MY SITE
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When designing this course I thought about what was the most valuable skills I learned during my own research process. I believe that working and reflecting on the projects that gave me agency over what I was researchind and how I presented that information allowed me to be more comfortable presenting myself as a professional. I tried to give students an increasing amount of agency in this course's design.
The first project is intended to have students think about the different ways that early moderns thought of the supernatural. Hamlet's ghost because it draws from so many different traditions and because Hamlet himself ignores a lot of advice from contemporary treatise writers, makes an excellent starting point for the course. Because the first project is an argumentative paper, a genre that most upper level English majors are likely familiar with, I've tried to keep my rubric simple. I feel comfortable not spending a lot of in class time workshopping the genre. But because I may have students who are still developing their argumentative skills and may need extra support, I've built in an option for students to revise over the course of the semester until they are happy with the assignment.
Projects 2, and optionally Project 3, are highly collaborative in nature. I think humanities projects are to often constructed for individual work and clash with how many career paths asks employees to work in a collaborative environment. I've also seen in other disciplines that while there is a focus on collaborative projects, there is also little formal training on how to work together. Part of my plan for the course, which is only partially reflected in the syllabus, is to emphasize learning how to collaborate. I've made space in the courses schedule for students to work together on research and writing in Project 2 and 3 during class time. During Project 2 when all students are working in groups, I plan to use activities developed from William Dyer's Team Building and Scrum, a management framework that is often used in software development. My goal is to get students openly discussing their roles, responsibilities, successes, and failures when working as a team. My hope is that this early intervention and continual guidance will make the projects and team dynamics run smoother than if students are left to their own devices.
Projects 2 and 3 also ask students to use technology to work in a multimodal fashion. Because it's difficult to know what kinds of careers students will enter into after graduation, I wanted to give them a space to have the option of writing with visual and auditory components in mind. I want them to ask how different formats affect how they choose to write and how audiences might receive their work.
The final aspect of the course that I want to touch on is the collaborative rubric in Project 3. By the time students reach the upper levels of the English major, they should be developing a nuanced understanding of what makes their writing good. They should also be able to think about how an assignment is an opportunity to think about their learning goals. By giving a lot of room for students to actively define and assess their writing, I hope to give them a sense of becoming more independent writers that have the skills to define good writing without the judgement of a teacher.
The first project is intended to have students think about the different ways that early moderns thought of the supernatural. Hamlet's ghost because it draws from so many different traditions and because Hamlet himself ignores a lot of advice from contemporary treatise writers, makes an excellent starting point for the course. Because the first project is an argumentative paper, a genre that most upper level English majors are likely familiar with, I've tried to keep my rubric simple. I feel comfortable not spending a lot of in class time workshopping the genre. But because I may have students who are still developing their argumentative skills and may need extra support, I've built in an option for students to revise over the course of the semester until they are happy with the assignment.
Projects 2, and optionally Project 3, are highly collaborative in nature. I think humanities projects are to often constructed for individual work and clash with how many career paths asks employees to work in a collaborative environment. I've also seen in other disciplines that while there is a focus on collaborative projects, there is also little formal training on how to work together. Part of my plan for the course, which is only partially reflected in the syllabus, is to emphasize learning how to collaborate. I've made space in the courses schedule for students to work together on research and writing in Project 2 and 3 during class time. During Project 2 when all students are working in groups, I plan to use activities developed from William Dyer's Team Building and Scrum, a management framework that is often used in software development. My goal is to get students openly discussing their roles, responsibilities, successes, and failures when working as a team. My hope is that this early intervention and continual guidance will make the projects and team dynamics run smoother than if students are left to their own devices.
Projects 2 and 3 also ask students to use technology to work in a multimodal fashion. Because it's difficult to know what kinds of careers students will enter into after graduation, I wanted to give them a space to have the option of writing with visual and auditory components in mind. I want them to ask how different formats affect how they choose to write and how audiences might receive their work.
The final aspect of the course that I want to touch on is the collaborative rubric in Project 3. By the time students reach the upper levels of the English major, they should be developing a nuanced understanding of what makes their writing good. They should also be able to think about how an assignment is an opportunity to think about their learning goals. By giving a lot of room for students to actively define and assess their writing, I hope to give them a sense of becoming more independent writers that have the skills to define good writing without the judgement of a teacher.