This week’s texts make a strong case for community engaged pedagogy in the composition classroom. I particularly like Dean’s articulation of the ways in which community engaged pedagogy naturally follows from the goals of the composition classroom (103). However, Dean, Julier, Goldblatt, and Livingston also raise some very real concerns about putting community engagement into practice. I’d …

This week, Cummings and Stancliffe write convincingly about the benefits of teacher-student conferences (In Our Own Voice, Strategies). As I revised my syllabus, I added a component requiring a multimedia composition. Students may chose which assignment they would like to compose multimodally. As it stands now, I have students writing a proposal for each assignment. …

Revised Syllabus & Assignment Sheet

This week, the reading I connected most with was Vivian Zamel’s “Strangers in Academia.” I have a couple of ESL students in my section, and I’m sure I will encounter many more in my time at Emory and throughout my career. I found Zamel’s article a useful breakdown of beliefs I already hold, but that …

On the whole, I didn’t find this week’s batch of readings quite as useful as last weeks. Many of the examples in Strategies and In Our Own Voice seemed very university-specific and too grounded in the author’s own particular pedagogy. I found going over the syllabi of the current third-year cohort last spring much more …

I found a number of strategies from this weeks reading useful, especially those in Chapter 7, “Teaching Invention.” I am most interested in applying the assignement in Susan Allspaw’s piece, “Writing Excercise– Connections.” Allspaw introduces photography into the composition classroom to foster a dialogue about perspective and subject position. She has her students to chose a …

1) It seems like the primary take-away with a lot of these multimodal projects (like the interactive photo montage described on page 420) is that meaning is constructed. Do you see any other possible learning outcomes that can be achieved by assigning students to interact with/create multimodal projects? 2) Miles suggests (p. 418) that it’s …

1). Jenkins discusses the transparency problem of participatory culture: the difficulty students face comprehending the ways media can shape their worldview. What causes the transparency problem, and why does Jenkins think the stakes are higher for digital media than for traditional media? Jenkins argues students need the skills to read games as texts, but how …

Spitzer and the DSM