Blog Response, Week Three: Writing Assignments

Prompt for this week: Based on your teaching philosophy (which may change over time), what are types of assignments which you would include in a FYC syllabus?

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I think the golden word with most pedagogical approaches I've seen, read, or heard about is "scaffolding," or being able to gradually move students toward more independent thinking when it comes to applying the material learned in class. I'm a relatively new teacher (this will be my fifth semester teaching), so I'm still learning about how to best integrate these practices--one approach that I think has worked fairly well for me (comparatively, anyways) is to always be upfront about what we are trying to achieve with any assignment. I think it's important that students not only understand what is expected of them in their work, but also become able to identify methods of application beyond the classroom. A lot of my teaching philosophy (so far) is grounded in students being participants, in their learning and in their communities. Ideally, I want to create curricula that incorporates active engagement with a variety of environments--other disciplines, other social settings, other workplace functions, or anything that requires critical thinking and citizenship (I'm a big believer in that education should support both consciously-minded citizenship and vocational skills).

I'm still working out what assignments would specifically apply to my teaching philosophy (part of why I'm so excited to make the syllabus), but I think for the purposes of this blog post I'll list some previous assignments that I've tried in the past to get to this idea of an engaged writer:

-Taking a "field trip" to the on-campus art gallery. At my last school, our common syllabus for FYC was grounded in teaching four different argument styles: definition, causal, evaluation, and proposal. Collaborating with two other GTAs, we used the art gallery as a way to practice applying evaluation argument strategies the students learned in class. Students were in charge of creating their own definition of art (definition arguments were the first unit, so they were relying on past lessons to form said definitions), their own practical/aesthetic/ethical criteria, and then they were assigned to pick two pieces from the gallery and create a written argument based on them.

-Students writing local proposals. For their last paper, students were assigned to write a researched proposal that had to deal immediately with either their hometown, college campus, or the city we were based in. This assignment was the most successful in terms of producing quality writing--students wrote proposals for a variety of things including campus policies, their workplace procedures, housing situations, and one even chose to investigate a nuclear power plant in his hometown. This is my favorite assignment to give out, mainly because I've had a few students choose to send their proposal on to outside audiences (for example, one student gave his proposal to a school district in order to get recycling bins in schools/sports arenas)

-Writing to a company or public official. For the evaluation argument, I gave students the option of a traditional essay, a letter, a review, a blog, or some other type of public writing. Most chose to write letters to companies about products or services--and a few sent them on to the outside audience (and received coupons!)

-Attending the bi-annual school organization fair and doing a write up of rhetorical choices the organizations made to recruit members

I'm still trying to come up with more assignments that incorporate a civic, externally-applicable component to the course material, but these were a few that stuck out to me. I think one thing I've learned is that no matter how familiar I grow with lesson-planning, it's always important to make connections between daily life and what skills are developed in the classroom.