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Today's guest blogger is Jeanne Bohannon, an Assistant Professor of English in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Kennesaw State University. She believes in creating democratic learning spaces, where students become stakeholders in their own rhetorical growth though authentic engagement in class communities. Her research interests include evaluating digital literacies and critical engagement pedagogies; performing feminist rhetorical recoveries; and growing informed and empowered student scholars. Reach Jeanne at: jeanne_bohannon@kennesaw.edu and www.rhetoricmatters.org |
At the start of each semester, I am nervous. I don’t sleep well the night before classes start, and I try to be early on the first day. If I feel this way, I am certain students do as well. It must be something about fear of the unknown, or maybe just the need to make a good first impression. Either way, I know that we both need an ice-breaker to get our first day conversations off to a positive start. In today’s Multimodal Mondays post, I describe an activity I use to start productive conversations about writing on the first day of class; I am also interested to hear yours! Check out the listicle below for activity instructions, outcomes, and ideas on how to engage with students in a class community from first-year composition to upper division writing courses.
Measurable Learning Outcomes
After completing this activity, students will be able to:
Background Reading for Students and Instructors
Acts of reading and viewing visual texts are ongoing processes for attaining learning goals in dialogic, digital writing assignments. Below, I have listed a few foundational texts. You will no doubt have your own to enrich this list.
The Post-It Note Ice-breaker
Multimodal often makes us think of all things digital. For this activity, we need to think low-tech and kinesthetic learning. Think of this as a sense of presence and community while gearing up for modeling class discussions for the semester from Day 1.
Here’s what you need:
Hands-on multimodal activities makes us present in the moment of the classroom.
Here’s what you do:
Reflection
I have found that this first-day activity helps to introduce students to me and to each other. We also can see where our classmates place themselves in terms of writing genres. Students have also reported that this activity helps them situate themselves in the writing class and makes them feel less self-conscious about interacting with me. We might call it self-disclosure meets composition J
Stay tuned for Part Two of a post-it note activity – the Fishbowl.
Do you have an idea for a Multimodal Mondays activity or post? Contact Leah Rang for a chance to be featured on Andrea's blog.
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