Description: This unit is a culminating (end-of-semester) project designed to have students bring together the knowledge they have developed throughout the semester in the service of purposefully joining a real-world conversation, addressing a specific audience (or related set of audiences) who are part of that conversation. This unit has a small number of texts that the whole class reads and/or analyzes together. Instead, a lot of the work happening in this unit is project-driven and process-oriented.
Time Frame: This unit was designed/paced as the last unit of the course (and it followed an earlier unit focused on rhetorical analysis of a multimodal artifact). Thus, students had some prior experience with thinking about and analyzing rhetorical situations, and with analyzing how different modes of a text work together rhetorically. In this unit, we focus on helping students identify serious issues and ongoing conversations occurring in their social spheres and local communities. Students are asked to do some research on these issues/conversations and ultimately to assess the credibility and relevance of particular sources for their rhetorical purposes. Originally, the unit was designed to take about 7 weeks but when we moved classes on line in Spring 2020, a week of class was cancelled and the unit was adapted to fit the remaining weeks.
ACE 1/English 151 Aim & Scopes: This unit is built around ACE 1 and the Aims and Scopes for Engl 151 related to “gain[ing] practice at primary and secondary research as a means of developing and clarifying their stance toward their topic and/or acquiring a richer understanding of the context...of their argument” (Goal 5). Engl 150 has a similar outcome focused more specifically on inquiry and this project can be adapted to Engl 150 as well
