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.