Download Engaging Assignments: Making Philosophy Relevant with Rhetoric, Writing, and Technology and more Assignments Web Design and Development in PDF only on Docsity! Jim Ridolfo Teaching Philosophy As a college educator, my challenge is to make my courses on rhetoric, writing, and technology as relevant as possible to my students’ lives. I work to meet this challenge by creating courses that interleave issues of public advocacy with professional writing, because I believe that rhetorical education without engagement is simply not an education in professional writing, not an education in practice. Consequently, all of my courses feature assignments that highlight how research can function as a fuel for action and show how rhetoric and professional writing can be an engine. In order to keep my assignments engaging and relevant to my students’ personal and professional lives, I create research and writing assignments around Facebook, MySpace, and Wikipedia. For example, in my WRA 210: Introduction to Web Authoring class, students individually propose, research, write and deliver (post) their own article to Wikipedia. The purpose of this assignment however not the article itself, but rather to study just what happens to an article after it has been submitted. Over the course of the next two weeks, students monitor the activity around their article. Some of their articles are edited by a third party, deleted by moderators, or flagged by moderators for future action. With an entire classroom full of experiences, students then analyze and discuss a large data set of examples and engage questions such as: who edits the article, what do they contribute, what is the rhetoric of the Wikipedia moderators, who are they, and how did they receive their power and authority? These assignment questions build upon each other and develop into overarching questions that guide the course and interrogate issues such as what is the relationship between workflow and collaborative writing, and what are the rhetorical advantages/disadvantages of emergent writing technologies. In my pedagogy I integrate the study, reading, and discussion of writing with rhetorical education. To facilitate a writing pedagogy with rhetoric in mind, I design research and writing projects around rhetorical concepts. This includes a key research focus on kairos, rhetorical situation, and rhetorical objective. For example, in my WRA 130: American Radicalism class I have students compose a one-page press advisory on an imagined political event of their own choosing: a demonstration, direct action, boycott, etc. Their topics generally address issues something important to them and worth acting on: tuition increases, a perceived draft, gas prices, cuts to affirmative action in Michigan. Working to visualize how writing and action are a complex array of rhetorically situated processes, students do a considerable amount of inductive planning. The very genre of this assignment, the advisory, requires students to imagine forms of action in addition to their own acts of writing. As students work together in groups, I listen as they design and discuss with each other the perceived effectiveness of different protest plans and ideas. As the collaborative assignment progresses, I’ve found that these conversations become more focused and strategic, with students discussing their rhetorical objectives through action in more concrete, specific language. I ask to hear more from students about the ways in which they work to describe their own rhetorical strategies. As a teacher of rhetoric, I am intently interested in how students discover their own rhetorical language. These assignments illustrate how I ask students to work with each other and me to develop their own rhetorical tools for action. As students’ needs and circumstances change, I find myself revising and evolving my understanding of learning, knowledge, and rhetorical practices to keep my assignments and pedagogy relevant to their lives.
