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 …
Tag Archives: Reinterpretation
Lesson: Students Present the Syllabus
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 …
Prompt: Collage Essay
Contributed by Jen Schell Alaska and the Frontier/Wilderness, a Research Collage The research assignment for this class is a bit unconventional. Your goal is to create a research collage about Alaska and its status as a frontier/wilderness. What is a collage?Collage is term used to describe a certain kind of abstract art in which …
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 …
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Final Portfolio Assignment
During one the pro-development workshops this year, we talked about student assessment and portfolios. This is something I have been experimenting with in my class, as part of their final project. I thought it might be helpful to post what I’ve been doing and why as just one possible (work-in-progress) way of approaching this. …
Handout: How to Write an Abstract
This handout is attributed to Philip Koopman, of Carnegie Mellon University. A link to his text can be found here: https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/essays/abstract.html. It is also copied below: Because on-line search databases typically contain only abstracts, it is vital to write a complete but concise description of your work to entice potential readers into …
Garden Gnome Liberation Mini-Project
What I’d like to offer here is an example of how you can take a similar concept–a seemingly silly non-academic topic–and use it in a classroom on a smaller scale. In my class, before launching the zombie project, we spent several class periods working with garden gnome liberation, and my students had the option …
Lesson: Sentence and Context
This activity asks students to look closely at sentences and challenges them to create and change meaning through a variety of techniques. The goal is to get students thinking carefully about how they construct meaning, at a sentence level. It’s also FUN – there’s lots of room here to play around. I’ve never gotten through …
Prompt: Narrative Fan Fiction
PAPER #1: NARRATIVE ESSAY – Fan Fiction REQUIREMENTS: 4-5 pages typed (or more), double-spaced, 12 pt. Times New Roman Font MLA heading and page numbers Rough draft must be edited and signed by a Writing Center tutor. EXPLANATION: For those of you who don’t already know, fan fiction is just what it sounds like: fictional …
Lesson: Observation and Perspective
(Consider taking students to the museum or the transfer station and having them choose an “object” for this activity) Read Wallace Stevens’ “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.’ In the poem, Stevens describes 13 different ways of looking at a blackbird. Some of Stevens’ observations are concrete others are more philosophical. Your assignment is …