A case study on the teaching of writing, this paper discusses what motivates students in a freshman writing course to complete increasingly difficult writing assignments. The study provides a glimpse into how one class of freshman students developed positive expectations for writing a paper about a difficult poem by helping each other map strategies for reading and writing.
Tag: english
Institutional Assessment and the Intellectual Work of Teaching and Learning in First Year Composition
Institutional assessment initiatives can provide opportunities to make the intellectual work of teaching and learning in composition studies more visible. Reciprocally, the scholarship of teaching and learning’s situatedness within disciplinary norms and values can enhance institutional assessments, providing a check on the tendency to rely on singular, overly generalized mechanisms for capturing course- or program-level data. This article shares one example of the reciprocal relationship that can occur between disciplinary and institutional assessment initiatives.
Teaching Rhetorical Praxis in a Post-Truth World: An Undergraduate Course on Detecting and Analyzing Bullshit, Fake News, and Alternative Facts
We are living in an era where reality, truth, and facts are being turned upside down and inside out. Fake news and falsehoods are being spewed out in increasing exponential rates. I was prompted to do something about the propensity of fake news through post-truth discourse and designed an undergraduate course that I titled: Bullshit, Fake News, and Alternative Facts. In this piece, I critically reflect on and share my theoretical frames for constructing the course, the design of it, my experience in teaching it, and report on a survey about the class—and I call all of you to work at least some material on post-truth into your classes or into a full course as I have.