What is/are the most significant thing/s that you learned which you plan to use in some way in the future?

How to create a syllabus and andragogy are two of the most significant things I’ve learned about in this this course. Both of these will be of use to me in the future as I would like to teach at some point and hope to have a significant amount of adult learners.

In the near future, I anticipate being in a position where I am planning training sessions and instructing employees on best practices. For these sessions, I anticipate needing to design course materials that are designed with consideration being made for who my audience is, just as I would for a college course. As we’ve discussed in class, adult learners often have different expectations for a course and require a different sort of interaction than students in their late teens and early twenties. From my previous experiences training adults, most want a lesson to relate directly to their job functions and to be easily executable. Rather than providing abstract concepts, or delivering “good to know” bits of information, the big question is, “why is this important to me?”

In addition to learning about syllabi and andragogy, I learned about the importance of teaching students about how important their newly learned rhetorical analysis skills are to assessing real life situations. One situation that Dr. Rice mentioned was the process of buying a car, an exciting and stressful task for most adults. After researching the car you are interested in and deciding on the price range you are willing to pay, stepping into a car dealership to make your purchase seems to be the hardest part. I’ve had many people tell me that they had their whole car buying experience planned out but ended up leaving the dealership unsatisfied and somehow feeling duped. Car salesmen are notorious for selling customers what they believe is the best for them rather than what the customer requests. Some car salesman have no problem “lying” to customers in order to make sales. Students who understand what rhetorical analysis is would be better equipped to combat a situation of being misled in a sales transaction.

The last significant thing I’ve [re]learned this semester is the importance of helping immigrants and visitors to America transition into their new lives. Working with students at the ELS center was a very rewarding experience and one that I think all Americans should experience. Since many of our ancestors immigrated to this country, Americans should be more welcoming of newcomers. Instead, much of the new stories you hear today are about intolerance and hate. I’d like to think sharing in the immigrant experience with someone starting a new life here would help to change people’s minds.

Write about what you'd like to write about. But write!

Wow! A chance to write about anything? This is exciting, yet terrifying. In just one semester of graduate school, I’ve become used to writing to some sort of prompt. Writing has become a part of my daily routine; in actuality, I’m writing when I’m eating breakfast and when I’m driving. I write when I’m watching television and when I’m walking in my neighborhood. What I mean is that I am constantly composing thoughts that may take the form of written words but more often than not remain strings of thoughts.

Many of my friends write blogs where they discuss with friends and strangers every nuance of their life. Dinner plans, reviews on the latest movie, and rants about their jobs are just a few subjects discussed. Gone are the days where we pick up the phone and ask one another about our lives. There’s no need with blogs and other social media platforms. This is problematic to me because it takes the element of surprise and genuine interest out of our interactions. I like to think that I’m still old-fashioned because I refuse to chronicle my every move on the internet, but, I think I’m really just behind the times. It still baffles me when my grandmother calls me to inquire about an event I attended or about an outfit I wore because she saw it on Facebook. No, she doesn’t have a Facebook account; rather, she has family members that like to blab to her about my whereabouts. She means no harm with these inquiries because she sees Facebook as an extension of our face-to-face family interactions.

I mention all of this to say that multi-modal forms of communication have become a way of life for most Americans. Having the ability to see someone while talking to them in a different time zone is amazing. But, with all of these forms of communication, are we actually becoming closer to each other? Or is the technology pushing us away from one another? Are the conversations we have about unimportant occurrences? Or are they about meaningful experiences?

To combat this feeling of being in technology limbo, I’ve started to write physical notes and letters to friends and family. It’s exciting to me to draft my thoughts on paper, copy them over to my “nice” letter-writing stock, and mail it off. It’s also pretty expensive to do this since stamps are almost 50 cents each. I feel satisfied when my recipient opens my letter and is able to physically see and feel my thoughts. Maybe I feel like my words are permanent when written on paper? Do they have more meaning when transmitted this way?

This was truly a random post! I’ve thought about this subject for some time but hadn’t been able to put my thoughts into sentences. 

Thank you Dr. Rice for your wisdom and guidance this semester! I’ve really enjoyed this class and learned much more than I could have ever expected to. If I do teach in the future, I’ll have the guidance you provided as a road map to success.

What is the thesis to your article for this course? What support will you cite to help you make your case?

This assignment makes me both nervous and excited. I’ve never written an essay with the goal of publication, but am glad we are jumping into this during our first semester in graduate school. With that being said, I’m planning to approach this assignment by breaking it into several related parts.

My thesis isn’t solid yet, but I have a general idea of what I want to write about. Here are the ideas/themes I am exploring in relation to composition studies:

• Crossing boundaries between student and teacher.
• Crossing boundaries between cultures, languages, and geographical regions.
• Crossing boundaries across academic disciplines.

Some of the authors that we’ve read in class that I plan to use for my research are: Royster, Fulkerson, and Bizzell.

Part of the research I plan to undertake is on how these boundaries have shifted over the past few decades. Are the boundaries more transparent today?

Review the learning objectives for this course. What's one thing you've learned that connects to an objective and to your future job? Also, what sorts of training do you wish you could have / could HAVE had?

This course has taught me a great deal about the history of composition studies as well as how to teach composition to students. Although I don’t immediately plan to teach after completion of this degree, this is valuable information that will assist me throughout my career. All of the learning objectives for this course are important, but the one that I have learned the most about is audience awareness. In this course, we’ve learned to analyze audience and purpose in rhetorical situations and make appropriate choices.

Audience awareness has been a part of my vocabulary and factors into my practical application in the workplace. In my experience, audience awareness is utilized when writing for a client or customer. Composition programs worry if the lessons they teach their students will be retained and used in future workplace situations. I believe much of their worry isn’t warranted as today, more than ever, audience/user centered awareness is understood. For example, I worked for an automobile insurance company that valued making the customer’s experience a pleasant one their first priority. All portions of the customer experience, including letters sent out about coverage, website design, and documents related to accident claims were customer focused. We often asked, “How will the customer consume this information? Is it useful to them? Will it lead them to remain a customer?” Without taking these questions into consideration, the insurance company would not have been able to gain new customers or retain the current customer base. This was the first company I worked for after completing my undergraduate degree and I was excited to find that audience awareness was truly practiced in the workplace. Now that I reflect on my experiences at this company, I realize that many companies miss the mark where audience awareness is concerned. They often have no connection with their customers and can only speculate on what the customer expects. Now that I am back in the classroom, I am glad to see that audience awareness is still perceived as being important in the workplace. Without it, I suppose it would seem like employees are talking at the customer instead of having a conversation with them.

For this week’s blog, I also wanted to talk about the question Dr. Rice asked about training. If we are discussing training as a document instructor in the composition program, my wish is that I would have had a chance to review student writing prior to starting the position. My expectations of the type of writing I would see and my response to this writing are very different from the reality. On the job training is definitely a common practice, but in this composition program, I think it is a disservice to the student, as well as the instructors. In my case, I haven’t reviewed academic writing in over 6 years; instead, my most recent experiences have been with workplace communications, which are very different from student essays. Having an idea of what is expected of me before grading “live” student documents would have been very helpful.

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. If you didn't produce a syllabus, discuss the relevance of this week's readings to your future workplace.

I have many revisions to make to my syllabus assignment, but, I am fairly sure that one assignment I will keep is my photo essay/visual rhetoric exploration assignment. In this assignment, students will take a series of photos that describe an experience that is important to them. For example, describe the best birthday you ever had or describe how you felt after you received your first car. To help narrow the focus of the assignment, students will be required to complete this using no more than 15 photos. Photos can be ones taken by the student or photos found online that are okay to use under fair use laws. The purpose of this assignment is for students to learn how to express themselves without using words by taking into account the story that can be told by a series of photos. When selecting photos, I’d like students to take into account the order in which the present the photos as well as the emotions the photos will likely evoke from their audience of fellow students.

I think this is an assignment where students may falter because the format will be very unfamiliar to them and will require a different type of thinking to accomplish successfully. Also, this assignment will require students to reflect in a way that they may not have before. If a student is coming into my course straight out of high school, this may be the first time they’ve been asked to reflect on their life in this manner. We are a culture that takes a multitude of photos, but how often do we stop and reflect on them other than the surface message they present? My hope is that students will find this assignment to be a rewarding experience and will aid in their development as writers by opening their eyes in different ways.

I suppose failure in this assignment would be if a student doesn’t delve deeply enough into their photo analysis and the sequence of their essay doesn’t make sense. How would I make this a teachable moment? I think the best way to go about this would be to ask students to think about how events are normally sequenced in their lives. For example, if you are taking pictures outdoors, watch the positioning of the sun in your photos. If you are selecting photos from different places (personal collection plus photos found on the internet) how are you connecting them together? Do they flow well or do they seem disjointed? Life events generally have a logical flow—this essay assignment should also have the same logical progression of events.

List 5 terms you don't quite know yet how to define from our final keywords list. Next identify three in other students' blog you do know how to define, and comment on them there in those blogs.

Here are five terms that I am not yet able to define:

1. Peer evaluation
2. Empowerment
3. Errors and expectations
4. Intertextuality
5. Marginalization 

What is one assignment you will include in your syllabus assignment that uses collaboration and/or technology and/or other things Yancey, Selfe, Breuch, Bruffee, or Shaughnessey have discussed?

I like Bruffee’s ideas of peer influence through collaborative learning and think that the methods he describes are a must for all first year composition classes. From my experiences as a DI and from hearing about CI experiences with students, I believe that a combination of in person and virtual collaboration is necessary for students to remain engaged.

Many first-year composition classes follow a traditional model: the instructor decides which material is appropriate for the students to learn and the students respond by composing a response in writing. I think this method stifles creativity and doesn’t create an environment where students have their opportunity to contribute meaningfully to the outcome of the class. Also, students often don’t have the opportunity for an open discussion on what worked well in their assignment and what didn’t when assignments are graded and returned to students without pre-submittal instructor feedback. Rather than waiting for this feedback to come after an assignment has been graded, I think it would be helpful for students to participate in a peer review and mock pre-submittal review of an assignment before it is turned in. This would teach students how to give and receive feedback. I haven’t yet fleshed out all of the details, but if I were to include an assignment like this in my syllabus project, I would structure it as a three part project.

The first part would be a virtual peer review session that requires students in groups of 3-4 to pair up and revise a document real-time using a tool like Google Docs. The document chosen for them to revise would be no more than 2-3 pages. These are the goals I would set for the sessions:

• Develop their own analytical skills
• Become better proofreaders
• Learn how to take advice on suggested edits from a peer and decide which edits to proceed with
• Become more comfortable with the kinds of edit requests they might encounter later in their academic or professional careers

The second part of the assignment would be a mock pre-submittal review of the document that was peer reviewed. The students in each peer review group would meet with the course instructor and discuss the draft document. This session would help the instructor see the thought processes of the students; in turn, the students have an inside look at what instructors are looking for students to accomplish with their writing. In addition, it will encourage students to meet with their instructors for feedback on their assignments before submitting them. After this session, the students would set up a final session through Google Docs to finish up the document.

The last part of the peer review assignment would be a brief in-class presentation where each of the small groups would discuss what they learned from the assignment.