Week Ten: Syllabus Weaknesses

Prompt: Identify where you think students may fail in an assignment in your syllabus, and how you will use that as a teachable moment by design

I think the riskiest assignment I have is my first one, the Google Mapping Project. Which is described in my syllabus as:

Google Mapping Project. For this project, you will use Google Maps to write a visual and textual map focusing on a theme of your choice for either the TTU campus, a place in your hometown, or a sample neighborhood of Lubbock. Suggestions: best bicycle trails, best parkour locations, best pubs, worst restaurants, worst traffic, etc.

The assignment is taken from the book Web 2.0: Applications for Composition Classrooms by Claire Lutkewitte. The book is comprised of a variety of multimodal, web-based projects submitted by college composition instructors or professors. The Google Mapping Project was taken from Moe Folk's chapter, "You are Here: Negotiating Digital Writing in FYC with Google Maps." The purpose of this assignment is to integrate community writing with a multimodal project, externalizing the value of communicating effectively to a general, public audience. Having students write up and "draw" maps of their local communities would be a starting entry point to framing what we do in the FYC as a method of civic engagement, and promote situated learning.

I think students may have a high likelihood of not understanding the learning objectives of this assignment unless it's been clearly articulated--especially in a few different ways. I think there's going to be the temptation to not take this assignment seriously-- either through throwing things at random on the map or not being reflective about the routes they are creating and personalizing. Additionally, I see how this might not be interpreted as composition, especially as it is a first assignment (assigned before any type of traditional writing we're doing in the class). Also, this is an assignment that uses a digital platform, and as such, there's opportunities for students to have technical difficulties and interface illiteracy.

To be effective, this assignment requires me to teach my students how to use Google Maps, how to conduct community writing, how to apply community writing to physical and digital spaces, and for me to be transparent about the learning objectives between the multimodal project and outcomes for the course.

I think the benefit to this assignment being first is that it can be an opportunity for "failing forward" (as Dr. Rickly stated in one of her articles). As later assignments in the class (ones that are worth significantly more points) are multimodal, having an early assignment worth less weight of the overall grade could be a benefit. I also think that having it as the first project in-class helps set a tone for the type of content that will be assigned throughout the semester. Google Maps is a relatively easy interface to work with, so that has the added benefit of helping me and the students learn together, and get one foot situated into digital literacy in the composition classroom.

Also, it starts prompting students to apply their content externally right away. Even if they don't fully understand the overall concept/outcomes of the work, they'll see that we'll be working with topics and material outside of the research essay.