Assignments/Activities

Discovering the Social through the Personal: Students from marginalized communities often view academic writing as foreign, abstract, or too challenging. Writing courses can help all students to find meaning in their experiences, gain confidence in their identity, and give voice to their ideas. To address this challenge, Soni Adhikari, for instance, assigns an essay called the “discovery narrative” that “encourages students to connect personal experiences to social issues that they care about.” The narrative component of the paper helps students write from their personal experiences, as they “discover” broader/deeper themes by using reflective writing as an exploratory tool. This assignment “has best engaged students from diverse backgrounds who might be anxious about sharing personal experiences and students who hesitate to adopt an ‘academic’ voice on complex issues.”

Research on DEI Issues: Writing courses let students draw upon personal and sociopolitical experiences as they explore complex academic issues. In Dr. Robert Kaplan’s WRT 102 class, students make a “constitutionally-based argument about what they would like to see changed about a current issue of their choice.” They learn about “how natural rights are embedded into the 5th and 14th Amendments, and how those rights are the basis for equality.” Some students, for instance, have used both amendments to propose laws to combat anti-AAPI hate crimes, educational inequities, and gerrymandering and voter ID laws.

Global Justice Multimedia Project: This assignment provides “opportunities to investigate in depth [an] aspect of conflict resolution” from the perspective of human rights and social justice in major global conflicts (Duffy). Students are “encouraged to use video, audio, still images, texts, animation, social media components, etc,” drawing upon course reading materials and independent research, including interviews. Some possible topical areas for the projects include “international or civil conflict.” The instructor holds three in-class mock negotiations involving “four teams and a jury”:

One week before the in-class negotiation, students, including members of the jury from “civil society,” are paired and assigned a specific character or role to play. With their partners, they research their assigned character’s background and position regarding the topic/conflict in advance; they come to class prepared to strategize and present from a one-page brief on their position in their team. Students learn to defend the parties involved being grounded in ideals of human rights and equal justice for all.

Critical Literacy Study: An assignment in Dr. Patricia Medved’s WRT 201 Grammar and Style asks students to work in groups to investigate a “gatekeeper” of language by researching how scholars in writing studies, linguistics, or history “question and challenge these standard bearers to discover what values they defend and support.” As written in the assignment instructions, students’ research “should lead to some provocative conversations around what we have been taught are the ‘rules’ and whether or not these rules should continue to govern written communication.” The results of the students’ research and critical study of a language gatekeeper are then turned into a podcast and made available to the university community through a you.stonybook website.