The Task and Teams
For your final Exploratory of the semester (audible cheers!), I’ll ask you to work in small teams to construct a network of concerns feeding into, emerging from, or occurring within our discussion of “literacy and community” based on this week's (and the previous week's, if you wish) readings. I’m choosing to keep the turn in scare quotes for obvious reasons:
- it is vast, given that our readings this week cannot be conflated under the same goals.
- it is possible that not all discussions of “literacy” necessarily serve all conceptions of “community” work in Rhetoric and Composition.
With these challenges in mind as you complete Exploratory 3, try not to let them hinder you as you chart out your network of concerns between literacy, community, and your particular interests. In other words, this is an opportunity to make visible, now, some of the other threads, strains, issues or topics that are meaningful to you, as well as how they contribute to or stem from this theoretical turn.
I will suggest the following work teams for this final assignment:
- Amanda and Caitlin
- Angela, Brendan, and Liana
- Cindy and Joel
Populating Your Network
While there are many forms of networks, I think it easiest for us to consider this assignment in terms of social (or relational) networks. Such networks might be flat, multilayered, and/or multidimensional, but what they have in common is that they provide scopic views of various relationships. Thus, what I am asking you to network is a set of significant relationships among our readings that you don't think has been explicitly identified in the way I have named this turn. What do you want to show, why is that important, and how can we viably see this contributing to or stemming from what we read? Let that be a guiding factor for your group!
While there are many forms of networks, I think it easiest for us to consider this assignment in terms of social (or relational) networks. Such networks might be flat, multilayered, and/or multidimensional, but what they have in common is that they provide scopic views of various relationships. Thus, what I am asking you to network is a set of significant relationships among our readings that you don't think has been explicitly identified in the way I have named this turn. What do you want to show, why is that important, and how can we viably see this contributing to or stemming from what we read? Let that be a guiding factor for your group!
Designing and Distributing Your Network
Please choose the best platform/way to depict this network and don't think twice about it. I am most interested in having you think together about how best to solve the problem of this assignment and encourage you to let discussions of your medium or platform emerge from that problem-solving. Thus, if you want to create and recreate this on a whiteboard, and take digital images of your whiteboarding, that is perfectly fine. Or, if you want to experiment with free network mapping tools (i.e., Canva, draw.io, SmartDraw, etc.), that is also perfectly fine. Or, you may come up with another solution. However, please try not revert to a standard platform simply because you are accustomed to it (i.e., Prezi, Wix) for the simple reason that it might prevent you from showing some networked relationships that you think are essential. As always, make this network as robust and as thorough as you possibly can. Also, to help us as viewers, please do include use in-text (parenthetical) citations within that network so that we can trace its particular strains.
Please upload your completed network to Canvas by the beginning of class time on 11/7/17, and bring a hard or digital copy to class for our discussion (just in case).
The Critical Blog Post
For your follow-up critical blog post (which you will do individually), please reflect on the network assignment and how some aspect of the task illuminated/complicated/addressed/extended your reading of our texts for this week. This critical blog post should be somewhat formal. It should be a minimum of 3-4 well developed paragraphs in length (a couple of screens), and my great desire is to see you engage expertly with both task and texts, at times speaking through or alongside what we read, and speaking with some insight about what we read. Since your post will be intertextual, I'll ask you to use parenthetical citations where needed, and to be clear that we know which articles/authors you are referencing. I will also ask you to embed a link to or an image of the network directly into the post.
You will post directly to our course blog, so what you write will become the temporary landing page (please keep that in mind as you polish and format). Be sure to define terms and unpack assumptions for us, using your posts as occasions to teach. Because the blog is somewhat performative, I'll ask you to title your posts creatively (or insightfully). Feel free to compose your post as a response to someone else’s, if you see an interesting conversation starting on the blog. Please post to the blog by 3:30 p.m. on Thursday 11/9/17.
This is work, but have fun with it!
-Dr. G
