1. In teaching what a Rhetorical Situation is to your students, would you have your students read Devitt's article? Why or why not. Also, would you accompany Devitt's article with Bitzer's article on the rhetorical situation or do you think Devitt's article is enough?
2. Yancey points out that portfolio grading gives the teacher and the student the benefit of looking at the student's work as a whole rather than fragmented pieces. Are there any ways you all can think of that would also allow the teacher and student to view the student's work from the semester as a whole while using paper-by-paper grading? Or is this advantage limited to portfolio grading?
- Emily
Emily,
ReplyDeleteI’m trying so hard to come up with a response to your second question that says yes, they can think of he student’s work as a whole without a portfolio. I only have two options that provide something close to that. Both involve the students responding to and connecting their work. In my internship, the class is basing their genre project off the research they did for their second essay. They are being asked to take claims and ideas from that and rework them for a different audience. This asks them to reflect on what they have already learned and also consider how they should communicate relative to their audience. The other instance would be through meta-cognitive reflection. We might ask a student to consider how feedback from a prior paper affected their approach to this paper. But I’m not sure how this second technique would be overall. Furthermore, I’m not sure if either of these enable the student and teacher to view the student’s work as a whole. It comes close because their work is connected, even inter-textually linked in a way. Speaking of meta-cognitive writing (and with relation to your first question) I was thinking while I read Reiff’s piece that this was the kind of writing I would want my students to see (at least the beginning portion) but I’m not sure I would actually show it to them. These readings overall had me wondering how I could help students attach their writing to more than just my classroom but put things in a larger context.