Lesson/Handout: Information Literacy Scavenger Hunt

  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 …

Lesson, Day 1: What is this class about, anyway?

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 …

Lesson: Brainstorm Inkshed Party

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 …

Lesson: Defining Success across Audiences

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 …

Featured Lesson: (Re)Search Parties

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, …

Featured Lesson: The Peer Review of Elimination

  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 …

Lesson: The Rhetoric of Comedy

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 …

Lesson: The Student Becomes the Teacher

  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 …

Lesson: Sentence Competition

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 …

Lesson: Entering the Conversation

  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. …

Lesson: Audiences and Rhetorical Situations

  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 …

Lesson: Thesis Statement Translation Workshop

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 …

Lesson: Choosing and Evaluating Research Topics

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. …