Since the purpose of this course is to prepare students for their academic lives, one way of developing English 150 is using a theme. For example, students might be asked to examine various aspects of place and location, including hometown culture, campus art and architecture, land-grant university, ethnic diversity, and Midwest community values. Below is a list of assignments used by first-year teaching assistants in English 150. If you are teaching a learning community, you may be using different assignments.
Where I’m From. A person’s hometown is defined by more than its geography—it’s defined by memories, associations, and momentous events in that person’s life. Writing about their hometowns allows students to make their transition to a new university more meaningful. The “Where I’m From” assignment in English 150 sets the tone for the course’s place-based curriculum and gives students the opportunity to think deeply about what place means, ultimately leading them to realize it as more than a set of coordinates on a map. With this evaluated-but-not-graded assignment, you can help students recognize the skills, knowledge, and vocabulary they already have that they can repurpose for your class. This type of exercise will help you know what terms and principles you need to introduce and which the students only need to be reminded of, recognizing, of course, that there are multiple acceptable taxonomies and terminologies.
Sharing Experiences: Letter or Memoir. Focusing on the relationship between past and present, memory and meaning, students will explore one event or a related series of events in the academic, personal, or civic parts of their lives for its significance to them or others. Students will consider their audience and what they are trying to accomplish: Why would they want to share this experience with an audience? What might others gain from it? What do they gain from it? How can students select and organize information so that their intentions are met with this audience? How might visuals or an oral component enhance the letter or memoir genre?
Exploring a Campus Organization or Program: Public Document and Profile. This project should help students clarify their thinking about the experiences we have and the groups, places, and individuals we interact with by allowing them to gain different insights than they already have and to convey that insight to their audience. This assignment has two steps: an analysis of the public documents pertaining to a university organization or program and a profile of the organization or program to deepen understanding of it. Important to this project is an inquiring attitude and the ability to provide useful and relevant information efficiently, so that an audience can make use of it. Again, students should think about how a visual and/or an oral component can help them accomplish their goals with the audience.
Analyzing and Understanding Campus Place or Artifact: Campus Landscape or Art. Using the genre of the report and/or the commentary, students will gather information about the ISU campus place or one of its interesting features (landscape, building, art) and analyze and interpret that information to find meaning in their new ISU surroundings. Their analysis of a visual artifact, such as a piece of art, a building, or a specific part of the ISU campus landscape, will help them and their audience come to a deeper or new understanding of this place and its features. Important to this project will be the gathering of information about the place or artifact and the student’s analysis of its “fit” with the overall environment and mission of ISU. Using visuals will be very important to this project, and communicating orally about it with a small group or the whole class may be part of the project as well.
“An attractive campus today is too often thought of simply as a strategy for student admissions and retention, not as something central to the educational mission. This is . . . shortsighted because it reflects a narrow view of the educational process at the very time when visual and environmental dimensions to learning are becoming increasingly important.”
—David Schuyler
Composing Visual Communication. Returning to the work the student did in one of the first three graded projects (above)—Sharing Experiences, Exploring a Campus Organization or Program, or Analyzing and Understanding Campus Place or Artifact—they will summarize their informational and analytical work by composing a form of visual communication, such as a brochure, newsletter, poster, or video.
ISUComm ePortfolio. The ultimate reflection assignment for English 150 is the ISUComm ePortfolio. This final assignment illustrates the knowledge your students are transferring from assignments early in the semester to those that come later. Have students select examples of their communication that will demonstrate their skills, illustrate their growth over the semester, prove their ability to handle the WOVE modes, and explain their short- and long-term goals for improvement. Most, but not all, samples will come from your course; encourage students to include work from other classes or extracurricular activities. Students will benefit from the process of creating an introductory overview of their work, reflecting formally on specific communication artifacts, and setting measurable goals for improvement beyond the course.
You may prefer that students emphasize the communication process by doing a developmental ISUComm ePortfolio or communication products by doing a showcase ISUComm ePortfolio. Either way, student commentary should show an appreciation for both the affective and cognitive dimensions of communication work. In English 150, students will begin to understand that they must ultimately assess their own work and articulate that assessment for others. By the time they are seniors, they’ll be assessing themselves in more formal and practical ways for prospective employers.
Although this assignment will come near the end of the course, students should begin working on it from the first week. They need to articulate learning goals for themselves in each of the modes and translate these into concrete actions for the semester. They need to make a preliminary list of communication artifacts from all their courses and extracurricular activities that might be useful in their ISUComm ePortfolio. And they must start collecting these artifacts in suitable form and keep revising them if they are to create an accurate, engaging, and rich ISUComm ePortfolio at the end of the semester.