Share, Collaborate, Engage
This lesson/handout is designed to help students begin to navigate the UAF library’s sources for research. The library has a great tutorial online and in this lesson, students use that tutorial to actually begin their own research. Go to the Library Information Literacy Tutorial. Watch the videos and take the self-check tests. Go to …
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Contributed by Jaclyn Bergamino, 2015 On the first day of class, I wanted to start getting the students talking about the ideas. I divided the class into two groups. I was teaching on the theme of love, sex, and marriage so I brought quotes about writing and quotes about love all different, the same number …
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Contributed by Jaclyn Bergamino, 2015 To get students thinking about research topics, I often use the Research Paper Topic Generator Game and then take it a little further. Once students have their lists of things that evoke them, I have them choose three and write them on spread out on a piece of paper. They …
Contributed by Elizabeth Alexander, 2014 Goals: To identify audience needs and revise writing accordingly Engage in self-assessment and self-critique for more effective communication with different audiences When to use this: In a unit in which students must revise a piece using a different mode and/or for a different audience Prior Class: Ask students to bring …
Continue reading “Lesson: Defining Success across Audiences”
Send your class on a rhetorical scavenger hunt in the library! Students research a text by splitting into teams, each assigned a component of the text’s rhetorical situation to investigate. Later, they report their findings to the rest of the class. How I did it: A week before my class’s visit to the Rasmuson Library, …
Students pair up and take the pen to unnecessary sentences, phrases, and words in order to trim their paper down. This peer review session focuses on the practice of revision. On peer review day, students came with 1 copy of their first draft of a paper. They were told they were working on a …
Continue reading “Featured Lesson: The Peer Review of Elimination”
Contributed by Kerstin Aloia I used this as a context lesson plan. Students will learn that writing and speech is placed in a context of time, place, social sphere etc. Knowing a lot about these contexts will make us as readers see a message in a text that might be different if we don’t …
Contributed by Craig Sanders, 2015 Summary: This lesson makes use of the medium of stand-up comedy to help students to understand and rationalize rhetorical argument and its strategies in new ways. By analyzing and demonstrating the rhetorical strategies associated with humor, students build connections with a different mode of discourse and are able to apply …
Contributed by Natalie Taylor, 2015 Summary: Students pair up and take the pen to unnecessary sentences, phrases, and words in order to trim their paper down. This peer review session focuses on the practice of revision. Description: On peer review day, students came with 1 copy of their first draft of a paper. They …
Contributed by Natalie Taylor, 2015 Cut-it-Up Peer Review Summary: Students take the scissors to their partner’s draft and help them rearrange it. This peer review session focuses on organization and transitions. Description: At the beginning of class (or in the previous class) we talk about different organization methods for the type of …
Contributed by Whittier Strong Summary: Have students learn by teaching! The class forms small groups based on what they struggle most with writing. Then each group creates and presents a lesson to the entire class on what they’ve studied about their particular challenge. Detailed Description: This is a good activity to present about …
Contributed by Whittier Strong Summary: Send your class on a rhetorical scavenger hunt in the library! Students research a text by splitting into teams, each assigned a component of the text’s rhetorical situation to investigate. Later, they report their findings to the rest of the class. Detailed Description: How I did it: A week …
Contributed by Natalie Taylor, 2015 Sentence Competition Summary: The class is split into two teams for a semester-long competition to create stronger, more argumentative sentences. Description: Throughout the semester, I collect a number of sentence-level issues that students are having. These issues range from grammatical problems, such as comma splices and subject-verb …
Here are several peer review activies from Patty Cady, Washington State University:
Contributed by Kori Hensell Students will learn how social experience and perspective makes an individual person a key piece in the exchange of ideas. By interacting with each other and with a variety of test subjects (all of whom are experts in at least one thing), students are both exposed to authority and involved in …
Contributed by August Johnson, 2015 Summary: In this lesson we use a resignation letter to discuss the rhetorical situation. Description: This lesson requires at least two days, as there is a homework reading assignment involved. We will read Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Serving in Florida” from 50 Essays. This essay contains a grim depiction of a restaurant …
Contributed by Jaclyn Bergamino, 2015 I do this activity on the second day of class, as a more interactive way to go over the syllabus. I cut the syllabus into parts half as big as the class, so for example, if I have twenty students, I cut the syllabus into ten pieces. In pairs, students …
Contributed by Whittier Strong, 2015 Summary: Connect the classroom to the larger world by having students write a letter to the editor regarding a class subject. The letter challenges students to consider tone, brevity, audience, and authorial intent. It also encourages students to consider how their writing can change the world around them. Detailed …
Evaluating Credibility 1. As a group, we consider things which make an author an authority in their particular field and the context of their subject, publications, research, employment, etc. We choose an author from readings done in the first unit for simplicity. 2. Has the author’s work been peer reviewed? If so, and it’s an …
Entering the Conversation Activity I. In class discussion, we choose a sample “hot’ controversial research topic, such as abortion (easy to demonstrate), and then brainstorm terms to use for searching for sources. Then, we look at common terms that come up during a simple Google search of “abortion.’ Motherhood, person, moral, freedom, murder, etc. …
Learning to recognize, consider, and research Different Rhetorical Situations and Audiences Context activity: recognizing that a conversation is going on For the first unit, we read six authors with varying stances on a particular theme. Students read a pair of authors for each class period, with opposing viewpoints on a particular issue within the …
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Finding Yourself in Maps In the northern hemisphere, maps of the world are always shown with north on top. We take this projection as a given. However, as a planet floating in the middle of the universe, this is only one possible representation. What does this representation value? How is that shown? What does …
The Mind as Place “The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n.’ —Paradise Lost, Book I Though he’s the devil, Milton’s Satan makes a keen point–our perceptions are the governing principle in how we process where we go and where we’ve been. It’s …
Context Place is often thought of in physical, geographical terms, but the physical body is a place as well. It is a place you inhabit, and it is a place that is mappable, both in terms of science and geography, and ideologic mapping (e.g. mapping someone’s gender, sexuality, etc.). The physical body is a place …
Context In Alaska, I once had a tourist complain to me that “You guys give crazy directions, like ‘turn right at the boulder.’ Don’t you guys have maps?” This tourist was from Southern California, like me, where Thomas Guides and Freeway directions are an indispensable part of life. But here, because of the vastness, because …
Contributed by Natalie Taylor, Fall 2013 Context: In the analysis unit, we were using Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue’ and Richard Rodriguez’s “Aria: Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood’ to think about language, identity, and contexts. We had also watched John McWhorter’s TED talk “Txting is killing language. JK!!!’ They were working on argumentative papers using a …
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Part of our purpose at WriteAlaska is to help build community by sharing resources. If you have a lesson, prompt, or handout that was particularly successful during your Reflection & Revision unit, share it! Simply paste your text in the comment box below and click “Submit Comment.” Don’t forget to include your name so that …
Part of our purpose at WriteAlaska is to help build community by sharing resources. If you have a lesson, prompt, or handout that was particularly successful during your synthesis unit, share it! Simply paste your text in the comment box below and click “Submit Comment.” Don’t forget to include your name so that we can …
Part of our purpose at WriteAlaska is to help build community by sharing resources. If you have a lesson, prompt, or handout that was particularly successful during your Analysis unit, share it! Simply paste your text in the comment box below and click “Submit Comment.” Don’t forget to include your name so that we can …
Part of our purpose at WriteAlaska is to help build community by sharing resources. If you have a lesson, prompt, or handout that was particularly successful during your observation unit, share it! Simply paste your text in the comment box below and click “Submit Comment.” Don’t forget to include your name so that we can …
Make your course your own: choose the texts that inspire you, start the discussions that you value, and tailor this curriculum to your skills and specializations. As you do this, browse through our Unit Framework and Resources section for ideas about each of the units and how other teachers have structured them in the past. …
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This is an exercise that I did with my class to talk about style and learn more about writing effective descriptions. First, I split the class up into groups and gave each group a paragraph to work with from one of the essays we had recently read and discussed. They had to look …
Purpose: To look at how context plays an important role in any text. Instructions: Go to a public place. Coffee houses and pubs work particularly well for this assignment. Make sure you bring a notebook and a sturdy pen. Eavesdrop on a conversation near you. Write down as much of what is said as possible. …
1. Sight Station ∙ Look at the following six images by Christoph Niemann. ∙ Can you describe them using visual language? ∙ In what ways is the artist playing with metaphor? Sight Station (1) Name: ____________________________ Date: ______/_______/ 2012 Group # ____ Sight Station ∙ What do you see here? Sound Station ∙ …
Learning to recognize, consider, and research Different Rhetorical Situations and Audiences Context activity: recognizing that a conversation is going on For the first unit, we read six authors with varying stances on a particular theme. Students read a pair of authors for each class period, with opposing viewpoints on a particular issue within the theme. …
Continue reading “Lesson: Choosing and Evaluating Research Topics”