Each of our three units will culminate in a digital portfolio, where you will collect, select, and reflect on your work up to that point. This assignment sheet includes prompts for the major components you'll work on throughout this unit, as well as directions for how to create and submit your portfolio. Read it thoroughly. Come back to it often.

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“Play creates a “space” to perform imagining, and imagining involves challenging the assumptions of everyday “reality” – this is no small part of what makes it developmental.  Improvisational performance is unique as a method for challenging assumptions, because in this kind of play the challenging of assumptions is not a cognitive mental process but a unified cognitive-emotive, mind-body, and socially performed activity. It can be a stage for development”

(Holzman, Vygotsky at Work and Play, 2017, p.111)

 

 

Play is so essential to our personal and social development! An overarching goal of our work in this class will be to put our understanding of multimodal composing to work in service of positively affecting our world. If that sounds big, don't worry too much; we're building to it! There will likely be a lot of new, possibly intimidating, things asked of you in our first unit. The core of our major assignments repeats multiple times over our first two units and you'll have multiple opportunities to draft, workshop and revise. I hope you'll take advantage of that repetition and take to heart the invitation to play.

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Our goal in this first unit is three-fold:

• we'll begin to theorize what it means to "write" "across" "media";

• utilizing our theoretical work around the concept of modes as one point of focus, we'll do some hands-on play with a range of media of your choosing;

• undergirding our play here, before we begin to think about what kind of intervention we'd like to enact by semester's end, we'll use our projects as opportunities to practice self-study, working toward an understanding of how we might use our personal gifts to better the world. 

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Throughout this unit you will produce quite a bit as you:

• read, annotate and discuss shared course readings

• write informally in class

• draft and workshop 3 Composing with the ___ Mode Projects

• draft and workshop 3 Theorizing the ___ Mode Assignments 

Come portfolio time, following the requirements below, you will decide which of these products to finalize and reflect on to show and tell a story of your learning journey to that point.

 

Our first portfolio is due by 10am Thursday, September 26. The following week, we'll meet one-on-one to talk through your work so far and where you're headed. If that sounds terrifying, stop by my office hours some time before that to warm up to me; we can talk about what you're working on…or we can just talk about dogs(!)...or whatever.

 

Portfolio Assessment

This portfolio is worth 20% of your overall course grade. Note on our course syllabus that portfolio weight increases as the semester unfolds. This is meant to take a little pressure off of this first graded batch of "products" and free you up to play and take risks.  Each component of the portfolio will be graded holistically on its effectiveness at meeting the criteria laid out in its prompt. So, while you have lots of directions you can take your projects, and what counts as "effective" for projects might be very different, you still need to be sure to address all aspects of what is asked of you. For instance, each bullet point in the rationale prompt should be thoroughly addressed.

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Portfolio 1 components:

1. Reflective essay

2. A final, polished product of one of the two Composing with the ___ Mode Projects drafted in this unit (linguistic, or gestural)

3. Two REVISED Theorizing the ___ Mode Assignments (of the 3 you wrote and workshopped during this unit)

4. Two pieces of informal or in-process writing

 

 

Prompts for portfolio components:

 

1. Reflective Essay

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The purpose of the reflective essay is to reflect on, synthesize and advance your work from this unit, creating a coherent, though hopefully not neat, map of where you've been and where you'd like to head next. Chronologically, this is the last piece you'll finalize for each portfolio, but I list it first here because it will be the focal point of your portfolio - where you pull together for yourself - and lead me through - the work you've chosen to curate from this unit. In other words, your reflective essay, located on your personal portfolio site, is your reader's entryway into understanding and navigating the text artifacts curated in your portfolio. This reflective essay, then must CLEARLY LINK to all included components (also housed on your site) AS they are discussed in text. That way you know you've discussed each component (hopefully quite thoroughly) AND don't have to trust my navigation skills! It is key here that you use your discussion of your included artifacts to illuminate your growth (whatever that means to you, and however meandering, circuitous, or frustrating that growth might feel at this point - we're not done yet!).

 

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2. Composing with the ___ Mode Projects

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The purpose of these projects is to encourage you to think critically about, and practice composing in, various media (of your choice!). To spur our thinking about the affordances and limitations of the media we choose to think through and communicate ideas, we will focus on a particular mode each week, create texts that utilize that mode, and consider how our media and design choices around that mode effect our compositions. You would be hard-pressed to find any text that utilizes only one mode - the idea here is not to limit yourself to one mode, but to devise a project in which you focus intently on the mode in question so that you can highlight and understand, in fine-grained detail, how that one mode is working as a component of your overall text artifact and the function it serves in this particular usage of the media you've chosen.

 

In this unit we will be focusing in on the linguistic, and gestural modes in our reading, writing, and making.  Aside from our theorizing about modes, the theme of this unit is self-exploration; the Composing with the ___ Mode Projects you devise here must take up this theme; they should aim to help you better understand yourself.  To that end, you may want to consider a particular identity you inhabit, question your values, probe your interests etc.

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You are required to include one of these mini mode projects in your first portfolio. It is up to you whether you create a final product for both modes or focus your energy on one product and just draft the other for workshop but never revise and polish it; follow your interests, and consider your work habits, but please do take some opportunities to challenge yourself. Our Tuesday class each week will be devoted to sharing, discussing, and pushing our works-in-progress; so, our Monday draft deadline is designed to enable that.  By noon Monday you’ll have posted a draft of your mini mode project and blog post.  The goal is to post a draft that is fleshed out enough to have a productive conversation, but still malleable enough to expand and revise before a product is due in your portfolio. 

 

Each Composing with the ___ Mode Project will have two major components:

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2a. The text artifact itself (ie the product you’ve created):

We’ll have time in class to explore and invent possible examples and directions for text artifacts you might create to think through the week's focal mode. During which time you should aim to settle on the message*, media, and modes you'd like to play with. Drafts of each Composing with the ___ Mode Project text artifact are due Mondays at noon.  We’ll workshop these drafts in class Tuesdays, and then you’ll have until the portfolio is due to tweak, expand, and polish your mini project.

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(*Your message here doesn't have to be an argument. In fact, in this unit especially, it may be generative if your message is a question or an invitation. It DOES however need to have a purpose and intended effect on its audience.)

 

2b. A rationale:

This accompanying document is where you will demonstrate your thinking and learning for the project. Its purpose is to help you think through and communicate clearly your intended purpose in creating your text artifact, the choices you made in composing to support that purpose, and the possible/intended effects of those choices in relation to others you could have made. This is a supporting text to aid your learning (and my understanding of your learning); it is separate from the text artifact, which should be able to stand alone as a communicative text in its own right. Meaning, someone shouldn't need to read your rationale to be able to interact with / understand your text artifact; if your text artifact needs some accompanying text with background information or something to be understood / interacted with, include that with the text artifact, do not add that to the rationale.

In a paragraph each, your rationale must thoroughly address each of the following:

• talk through your process

• explain your rhetorical and design choices in relation to your purpose

• discuss the effectiveness of those choices

• consider the affordances and limitations of your chosen media, rhetorical and design choices

• discuss the particular role the highlighted mode plays in this text artifact

• frame anything in particular that you'd like my feedback on

• muse on how this text artifact is valuable for your self-exploration

 

 

3. Theorizing the ___ Mode Assignment

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Drafts of Theorizing the ___ Mode Assignments are due in this unit as marked on our course calendar BY SUNDAY at noon. You are welcome and encouraged to write your post before Sunday at noon, depending on when it seems best timed for your thinking on the topic - you may want to write directly after you annotate your reading for the week, or after discussing the text in class on Thursday, or while you're thinking through your mini project. Up to you. But as previously stated, it’s due at this time to encourage you to break up your weekly projects and to enable our Tuesday workshop, so don’t miss this deadline. 

Full credit for these assignments (monitored in real time and tallied at portfolio time) is dependent on on-time, thoughtful completion of drafts and substantial revision (see below) visible in final drafts.  Participation in workshops is also crucial to your success (and learning!) on these assignments.  This is graded separately from the work in your portfolio, but is communicated at portfolio time as well.

The goal for Theorizing the ___ Mode Assignments in this first unit is to:

1. *Engage with the theory in the week's reading, (this is the MOST IMPORTANT goal, and should be the major focus of the post)

2. Deepen your self-exploration

3. Reflect on and plan for the exploratory mode work you're doing in your Composing Projects  - considering your product-in-process through the frames of the theory we've discussed as a class and your own self-seeking

For your portfolio, choose two of the three Theorizing Assignments you wrote this unit to substantially revise*.

 

*Substantially revising does NOT mean proofreading! Rather, you should focus on changing your mind (rethinking, expanding, or focusing in on some earlier insight or train of thought) as a driver for changing your text (making your composition clearer, more effective, easier to follow). 

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4. Two pieces of informal or in-process writing

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This is not new writing created for the portfolio. Rather, it should be selected from writing done in the service of your coursework: class notes, a freewrite done in class, or writing/drawing done in the process of researching/planning/drafting your mini mode project, for example.  The point here is to make legible to me the work you do to learn and experiment with course concepts that doesn't make it into final products.  You should have a specific purpose in mind for why you choose these texts to illuminate your thinking/making processes for me. As with the other components, these are to be woven into the narrative of learning in your reflective essay - think of all the components as evidence of the story you tell about your learning.