Megan Eatman's blog

Optional Collaboration and "Winging It"

Megan Eatman — Wed, 13 Aug 2014 22:21:21 +0000

Author:

Megan Eatman

Image Credit:

Screenshot from an in-class composition

I’m a big fan of "winging it" in the classroom, a practice my colleague Scott Nelson addressed in a 2012 Blogging Pedagogy post. Typically, my improvisation is restricted to my lesson plans, which I leave informal and loose so that there is room to shift gears depending on the class's needs, interests, and concerns. This semester, though, my “winging it” extended to the broader arc of the course. Once I got to know my Critical Reading and Persuasive Writing class, I rewrote their final paper assignment to include collaborative and multimodal options. The resulting projects were exciting, but that shift also led me to consider how flexibility affects student perceptions of the instructor’s ethos.

My section of Critical Reading and Persuasive Writing, a lower-division class aimed at students who already have credit for our introductory Rhetoric and Writing course, had four units. In the first two, students wrote analytic papers that discussed features of an online public of their choice; in the second two, students wrote arguments for or about issues important to that public. The third unit required students to construct a multimodal composition, and the fourth unit originally required a traditional textual composition. Normally, I would reverse those assignments so that students would have to flesh out an argument in text before writing on the same issue in other media, but I wanted their projects to be “born digital” rather than translations of existing papers. The results were good. Students turned in assignments in which it was clear that medium wasn’t an afterthought.

I had a feeling that I wanted to rewrite the Unit IV project before I saw the results of Unit III, and I had warned students (both in class and with a note on the assignment page) that the assignment was undergoing revision. But, while I wanted to offer students the option to continue their exploration of multimodal composition and produce larger, more complicated projects than they could achieve individually, I also didn’t want to disappoint students who were counting on writing a traditional, individual paper. Ultimately, I created an assignment with two options. Students could either remix their Unit III argument for a different audience and in a different medium, or they could produce a multimodal collaborative project on a topic of their choice. Since all the Unit III arguments were multimodal, an individual, traditional paper was still an option, but I also tried to facilitate collaboration. Early in the unit, I asked students shared their project ideas in small groups, and several of the groups became collaborative work groups after those meetings. Of my 17 students, nine ended up working on collaborative projects, and the other eight worked individually. Of those eight, four turned in text-based arguments.

While I was happy with this change and the resulting projects, having a collaborative option, as well as the option to do a multimodal or traditional argument, made teaching the last unit somewhat more difficult. I had to ask students to decide on a project plan very early in the unit so that I had an idea of their needs, and most classroom activities had to be tailored to have value for a wide variety of projects. For the most part, we focused on broader issues of argument construction: for example, finding appeals to suit specific audiences and anticipating and addressing counterarguments. If I were doing this sort of project again, I would have asked students to focus more on identifying the conventions of different kinds of arguments in different media and publications, because some students seemed to master some of those conventions more readily than others. Since we had already done a unit on multimodal composition, I think those activities would have been especially helpful for the students who chose to do traditional textual arguments. Spending more time discerning how an article in Slate is different than a college essay in structure, not just appeals, may not have had immediate utility for the multimodal groups, but could have still reinforced a method for understanding different rhetorical situations.

Finally, I wondered about how my flexibility in the classroom affected my students’ perceptions of me as an instructor. For me, “winging it” is the result of confidence and experience. This is a class I’ve taught before, a student population with which I’m familiar, and I feel comfortable enough as a teacher that I don’t worry about a sudden mutiny. For students, however, improvisation may make me look less prepared or less experienced because the prior experience that allows me to reconstruct assignments on the fly is obscured. That concern would not stop me from adapting lesson plans and assignments to suit the class’s needs, of course, but it has inspired me to reflect on how improvisation affects my ethos and, importantly, how it might play differently for me, a relatively young woman, than it does for some of my colleagues.

Identifying Visual Conversations

Megan Eatman — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 16:12:29 +0000

Author:

Megan Eatman

Image Credit:

Chris Metcalf via Wikimedia Commons

In my RHE 309K, Rhetoric of Tragedy, I often ask students to analyze or otherwise engage with images. It seems appropriate to the content, since images often play a large part in how violent or disastrous events are defined, and it creates less reading, which my students seem to like. With my Using Images for Invention lesson plan, I hoped that an engagement with images related to their tragedies would expose some of the students’ own assumptions and feelings in relation to the event, as well as make them aware of affected parties that they might not have otherwise considered. However, I now think that the assignment was both too rushed and too structured. With some modifications, I think it could be more effective.

In the interest of allowing students to explore the various points of view, I would in the future give students more time and allow them to compile a collection of images on their blogs. I would also give the assignment more weight, given the increased time investment. The lesson as I had originally conceived of it was in-class activity, but students seemed rushed and probably used whatever image they found first, regardless of their level of interest or engagement. Giving students time to collect images (probably some time in class, but mostly out of class) might help them engage more with what they find, thereby making the exercise more helpful overall. I have also considered following this activity with mind-mapping; students have enjoyed mind-mapping in class before and seem to find it particularly useful for invention, and the images may help improve the quality of their maps.

I think this exercise could also provide some preparation for the image production students complete as a part of their final major assignment. Right now, the image production assignment is fairly open, but I provide students with in-class instruction on Animoto so that everyone has at least one means of producing a visual argument with which they feel comfortable. Compiling a collection of image could segue into this more significant assignment fairly easily, particularly since the guiding questions ask students to identify what is missing from the representations they find. Identifying what the images lack (individually and as a group) could better prepare students to intervene in a broader visual conversation.

Experimenting with Workshops

Megan Eatman — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:19:28 +0000

Author:

Megan Eatman

Image Credit:

Eric James Sarmiento

I’ve ended each of the past three semesters with several days of project presentations. Part of my reasoning was that I did not want to teach right down to the wire; I gave students their final project assignment and we spent some time talking about it, but then I wanted to give them time to work. Since the presentations were extensions of the project, I felt that devoting class to student presentations would help achieve this goal. These presentations also allowed students to see what their classmates were doing, so they were exposed to stronger and weaker arguments well in advance of the project due date. I also feel that practice with oral presentation, including producing an effective visual aid, is useful for students, since many will have occasion to do something similar in their future jobs.

However, in spite of what I think are good reasons for doing presentations, I decided not to do them this semester. Instead, we will spend several days workshopping project proposals and initial work samples. Last semester, I asked students to do multimodal final projects for the first time, and while the results were often really successful, I changed a few aspects of my teaching this semester in hopes of preparing them better and receiving more sophisticated arguments. By workshopping project proposals and samples, I want to:

Give students an idea of the possibilities of this project. (To be fair, presentations would do this, too.)
Encourage students to come up with ideas that they aren’t yet sure how to execute with the knowledge that the class can help them figure it out.
Identify possible problems early, although students who present on one of the later dates will have less time to revise.
Keep students, especially those doing projects with visuals or sound, focused on audience and persuasion rather than symbolism.

The last objective in particular is based on my experience last semester. I felt like last semester I did a poor job of reminding students that visual arguments need to be legible for an audience. While the author may include an image that she feels symbolizes some aspect of her controversy, that image is useless unless an audience has time to see and process it and is then likely to come to the same conclusion. We did traditional peer review with these projects, which but it did little to fix this problem. Since individuals can have idiosyncratic readings, it is easy for an author to say that this one reader just doesn’t understand her project, and authors who have invested significant time and effort into a slideshow or a poster design may be hesitant to revise at a later stage. By having the whole class evaluate the idea and the beginnings of the project, I’m hoping to put emphasis back on arguing for an audience rather than just composing a text that says something about a controversy.

I can see a wide variety of potential problems with this approach. I ask students to select a particular audience and then design an argument to reach them, so the class will have to keep in mind that they may not be the argument’s intended audience. We have spent a lot of time talking about commonplaces and imagining an audience’s values, desires, and objections, so I hope that the workshoppers will be able to imagine themselves as a different audience to evaluate the argument. I will instruct them to do so. Additionally, I have not yet decided what (if anything) will happen if “workshoppees” decline to submit their materials in advance of the workshop. My general practice is to always have a quantifiable consequence (point deductions) because otherwise the motivation for doing this, especially toward the end of the semester, might be too low.

Last but not least, I am most concerned about in-class participation. Right now, the assignment emphasizes group discussion, but I am reconsidering that aspect. While I don't want to ask students to do too much outside work, I may consider shifting some of the in-class work to online environments, perhaps a workshopping wiki. That approach could lighten students' homework (they could look at the project proposals without writing about them before class) and head off participation problems while still allowing students access to each other's comments. I will have to consider it further, but any suggestions on workshopping practices are welcome.