Shipka’s “This Was (NOT) an Easy Assignment”
How students negotiate more open-ended assignments, at the same time, how to escape linear, thesis-driven composition:
Instead of requiring that students produce linear, print-based texts, the framework for composing I describe here provides students with open-ended, inquiry-based tasks that invite students to draw on a much wider range of materials, methodologies, technologies and rhetorical strategies than writing courses have traditionally tended to allow.
There is no single formula for good writing, no single method for teaching writing:
Students who enter the course hoping that the experience will provide them with “the” formula for good writing for all time and for every purpose learn that the successful production of texts is not determined by a stable set of universal composing laws that the student has yet to master, but by how successfully he/she is able to identify, align with or negotiate the objectives, tools, rules, materials, and conventions of a specific communicative genre, activity system, or discipline.
And:
Otherwise put, instead of providing students with opportunities to explore the communicative potentials of new (or older) media in a context where I, as the instructor, decide what their final products will be, do, or mean, I provide students with open-ended, inquiry-based tasks that ask them to consider how even seemingly simple, straightforward, and relatively familiar communicative objectives (i.e., creating a text based on outside readings/research, summarizing and analyzing a text) might be accomplished in any number of ways, and with any number of semiotic resources, depending on how they choose to contextualize, frame or coordinate their response to the tasks.
Students expect the instructor to decide, to teach. Shipka frustrates this expectation. Such frustration opens us a space in which they can learn. Working with the best students, Shipka show “they know jack,” that they can make sophisticated and meaningful decisions:
The case studies presented here suggest that students are, as Nelson argued in 1990, “sensitive decision-makers,” people who are able to “size up a writing situation and adapt their goals and approaches to meet the demands of different classroom contexts” (p. 388). What’s more, the studies suggest that when given the opportunity to set their own goals for their work, to draw on the resources they believe will facilitate those goals, and to account for the choices they made with their work, students demonstrate a capacity to be markedly sophisticated and highly flexible material, methodological, and rhetorical strategists.
Sketching Out the Rest of Our Year
The rest of our semester will revolve around two projects, the Personal Portfolio Project and the Just One Thing Project.
Project One: Just One Thing…
In this project I will ask you to help me develop a social media campaign that will be implemented this summer and next fall in my graduate level courses on “Digital Rhetoric and Sustainability” and “New Media Production.” In a sense, you are test subjects so that I can get a sense of the trials future students will face in contributing to this campaign.
The inspiration for this campaign is Joe Smith’s viral TED talk “How to Use a Paper Towel.”
Based on Smith’s work, students will create 1-2 minute videos explicating one small life change everyone can make and estimating how that simple change would improve sustainability (or, for this practice run, any change that would make the world a better place). These videos should include empirical research into the effects such a small change could cause. Changes should be low-cost oriented. What we want is to overcome apathy and cynicism by introducing little, tangible, realizable changes that just about any person could enact any day.
You will work in teams of 2-3 for this project. Each time will be responsible for producing 2 videos.
Each group needs to develop an intro “animation” or sequence for their video series. The intro graphic should be developed in Photoshop and “animated” in Adobe Premeire. Also, it should contain some kind of sound/music obtained from a legal, open-source collection, such as CreativeCommons, freestockmusic.com, or another such service. The intro–music included–need not exceed 5 seconds. Of course, the archetype for this part of the project is NBC’s “The More You Know…”
The intro, in addition to the “Just One Thing…” title of the series, needs to include Patel Center for Global Sustainability branding.
Let me be clear: I am not looking for you to simply film a TED style talk. That would be boring (or, in the precise terminology offered us by Steve Stockman, that video would “suck”). Rather–take Stockman’s advice for filming engaging videos, and apply it to producing a short, TED inspired message.
Project Two: Personal Portfolio
The second and final project of the semester asks you to develop your Squarespace webspace into a portfolio showcasing your best work from all of the classes you have taken as a part of this major.
We will spend a class session looking at portfolios of professional writers, designers, and academics so that you get a sense of the range of possibilities for developing a portfolio. Often times, a portfolio–like the clothing we wear–is a highly rhetorical and stylized method for telling someone who we want to be and how we want to be perceived. In short, it is an opportunity for distinction.
There are some requirements for the project:
- First, it must construct a sensible ontology for organizing projects. This probably shouldn’t be by class.
- Second, the portfolio section should provide brief BUT FUCKING MEANINGFUL commentary on the project. In short, explain to your audience (potential employers, graduate or law school admissions committees, etc.) what this project tells us about you and your abilities. Learn to develop language for talking about your work.
- Third, even if it is just a paper, include an image, not just a link. For boring old papers, you can take a screen cast of a page or even a hyper-magnified portion of a page since that looks cool.
- Fourth, at some point you must customize the design of your site by editing the CSS. Don’t freak out, I’ll help ease you into this in class.
To get us started learning html and css (just enough to edit and navigate existing code), I want you to bring a one-page Microsoft Word copy of your resume to class on Tuesday.
