“If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.”

(Dalai Lama)

 

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We made it through the first unit! Now that you've had a chance to play a bit, our second unit will serve as a chance to practice in more depth. The material criteria of our second portfolio will be largely the same as the first, but with that structure under our belts, our focus and expectations are shifting. Here's what we're working toward in this second portfolio:

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As with the last, this assignment sheet includes prompts for the major components you'll work on throughout this unit.  They look similar to those of the last portfolio, but with key differences in our goals and expectations, so read carefully for those distinctions. Note my *design choice* to highlight those key differences with blue text!

 

In this unit:

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

• building on our theoretical work around the concept of modes, we'll deepen our practice with a broader range of media of your choosing, beginning to take more risks and work more in-depth with composing tools (as we also teach and learn them in our media literacy workshops beginning in this unit);

• undergirding our practice here, as we begin to think seriously about what kind of intervention we'd like to enact by semester's end, we'll use our projects as opportunities to explore issues we care about; we'll take what we've learned about ourselves in unit 1 as a jumping-off point to consider where we might want to make an impact in the world, what kinds of strategic questions we'd need to ask to understand and approach the problem, and what composing tools we need to do so in effective ways.

 

Our second portfolio is due by 10am Thursday, November 7.

 

 

Portfolio Assessment

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Not only are the expectations heightened for this second portfolio, but it is worth more of your overall course grade: 25%.

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Again here, each component of the portfolio will be graded holistically on its effectiveness at meeting the criteria laid out in its prompt. Now that you have some experience hitting those criteria, I expect your work to be clean, comprehensive, well thought out, well executed and backed by intentional deployment of course concepts. 

 

Components (same in kind, but not in number, as in portfolio 1):

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1. Reflective essay

2. Two FINALIZED (of the three drafted) Composing with the ___ Mode Projects explored in this unit (aural, visual, spatial)

3. Two REVISED Theorizing the ___ Mode Assignments (2 of the 3 you wrote 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 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! As part of your narrative explanation here, I also ask this time around that you specify in this text how you revised your thinking in your included Theorizing the ___ Mode pieces. 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 mini 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 aural mode, the visual mode, and the spatial mode in our reading, writing, and making.  Aside from our theorizing about modes, the theme of this unit is tapas, or burning enthusiasm. The Composing with the ___ Mode Projects you devise here must take up this theme. Working from your self-understanding, the goal here is to discover where you, with your particular interests and talents (including the knowledge and know-how you're cultivating in this class), might be best suited to make a positive impact on your world.  To that end, you’ll want to use your projects in this unit to learn more about issues that are close to your heart and explore how others have tried to make an impact on those issues.

 

You are required to include two of the three possible 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 Composing with the ___ Mode project and Theorizing the ___ Mode 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:

 

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, it may still be a question or an invitation, but in this unit, you should be working toward building some supported opinions and expressing your values.) It DOES STILL 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 exploration of an/issue(s) of interest

 

 

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. Explore your burning enthusiasm to build from your self-exploration toward your final intervention project issue intervention

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 search for a personally meaningful contribution to the world

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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

 

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.  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.