Teaching students how to analyze an argument is no simple task, as rhetorical analysis exists on a spectrum of complexity ranging from the most commonly encountered modes of persuasion, to analytical frameworks that push the definition of “rhetorical action” to its limit and beyond. What this disparity demonstrates is that rhetoric is generative, inventional, it stipulates through rhetorical action its own limits, it defines itself through its own capacities. Moving students from summary to analysis in Unit 2, students are …
(Re)visualizing Data
Team Data Visualization is proud to present a new set of lesson plans that we’ve designed to be as cohesive as the first. With a little planning, anyone can share a data visualization lesson plan with their students. Sarah Welsh and Sierra Mendez collaborated on two lesson plans. The first takes inspiration from Dr. Johanna Wolfe and her work on rhetorical numbers to help students think about the often mistaken view that numbers always equal fact. The second provides a meditation on rhetorical …
Lesson Plan: Data Collection and Database Rhetorics
Some public data makes sense , and some data does not. Not only does this have to do with the way data is presented or cherry picked, but research suggests that in order to get credible results, surveys should provide clear questions that are unambiguous, unbiased, and worded in a way that prompts respondents to answer truthfully (Dillman 2007). This might seem obvious when it’s written down as it is here, but the importance of a survey’s rhetoric may not …
Cool Tools: Sound Mapping
Jazz began in New Orleans at the turn of the century and spread like wildfire in the 1920s, as men and women who perfected the genre booked gigs in Austin, Chicago, and New York. Musicians played live for youthful audiences, electrified by the new sound. As the genre traveled north, and later west, it transformed from Louis Armstrong’s optimistic trumpet to Thelonious Monk’s volatile piano solos. How may instructors demonstrate these changes in America’s cultural landscape, capturing both the physical …
Cool Tools: Piktochart
Have you thought about incorporating infographics into your classroom? Here at UT, the first year writing curriculum now includes an infographic assignment in which students are asked to remix their final persuasive essay into a visual form. The Digital Writing & Research Lab has been collaborating with the Department of Rhetoric & Writing to create an assignment prompt and tool recommendations, and given that it’s syllabus creation time around the country, we thought we’d share one of those resources with …
Digital Pedagogy Showcase: Google Tours in the Writing Classroom
At the DWRL’s 2016 Spring Digital Pedagogy Showcase, the Augmented Reality Research Group showed attendees how to design assignments and lesson plans using Google Tours.
Typographic Prosopopoeia Lesson Plan
Among the many other fantastic lesson plans outlined by our DWRL colleagues for the recent Digital Pedagogy Open House, the Typography Team™ offered the following exercise as one way to integrate a rhetoric of fonts into a writing classroom. In your typical freshman comp class, instructors often observe that a student tends to give more thought to what she writes than how she writes it, and so the goal of many assignments is to have students become more aware of how the how works to persuade, paying …
Assignment Spotlight: TimeMapper
When the DWRL staff started talking about preparing digital lesson plans for new instructors teaching first year composition in our classrooms, one of the first tools we settled on was TimeMapper. This free and open-source tool allows individuals and classes to quickly and easily build timemaps: timelines with associated geodata, in which every data point is mapped to both its temporal and physical location. It’s fun and accessible, and it builds on the DWRL’s long history of research in locative …
A Discussion on Discussions
Among teachers, silence is always a concern. You assign an intriguing, provocative and controversial reading to your students, hoping for a lively discussion in the classroom, a debate which will spark new ideas and lead to the questioning of old assumptions (assuming, that is, that students have in fact done the reading). But then, one is often met with silence. What went wrong? Did the reading not resonate with the students? Did they not find it interesting? Did they not …
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