 17, and we’re continuing to process book orders until then. If you’d like a physical book, we’ll honor the request, but you’ll have to come and pick it up as normal.
eBooks
eBooks are an option as well, and I’m happy to look for multi-user or unlimited-user ebooks for any course materials and get them in place by next week. We also have temporary unlimited access to many ebooks we currently own, so if you’d like to know the status of any ebook in our catalog, let Alex Watson know. Access to ebooks is available through OneSearch or the library catalog, and Alex Watson can get direct links for embedding purposes on request.
Videos, Tutorials, and Virtual Presentations
Library presentations are being made available virtually through Zoom, though they will need notice to get an expended/enhanced Zoom account set up in preparation. They also have the ability to make non-interactive tutorials and presentations on request. You can search existing library videos on the library website.
LibGuides for Courses
If you’d like a special library page with resources for your class, we are in a position to make those for you. Contact me about it with your course information and any specific databases, books, or resources you’d like added to it. The resulting page will have a URL that is easily shared or dropped into Blackboard. Here’s the list list of existing guides
Library Chat
The library will be running its standard chat reference service Monday-Friday 11:00-3:00 CST for the time being. Alex Watson will also be personally manning a special chat reference for class-specific and subject-specific questions. If you’d like to make sure he is available to chat with a student or students, feel free to make an appointment via email. Here is the direct chat link.
Speech Courses
SPCH 102 Assignment Library
See Also
SPCH 102 is a skills-building course and allows students repeated opportunities to work through the speech process. The assignment-based design engages Blooms Taxonomy from comprehension to creation a minimum of five times. Reading, discussion, and quizzes occur throughout the course to enhance memory and understanding of core concepts. Peer coaching and/or review, as well as post-presentation journaling enhance analysis and evaluation.
SPCH 105 Assignment Library
See Also
Speech 105 is a practical introduction to the principles and skills of effective communication in business and professional settings. The course includes frequent performances in business situations requiring effective communication practices.
Writing Courses
WRIT 100/101 Assignment Library
Writing 100 and 101 follow the same outcomes and use common assignments. Teachers have multiple curriculum options, and some may choose to combine the options. Select the course flavor below.
WRIT 100/101 with Let’s Talk
Writing 100/101 is designed as an introductory course to academic writing featuring genres commonly used in other academic situations such as analysis, argument, and reflection. For information on class size and conferencing requirements, please see the WRIT 100/101 Course Page. Students choose to take either Writing 100 or Writing 101 and then move into Writing 102 or Liberal Arts 102 after successful completion of either course; they are not placed into either course by test score or writing sample.
Common Reading Text Project
The first-semester, first-year writing courses—WRIT 100 and WRIT 101—use the Common Reading Text as the basis for the first major writing project. This project emphasizes the critical reading, critical thinking, analysis, research, and synthesis skills that are vital to college writing. In this assignment, students are given a prompt pertaining to the Common Reading Text and asked to compose an essay that integrates the Common Reading Text with the student’s own ideas and perhaps outside sources. First-year writing courses use the Common Reading Text as a basis for student reading and writing rather than as a literary study.
Analysis
In analysis, students examine an issue or an artifact’s component parts to understand how they work together to make meaning. The analysis project is usually the hardest project for students because they don’t have much experience with it and have difficulty moving past summary. Analysis is roughly a three-week unit.
Areas to highlight: Many students are unaccustomed to examining individual parts of an issue or an artifact and may need guidance in breaking down the whole. Often, students struggle with identifying an analytic thesis that answers the questions how, why, and/or so what. Once students have a draft in place, the most common problems are organization and focus. It is not uncommon for a student to try to cover many different ideas. These writers need help organizing their thoughts and focusing their essays. Students sometimes struggle with providing enough specific evidence to support their analyses. These writers may need to be alerted to areas that would benefit from additional evidence.
Argument
In argument, students make a claim and support that claim with evidence. While instructors may assign for this project different types of argument, the assignment should require background information on the topic as context for the argument, a clearly-expressed main claim, evidence, integration of outside sources, and consideration of counter-arguments. Argument is a three- to four-week unit.
Areas to highlight: Students often need help narrowing a topic to a specific, debatable claim. Some students struggle to provide enough specific evidence to support their claims and need help brainstorming places to find evidence. Students often need help integrating quoted material and paraphrases into their texts as well as documenting their sources. Students may also need help considering opposing viewpoints or counterarguments and refutation.
Multimodal
In the multimodal assignment, students may rework or rethink an earlier project in a different mode or medium. Multimodal is roughly a two-week project.
Areas to highlight: Students often don’t recognize that a change in mode or medium requires a change in technique, so students need help in understanding how electronic, visual, or spoken text is different from print text and, thus, how to think about audience. Students may also need help with unfamiliar technology.
Reflection
Students will reflect on their writing and learning throughout the semester. This may involve daily, weekly, and unit reflections, culminating in a final reflection.
Areas to highlight: Students are generally unfamiliar with self-reflection and metacognition and need many opportunities throughout the semester to practice. Many will need help with being more specific about their learning. Students may have difficulty demonstrating their progress, or lack thereof, through examples, often resorting to more telling than showing. Students may also struggle to understand how tagging can be a mechanism to represent the larger structures of their learning.
WRIT 100/101 with The Writer’s Practice
Writing 100/101 is designed as an introductory course to academic writing featuring genres commonly used in other academic situations such as analysis, argument, and reflection. For information on class size and conferencing requirements, please see the WRIT 100/101 Course Page. Students choose to take either Writing 100 or Writing 101 and then move into Writing 102 or Liberal Arts 102 after successful completion of either course; they are not placed into either course by test score or writing sample.
Common Reading Text Project
The first-semester, first-year writing courses—WRIT 100 and WRIT 101—use the Common Reading Text as the basis for the first major writing project. This project emphasizes the critical reading, critical thinking, analysis, research, and synthesis skills that are vital to college writing. In this assignment, students are given a prompt pertaining to the Common Reading Text and asked to compose an essay that integrates the Common Reading Text with the student’s own ideas and perhaps outside sources. First-year writing courses use the Common Reading Text as a basis for student reading and writing rather than as a literary study.
Analysis
In analysis, students examine an issue or an artifact’s component parts to understand how they work together to make meaning. The analysis project is usually the hardest project for students because they don’t have much experience with it and have difficulty moving past summary. Analysis is roughly a three-week unit.
Areas to highlight: Many students are unaccustomed to examining individual parts of an issue or an artifact and may need guidance in breaking down the whole. Often, students struggle with identifying an analytic thesis that answers the questions how, why, and/or so what. Once students have a draft in place, the most common problems are organization and focus. It is not uncommon for a student to try to cover many different ideas. These writers need help organizing their thoughts and focusing their essays. Students sometimes struggle with providing enough specific evidence to support their analyses. These writers may need to be alerted to areas that would benefit from additional evidence.
Argument
In argument, students make a claim and support that claim with evidence. While instructors may assign for this project different types of argument, the assignment should require background information on the topic as context for the argument, a clearly-expressed main claim, evidence, integration of outside sources, and consideration of counter-arguments. Argument is a three- to four-week unit.
Areas to highlight: Students often need help narrowing a topic to a specific, debatable claim. Some students struggle to provide enough specific evidence to support their claims and need help brainstorming places to find evidence. Students often need help integrating quoted material and paraphrases into their texts as well as documenting their sources. Students may also need help considering opposing viewpoints or counterarguments and refutation.
Multimodal
In the multimodal assignment, students may rework or rethink an earlier project in a different mode or medium. Multimodal is roughly a two-week project.
Areas to highlight: Students often don’t recognize that a change in mode or medium requires a change in technique, so students need help in understanding how electronic, visual, or spoken text is different from print text and, thus, how to think about audience. Students may also need help with unfamiliar technology.
Reflection
Students will reflect on their writing and learning throughout the semester. This may involve daily, weekly, and unit reflections, culminating in a final reflection.
Areas to highlight: Students are generally unfamiliar with self-reflection and metacognition and need many opportunities throughout the semester to practice. Many will need help with being more specific about their learning. Students may have difficulty demonstrating their progress, or lack thereof, through examples, often resorting to more telling than showing. Students may also struggle to understand how tagging can be a mechanism to represent the larger structures of their learning.
WRIT 100/101 with The New York Times
See Also
Required Text: A semester-long subscription to The New York Times
Optional Text (can be required by instructor): The Writer’s Practice
Welcome to the Writing 100/101 New York Times assignment library. Assignment sheets, rubrics, and student samples are available under each project content area.
Common Reading Text Project
The first-semester, first-year writing courses—WRIT 100 and WRIT 101—use the Common Reading Text as the basis for the first major writing project. This project emphasizes the critical reading, critical thinking, analysis, research, and synthesis skills that are vital to college writing. In this assignment, students are given a prompt pertaining to the Common Reading Text and asked to compose an essay that integrates the Common Reading Text with the student’s own ideas and perhaps outside sources. First-year writing courses use the Common Reading Text as a basis for student reading and writing rather than as a literary study.
Analysis
In an analysis, a writer closely examines an issue or an artifact, systematically breaking down and considering the components, as well as the context in which it was constructed, to posit an interpretation or evaluation. This assignment has several flavors based on The New York Times.
Argument
In argument, students make a claim and support that claim with evidence. While instructors may assign for this project different types of argument, the assignment should require background information on the topic as context for the argument, a clearly-expressed main claim, evidence, integration of outside sources, and consideration of counter-arguments. Argument is a three- to four-week unit.
Areas to highlight: Students often need help narrowing a topic to a specific, debatable claim. Some students struggle to provide enough specific evidence to support their claims and need help brainstorming places to find evidence. Students often need help integrating quoted material and paraphrases into their texts as well as documenting their sources. Students may also need help considering opposing viewpoints or counterarguments and refutation.
Multimodal
In the multimodal assignment, students may rework or rethink an earlier project in a different mode or medium. This assignment has several flavors based on The New York Times.
Reflection
Students will reflect on their writing and learning throughout the semester. This may involve daily, weekly, and unit reflections, culminating in a final reflection.
Areas to highlight: Students are generally unfamiliar with self-reflection and metacognition and need many opportunities throughout the semester to practice. Many will need help with being more specific about their learning. Students may have difficulty demonstrating their progress, or lack thereof, through examples, often resorting to more telling than showing. Students may also struggle to understand how tagging can be a mechanism to represent the larger structures of their learning.
WRIT 100/101 with National Public Radio
Welcome to the Writing 100/101 NPR assignment library. Assignment sheets, rubrics, and student samples are available under each project content area.
WRIT 102 Assignment Library
Welcome to the Writing 102 Assignment Library. This library is organized by major unit. Where applicable, each assignment’s page is subdivided by course theme.
WRIT 102 (First-Year Writing II) is a theme-based, first-year writing course designed to build on writing skills learned in either WRIT 100 or WRIT 101 and develop critical thinking and research skills appropriate for use in academic writing. The course pays special attention to developing argumentative skills, analyzing texts, and synthesizing information into thoughtful, coherent essays and projects. Students enrolled in WRIT 102 will produce papers that are longer and more in-depth than in WRIT 100/101. The course culminates in a final portfolio of the student’s work.
Course Objectives
The objectives of this course are
to develop basic writing skills learned in WRIT 100/101, including the understanding that writing is a process that develops over time
to write for specific purposes and for specific audiences,
to respond critically to different points of view, allowing the student to create effective and sustainable arguments,
to become skilled at locating primary and secondary research from a variety of sources and at evaluating their reliability, and
to become effective researchers and writers of research papers as a member of an active writing, reading, and researching community.
Rubrics
WRIT 102 uses a general rubric for all major assignments. There is a long version and a short version.
Synthesis
From the Online Writing Lab at Purdue, “Synthesize means that you combine information in a way that could coherently and effectively present your ideas or opinions. In some assignments, you will be required to synthesize sources or ideas. This means that you will combine the sources and ideas and organize them in a way that is appropriate and approachable to your readers.”
After much discussion and analysis of the way instructors develop and execute the synthesis paper assignment, the WRIT 102 curriculum committee offers two different tracks for the instructor, although each informs the other: one focuses on research and the other focuses on composition.
In either track, the committee agrees that the synthesis essay should have the following outcomes:
The student will:
Write a 4-6 page essay with at least two, but no more than three, sources cited in a given citation style
Create and support a thesis using these sources
Select and evaluate high-quality, contextually relevant sources with an identifiable thesis, either stated or implied
Engage critically with sources by analyzing and evaluating source contexts and positions
Move beyond simple compare and contrast in blending (or integrating) sources
Address underlying assumptions and common themes within the sources
Become more comfortable with citation and good quoting/paraphrasing in preparation for the research essay
In-Class Writing
The in-class essay is a timed writing exercise where students may do similar work as in papers 1 and 2 in that students might be asked to respond to a particular text or argument or evaluate a text’s argument. This may be related to paper #3, the research paper. The in-class essay is worth 5% of the student’s final grade.
Areas to highlight: Timed writing can be intimidating to many students. Going over strategies to alleviate stress will be useful for this assignment and any future essay exam. Because the writing is so short, students may believe the writing process does not apply but instructors should model how to use brainstorming/outlining, drafting, and revision in this context, with special attention to time management. Students who do not do well in this assignment often do not prepare well for the in-class essay (by not bringing a required essay or optional notes) or do not read the prompt carefully. These areas should be addressed; Instructors may also opt for a practice timed essay in class.
Research Paper
Paper #3 is the research paper where students will come up with their research question in the context of the class theme. This paper should be 7-9 pages and use at least seven credible sources. This assignment is worth 20% of the student’s final grade.
Areas to highlight: This is the most intimidating assignment for students. Many of them may have never written this length of paper. Some may have only written an “informational” research paper and not an argumentative one. Since the class spends nearly a month of class periods on this assignment, the sequence of homework assignments, in-class work, and other elements of the process are important to a student’s success. Several class periods should be spent on developing a research question alone. This special care and attention will make the process much more manageable. Emphasize their many avenues of support – the instructor, their peers, the consultants in the Writing Center, and the reference librarians.
Multimodal Project
The multimodal assignment revises the research paper into another mode. This assignment is worth 15% of the student’s final grade.
Areas to highlight: This assignment is perhaps the most individualized by theme; however, problems with technology will the biggest issue. Instructors should take advantage of Andrew Davis (Lamar Hall Ste. B, Rm 22) to learn how to teach the technology to students. Instructors should keep in mind that this assignment can be as low or high tech as wanted.
In general, since this assignment is most often paired with the research papers, students may be tired of their subject or be reluctant to cut their papers. Further, failures in the paper version may translate to problems with the multimodal project. Try to return the research paper back as quickly as possible to alleviate this issue and try not to double-penalize them.
Reflection Blog
The creflection is a personalized space for recording, organizing, and reflecting on a student’s learning. This semester-long project incorporates daily, weekly, and unit reflections, culminating in a final reflective post (called an epilogue).
Areas to highlight: Many students will have practiced self-reflection and metacognition in WRIT 100/101, and WRIT 102 should build from this foundation. However, students who placed out of WRIT 100/101 may not have had much practice at all. In general, many will need help with being more specific about their learning. Students may have difficulty demonstrating their progress, or lack thereof, through examples, often resorting to more telling than showing. Students may also struggle to understand how tagging can be a mechanism to represent the larger structures of their learning. In WRIT 102, it is also a challenge to make this assignment fresh and engaging rather than rote and reflexive.
Critical Thinking
This folder contains critical thinking exercises, assignments, and class activities as well as research that can be used with any major unit.
LIBA 102 Assignment Library
See Also
Welcome to the LIBA 102 Assignment Library. This library is organized by major unit. Where applicable, each assignment’s page is subdivided by course theme.
Analysis
Paper #1 is an analysis of a single text. This can be a response paper to an author’s argument or a profile or analysis of a person, place, or thing. It should be 3-4 pages with at least a single entry on the Works Cited page and is worth 10% of the student’s final grade.
Areas to Highlight: This assignment will help students learn to look closely at a text (academic or otherwise) and begin the fundamentals of quoting and citation. Because some students may have had a disruption in time between a WRIT 100/101/equivalent course and a WRIT 102 course (even if it is only winter break), it is recommended that instructors go over thesis statements and paragraph construction that students should have learned in WRIT 100/101. Students may also need help in understanding the difference between summary and analysis.
Synthesis
Paper #2 is a synthesis paper where students weigh at least two different arguments and synthesize a unique thesis in reaction to these arguments. It should be 4-5 pages with at least two entries on the Works Cited page and is worth 15% of the student’s final grade.
Areas to Highlight: Though themes may ask students to do different tasks, students are often most frustrated with locating and evaluating sources. Instructors should go over plagiarism issues such as correct citation and using paraphrases. Though challenging, this assignment gives students practice in working with texts for their longer research paper.
Research
Paper #3 is the research paper where students will come up with their research question in the context of the class theme. This paper should be 7-9 pages and use at least seven credible sources. This assignment is worth 20% of the student’s final grade.
Areas to Highlight: This is the most intimidating assignment for students. Many of them may have never written this length of paper. Some may have only written an “informational” research paper and not an argumentative one. Since the class spends nearly a month of class periods on this assignment, the sequence of homework assignments, in-class work, and other elements of the process are important to a student’s success. Several class periods should be spent on developing a research question alone. This special care and attention will make the process much more manageable. Emphasize their many avenues of support – the instructor, their peers, the consultants in the Writing Center, and the reference librarians.
Multimodal
The multimodal assignment revises the research paper into another mode. This assignment is worth 15% of the student’s final grade.
Areas to Highlight: This assignment is perhaps the most individualized by theme; however, problems with technology will the biggest issue. Instructors should take advantage of Andrew Davis (Lamar Hall Ste. B, Rm 22) to learn how to teach the technology to students. Instructors should keep in mind that this assignment can be as low or high tech as wanted. In general, since this assignment is most often paired with the research papers, students may be tired of their subject or be reluctant to cut their papers. Further, failures in the paper version may translate to problems with the multimodal project. Try to return the research paper back as quickly as possible to alleviate this issue and try not to double-penalize them.
Commonplace Book
The LIBA 102 Commonplace Book assignment is based on the WRIT 102 curriculum.
WRIT 250 Assignment Library
See Also
Writing 250 is an advanced composition course designed to help students further develop the analysis, synthesis, argument, and research skills built in first-year writing in addition to introducing them to primary research. The course follows a Writing in the Disciplines approach, requiring students to choose topics within their fields to research and to write about to help prepare them for their later coursework in core classes. Writing 250 is offered both face-to-face and online.
Exploratory Essay
The Exploratory Essay is designed to introduce students to writing in the disciplines and to finding/using Library resources related to their major. This narrative essay requires students to find and compare academic and non-academic sources on the same topic. There are three variations of the assignment that instructors can choose from. The final product takes the form of a process narrative in which students trace their steps in finding and comparing sources. Usually, the exploratory essay ends up generating a topic idea that students will want to pursue for the subsequent assignments.
Areas to highlight: Students often struggle with understanding the difference between academic journals themselves and the articles within them. This can be particularly difficult in online sections of the class. It is also important to walk students through Library database searches (or request a librarian demonstration), as students sometimes assume that any source that comes from a library search is peer-reviewed. Also, sometimes students make this first assignment more complicated than it needs to be: it’s ultimately a process narrative, and instructors should emphasize that it’s a relatively low-stakes entry-point into researched writing in the disciplines.
Annotated Bibliography
The second major assignment is an annotated bibliography based on secondary research for the research project students have identified. Students will articulate a topic and rationale in a topic proposal ePortfolio/Research Toolbox assignment around the same time as they are working on the annotated bibliography. For the annotated bibliography, students select 8 to 10 academic or professional research sources and write summaries and evaluations of each source. Students also write an introduction to the bibliography, in which they identify trends or concepts that connect the sources to one another.
Areas to highlight: Students often struggle with selecting good sources, even though they have already had experience with the process with the exploratory essay. Some of the same issues are prevalent, including the use of popular/non-academic sources, as well as sources published in academic journals that aren’t necessarily appropriate for a literature review (opinion pieces, book reviews, etc). Students also struggle with meaningful, detailed summary and specific evaluation of the sources, and sometimes tend to review the sources in very broad terms.
Literature Review
The literature review is a synthesis of secondary research on a student’s topic. Students choose at least five of their secondary sources from the annotated bibliography to include in a literature review that describes the “state of research” in their major on their chosen topic. Emphasis is placed on identifying the gap in existing research, into which the student’s proposed research project will eventually fit.
Areas to highlight: Students struggle with synthesis of sources and identifying gaps in research. Also, sometimes students have trouble seeing “the big picture” of research, and instead more through their sources in isolation. It’s important to emphasize the balance between direct quotation, paraphrase, and original synthesis, as sometimes students rely too heavily on direct quotation.
Prospectus
The Prospectus is the culmination of the research project students have worked on for the entire semester. The prospectus serves as a formal proposal for an original primary research project in the student’s major, based on the research question identified earlier in the semester. In the prospectus, the students combine a condensation of the literature review with a discussion of the results of their small-scale primary research project (mini-pilot or in-class survey), and outline an original study that they have designed to answer their research question.
Areas to highlight: It helps to describe the prospectus as a sales pitch. Students should think of it as an opportunity to “sell” their proposed research project to a group of skeptical colleagues. Ultimately, they have to prove that they have credibility as researchers in their field and that their project is valid enough to stand on its own. The effectiveness of this approach depends largely on how well students can show how their original student fits into the discourse community established in their review of literature.
Multimodal
Students work on the multimodal presentation concurrently with the prospectus. The presentation is the student’s opportunity to “sell” the research project proposed in the prospectus. Students are required to use different modes of expression in assembling the presentation, including video, audio, and handouts. In a face-to-face class, presentations usually take place during the last week of the semester. In an online class, students create recorded versions of their presentation and share on a discussion board.
Areas to Highlight: Students often don’t recognize that a change in mode or medium requires a change in technique, so students need help in understanding how electronic, visual, or spoken text is different from print text and, thus, how to think about audience. Students may also need help with unfamiliar technology. Students also struggle with making their presentation persuasive (selling their proposed research) instead of informative (reviewing existing research).
Research Toolbox
This project is undergoing some curricular revision. The files below are in a state of transition.
DWR Reports and Internal Research
The DWR is committed to transparency and continuous improvement. As part of that commitment, we plan to share departmental reports, assessment results, and raw data on this part of the Teaching Hub for our faculty and other interested parties to freely access.
DWR Strategic Plan 2018-2022
Documents |
Dates |
Description |
|---|---|---|
8/1/2018 |
In Spring 2018, the Strategic Planning Task force developed 32 action items for the department’s strategic plan that will guide us through 2022. |
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8/1/2019 |
This report documents progress toward the strategic plan’s four objectives in the 2018-2019 academic year, detailing specific actions and enrollment numbers from that time period. |
UM Writing Centers OER Institute
Note
This section is under construction and is not finalized.
The UM Oxford Writing Center hosted an open educational resources institute in January 2022 for graduate students. This program offered participating graduate students with experience or interest in writing center consultation and/or writing instruction the opportunity to learn how to develop, design, and publish open educational resources. Participants attended brief, daily professional development sessions where they learned principles of open access content development, document design, electronic document accessibility, creative commons licensing, and web publication.
Participants worked in groups to develop writing instructional topics, design learning resources, workshop their ideas, and carry their compositions through to publication. The culmination of the program was the production of a series of new open access educational resources published on the UMWC website and credited to the individual author or teams of authors.
This section of the Teaching Hub is for OER Project Mangement documentation and resources, as well as archiving and indexing of non-course-affiliated OER content.
Managing an OER Project
The main challenge faced by faculty members (and other knowledge workers) in creating and sustaining an OER or a collection of OERs comes from the lack of long-term project modeling. Unlike commercial publishers, who have the workflows, experience, and funding to maintain multiple publication projects, most people who are interested in working on OER projects are not in the publishing industry: they’re teachers, writing center tutors, undergraduate students, and even community members. That’s why it is especially important for OER project leaders to build a sustainable model with simple, long-term infrastructure and a plan for maintaining the project once the initial group of developers have moved on.
OER Production Framework
The following OER production framework, based on an instructional design framework, depicts the major steps that OER adoptions typically go through:
Tip
You can see the full Project Production Workflow on Google Drawings.
Research Phase
At this step, you should ask yourself a few key questions to gauge your OER knowledge and skills before taking on a project. Have you explored OER content in your subject area? Have you been through any previous training for work with OER in the past? Contact support staff on campus to receive any training you might be lacking for working with open content.
Pre-production phase
This phase involves the curation of existing resources that may be applicable to the OER adoption and planning out the general design of the project. No new content should be adapted in this step, but a skeleton outline and other time-and-task-based project management documents should be prepared. Getting an OER consultation scheduled at this time is encouraged.
Design phase
This step is the last planning phase before work on the actual OER content begins. For projects adapting OER as-is, this may be the final step apart from preparing instructional documents. During this phase, project outlines and skeleton documents are fleshed out, and existing OER are fit into places where they are believed to be applicable. Any visual/graphic design work and processes that require assistance from an instructional designer are included here.
Development phase
This phase is where the most time is spent on OER projects that require building new materials. Existing OER that are being adapted or modified go through revision and review in a closed loop until they are in a place where they require only minor changes or copyedits. Checks for intellectual property (which CC license is on the content, and have we appropriately attributed everything?) are done, as well as checks for accessibility (is content formatted semantically, do images include alt-text, etc)?
Content here is typically drafted in Google Docs or another rich content editor (Word, OpenOffice) and are then ported into the publishing platform (the ISU Digital Press recommends Pressbooks for text-based content).
Publication phase
The final phase involves publishing and sharing the content that has been created. This includes creating export versions, archiving editable files for instructors who might wish to edit your work (.doc, .xml, etc), and depositing any ancillary materials such as syllabi or lesson plans in the institutional Digital Repository. The new adapted or original OER content is then disseminated to learners and shared with the open community.
Finding In-Line Comments