Happy Spring!
We had a fun and productive “Day of Plausible Dada” at our spring conference March 31st. Participants had a chance to be the students in a Studio activity, started brainstorming their own Studio activities, and got a jumpstart on designing their course inquiries for Fall 2022.
The Studio Experience session asked participants to create an infographic (link), an activity which encompassed four of the five components that a good studio session should have:
- Introducing or working with a specific technology or tool
- Workshopping with the technology/tool toward some end
- Collaborating/sharing
- Rhetorical work
We were blown away by the infographics that were shared, some of which you can see scattered throughout this blog post. Not everyone completed an infographic, however; some just used the time to explore Canva (or other platforms such as Adobe Spark and Google Draw) as a tool for multimodal composition. Some groups did double duty, using the time to wrap their heads around the major components of ENGL 1007 by creating infographics about them. We wanted teachers to experience the infographic not as a readymade form to perfect but, rather, as a sometimes unwieldy or arbitrary constraint that, if embraced, makes visible the negotiations and compromises inherent in any act of writing. Studio work can foster reflection and awareness of forms and audience that might go unnoticed in more routinized seminar work (e.g., discussion and essay writing).
In Session II: Designing Studio Activities, participants took some time to reflect on their Studio experience in groups and came up with some ideas for Studio activities which might be completed in one or two sessions by their students. Among some of the great ideas were:
- Infographics or memes to supplement student essays
- Mini-soundscapes or interviews
- Photo essays
- Elements of a portfolio project
- Rhetorical Tik Toks and analyses of self-presentations on a social media platform
- Infographics of the main expectations of the course syllabus (get them to read those syllabi!) or how to cite MLA
- A variation of the New York Times Close Read series (see a NYT example here)
In Session III: Designing a Course Inquiry, participants were given a template and a chunk of time to begin building their course inquiries for fall.
We also received a lot of helpful feedback from instructors about implementing ENGL1007 and we’re looking forward to hosting some Q&A sessions soon that will address questions that people may still have.
If you missed the conference or would like to take another look at the slideshows, here are the links:
And, of course, here’s a link to our brand new ENGL1007 Course Overview.