Summer 2017
My goal for my 1101 classes is two-fold: get my students excited about why people compose in any medium and teach them to critically think about how they are being affected by compositions in any medium. In other words, passion and practice. 
The first day of class I talked to my students about why I write and asked them to share examples of compositions that made them passionate. My example was a song that happened to be a narrative: The Mariner’s Revenge by the Decemberists. The second day of class we began discussing narratives, using my example song as the starting point. This led into a discussion of how they might tell their own stories with a purpose, thus leading to the assignment of the personal narrative. In order to help get my students started, I asked them to pick a favorite piece of media (most chose songs) and interview each other in partners on camera. I asked them to talk about why the composition they chose inspired them and how it related to moments in their life that they had to change or overcome something. They then edited those videos and turned them into remixes or rough drafts of a narrative. Because we had a 2 1/2 class and they weren’t allowed to work on these outside of class, the task was kept manageable and was not daunting to the students. Because most of my students wrapped their narrative around a song, there was a seamless transition into the second paper, which was an analysis paper. When I felt passion needed to meet practice, where I felt I needed to raise the stakes in an analysis assignment, I asked my students to create a fake online dating portfolio for for a famous or fake person. We then used analysis to determine the date-ability of these people and to match them with others. I focused on passion by bringing music into the classroom, a medium that most of my students understand as being intimately connected to passion. As my students learned about why they might compose, my final goal for them was to help them learn how to make sure that the world could share that composition with them in the form of academic prose. Thus we began the process of writing the Lit Review. I asked my students to really focus on the research that existed around the topic that they chose, and then to present their ideal thesis in a “works in progress presentation“.
The practice comes in the form of homework. I asked my students to complete 10+ 500-700 word analyses (based on these guidelines) with prompts ranging from “analyze your favorite song or your own narrative” to “analyze your college experience compared to what you expected” (prompts are found on the daily calendar).
Fall 2017
When I teach 1102 my goal for my students is different; it is that I can teach them how to communicate with an audience so that their passion is realized by others. I start this with a lit-review video (and rubric)because I want my students to realize they can do something with technology that they didn’t think they could. Also because I want a lit-review to be about the research, I don’t want them to think they can turn the same thing in as an argument paper. As we presented the videos, I realized that I needed to change my plan for the semester and we went ahead and converted our videos into essays for a more academic audience. And they wrote their lit review drafts. The next thing that we focused on was doing research, that is, the Methodology (methodology-assignment-2bl2fnp-1). And, if I’ve done my job right, with lots of in-class work shopping, it all turns into a final research paper.
I focus on my students’ writing throughout the semester by giving them analyses to write. These focus on helping my students to learn how world views can be created through habits. Eventually showing how a research method can determine the outcome or world view. I have them make and analyze games, maps, and videos in order to better understand this concept.