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Discuss This!: Structuring Reading Discussions through Collaborative Annotations

A DWRL Practicum Online Module by Abby Burns. As a hard-of-hearing instructor who struggles intermittently with listening fatigue, there are days when keeping up with class discussion eats away at all of my energy (or requires more energy than I have), diminishing my capacity to respond in real time. One...

Proposal Assignment

You will write a persuasive argument proposing a course of action to address your chosen local controversy. This essay should acknowledge different viewpoints and recommend a solution that could convince multiple stakeholders. The project could be a more practical proposal, like one that would be aimed at the city council or...

Student Essay AI Co-Writing Public Demonstration

This is a small public demonstration of artificial intelligence (AI) co-writing in classroom contexts. The essays collected here respond to a proposal writing assignment assigned as part of the first-year composition course at the University of Texas at Austin. Each sample essay includes the final revised essay and all prompts...

Lesson Plan: Teaching Context with Video Creation

Undergraduate students sometimes have trouble leveraging historical context to the end of persuasion. Reasons for this include that they may not see contextualizing (including the use of historical context) as a discrete and substantial task worthy of the same creative intellectual effort given the construction of arguments. That contextualizing is...

Lesson Plan: Visualizing Sound by Captioning Nonspeech Sounds

Although closed-captioning is usually thought of in terms of accessibility, it also highlights the larger rhetorical significance of sound—a significance which is most notably taken up in sound studies. The convergence of rhetoric with sound studies has become increasingly salient to rhetorical theory as noted in the review essay “Auscultating...

Lesson Plan: Viewing>writing>listening Pedagogical Versions of Access

Existentially, this lesson plan is about challenging student conceptions of information dissemination and questioning notions of universality embedded in web narratives of access. We like to think of the internet as a democratic space of unlimited maneuverability. But for many users, it is not. Here, we want students to consider...