You must submit the written piece to me 48 hours in advance if you’d like me to make 21 copies for the class. After 48 hours, it will be your responsibility.
OBJECTIVE: Give you the opportunity to think seriously about the kind of writing you want to model, and give you an opportunity to practice your presentation skills and discussion moderation in a safe, collegial space. :-)
ACTIVITY: Each of you will be responsible for a 15-minute presentation or class discussion.
LABOR INSTRUCTIONS
REQUIRED LABOR: 140-160 minutes.
1. (20-40 MINUTES): Carefully choose an excerpt of 500-700 words. Make sure that it is formatted, copied, and pasted correctly. Save it as a pdf if you're intending on sending it to me.
- An excerpt from an article, book or other document you’ve been using for your research.
- An excerpt from your own writing from the previous paper or this paper that you think we can all learn from.
- A light theoretical piece on “criticism is”or “close reading.”
- It CANNOT be something we’ve already read and discussed in class.
- ALSO SHOULD NOT BE FICTION, CREATIVE PROSE, OR POETRY. If you have any questions about your excerpt, email me.
3. (60 MINUTES): Lesson plan for your 10 minutes, by preparing a handout with the following:
- 2-3 questions you want to ask the class to help get the conversation started, or to move the discussion forward if it slows down.
- 2-3 passages that are interesting and useful for the class to turn to.
- Write a paragraph on each of the passages, considering why this passage is important and what you'd like your classmates to learn from it.
- A summary of your final thoughts and conclusions.
In Class:
You are responsible for teaching the class what we can learn about this piece of writing.
For the assignment to be considered complete, you must hand in the following:
- 5 minutes of your class time will be given to students reading the work and commenting on it.
- In the next 5 minutes, you will lead a discussion on the writing. In order to do this effectively, come to class thoroughly prepared:
- Make sure you have read through the piece of writing multiple times.
- Make sure you understand all of it.
- Take notes and make comments in the margins, because you will forget what you want to say!
- Prepare questions.
- Have passages chosen.
- You are welcome to use any of our class discussion strategies— have students free write for 2-3 minutes, ask questions that guide the discussion, put students thoughts in conversation with one another, etc.
- To conclude your presentation, you must give us a final summary of the writing. What do you want us to take away from reading and thinking about this piece?
- The goal is for you to bring a piece of writing that we can learn something valuable from. Either this is a work of weak close reading in your own work that you think the class would benefit from unpacking, diagnosing, and improving. Or this is a work from an outside article that you think does an excellent job at integrating research, analyzing evidence, contextualizing, or close reading.
For the assignment to be considered complete, you must hand in the following:
- The writing excerpt (either emailed to me or brought to class)
- The handout (guidelines in Labor Instructions)