Overview
These are assignment prompts you might use in a place-conscious classroom. Some of these assignments adapt existing composition theory and assignments through a place-conscious lens. Others are created explicitly for place-conscious classrooms. As with all material on this site, these are intended to inspire. You may copy anything here directly, or you may further adapt to meet your own institutional needs. You may also create new material using these as a starting point.
As you adapt and create new assignments, consider sharing them with me (jlclem@ncsu.edu) so that they may be added to this page for other instructors to re-use or remix.
Assignments from Scholarship
These are genres of assignments based on or fully borrowed from ones written about in published scholarship. Along with an overview of each kind of activity, you can find suggestions for adaptations and bibliographic information for the texts from which assignments are derived.
Place-Based Autoethnography
Ferreira, Felipe de S. (2017). Critical sustainability studies: A holistic and visionary conception of socio-ecological conscientization. Journal of Sustainability Education, 13.
Leack, R. D. (2019). From chaos to cosmos, and back: Place-conscious autoethnography in first-year composition. Composition Forum (41).
Overview
This project asks students to conduct both primary and secondary research and synthesize them into a research report in the form of an autoethnography. In Leack’s assignment, students identify a subculture group of which they are a part. They then select a cultural artifact that is important to this group. Through investigating both the material item and the discursive group identity, students gain a better understanding of the interdependence of place, material, and identity. They then put these findings and insights into conversation with published research regarding their subculture.
Possible Adaptations
- This project can be adapted from various pedagogical approaches. In a WID-based class, you might encourage more formal engagement with disciplinary writing conventions. You may choose to use a place or a building instead of a cultural artifact. You may also engage with more formal research methods. This project could be preceded by an annotated bibliography to help students learn to find, evaluate, organize, and summarize scholarly sources.
Deep Maps
Brooke, R., & McIntosh, I. (2007). Deep maps. In C. Keller and C. Weisser (Eds.), Locations of Composition (pp. 131-149), State University of New York Press.
Overview
This assignment asks students to draw a map of the path they take to get from home to the classroom. After drawing, students engage with these questions:
- What images and/or locations feature most prominently on your map? What is the contermost “thing” on your map?
- Is your map predominantly of rural or urban locations?
Possible Adaptations
- The exercise Mapping Your Major described here adapts this concept of mapping for use in a WID-based writing course to help students understand and explore the ecologies of a disciplinary discourse communities.
- This exercise could be adapted as a scaffolding exercise for an autoethnography project like the one proposed by Tombro (2016). Ask students to map out the people and objects involved in a subculture in which they participate. Ask them to consider what or who is most central and why. Ask them what people look like and why. Ask them who is absent and why.
Evaluating Phenomenology of Spaces
Campbell, S. (2008). The complexity of places. In L. Christensen & H. Crimmel (Eds.), Teaching about place: Learning from the land, (pp. 81–97). University of Nevada Press.
Overview
This exercise asks students to look around them at whatever space they currently inhabit (a classroom, a library meeting room, a coffee shop, their dorm or bedroom, and so forth). After brief reflection, they write about what the space looks, sounds, smells, or feels like. The focus is to describe how the space impacts the writer on an affective, sensory, phenomenological level (i.e., primarily through the senses, not the perceptions or meanings they attribute to the place).
This can be used as an early exercise in getting students used to thinking about and analyzing physical spaces and places in the same way they might analyze alphabetic texts or visual media. This can be used as an introduction to more disciplinary rhetorical engagement with and analysis of spaces and places.
Possible Adaptations
- This assignment could be completed using any space as the object of study. Campbell recommends shifting the usual place of class to do this. You can go outside, to a different room, or a different building. Keep in mind the accessibility of the location you choose.
Analyzing Spatial Rhetoric
Chao, R. (2020). Analyzing physical spaces as a means of understanding rhetoric. Prompt: A Journal of Academic Writing Assignments, 4(1), 18-28.
Overview
Possible Adaptations
- This assignment could use any built environment as the object of study. Dickinson and Maugh (2008) use a grocery store, and Dickinson and Aiello (2016) use a coffee shop. In the past, I have done this exercise using the Tex-Mex fast-casual genre of restaurants. Students compare the visual and spatial rhetoric of spaces inside a Moe’s Southwest Grill, a Chipotle Mexican Grill, and a Salsarita’s Fresh Mexican Cantina. Keep in mind the past experiences of your students as your select spaces, as some students may not be familiar with the spaces you choose. Consider providing images of each space so students who have not visited can still participate in discussion.
Examples Assignment Prompts from Previous Classes
These are assignment descriptions and activity prompts I have used in the past with some success. In my own context, I teach in a WID-based course at a large 4-year institution with a strong STEM focus. These assignment descriptions show how place-conscious approach to FYC can co-exist productively with other models of FYC.
Place-Based Autoethnography
Based on:
Brown, S. (2016). Experiencing place: An auto-ethnography of digging and belonging. Public History Review, 23, 9–24.
Ellis, C., Adams, T., & Bochner, A. P. (2011). Autoethnography: An overview. Historical Social Research 4(36). 273–290.
Ferreira, Felipe de S. (2017). Critical sustainability studies: A holistic and visionary conception of socio-ecological conscientization. Journal of Sustainability Education, 13.
Leack, R. D. (2019). From chaos to cosmos, and back: Place-conscious autoethnography in first-year composition. Composition Forum (41).
Tombro, M. (2016). Teaching autoethnography: Personal writing in the classroom. Minneapolis Open Textbook Library.
Wall, S. (2016). Toward a moderate autoethnography. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 15(1), 1–9.
Overview
This is one major projects completed in a rhetorical sequence of 4 projects. As I have used it, it follows an annotated bibliography project in which students do the secondary research to inform the primary autoethnographic research of this project. The project is intended to introduce students to principles and practices of secondary and primary research, information literacy, evaluation of scholarly and popular sources, considerations of audience, genre conventions of academic writing in the social sciences, and critical engagement with the interrelation between identity and place.
Mapping Your Major
Based on:
Brooke, R., & McIntosh, I. (2007). Deep maps. In C. Keller and C. Weisser (Eds.), Locations of Composition (pp. 131-149), State University of New York Press.
Gere, A. R., Swofford, S. C., Silver, N., & Pugh, M. (2015). Interrogating disciplines/disciplinarity in WAC/WID: An institutional study. College Composition and Communication, 67(2), 243-266.
Marcovich, A., & Shinn, T. (2012). Regimes of science production and diffusion: Towards a transverse organization of knowledge. Scientiae Studia, 10, 33-64.
Prior, P. (1999). Writing/disciplinarity: A sociohistoric account of literate activity in the academy. Routledge.
Overview
This exercise asks students to use spatial relationships to understand the various dimensions of the discourse community of their chosen major. First, using Prior’s (1999) five interconnected dimensions of communities, persons, artifacts, institutions, and practices, students list out or draw as many of each category as they can think of in their own major. Then, using Marcovich and Shinn’s (2012) concept of new disciplinarity, they add the spatial and temporal elements of borderlands, project, and elasticity by drawing the most important or integral elements in the center of a circle and then drawing the farther out elements in spatial relationship with the center, or nucleus of their major.
Where Are You From?
Based on:
Brooke, R. (2006).
Brooke, R., & McInstosh, J. (2007). Deep maps: Teaching rhetorical engagement through place-conscious education. In C. Keller & C. Weisser (Eds.) The locations of composition (pp. 131–149). Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Overview
Like the “I am from” poem assignment supported by Robert Brooke, this prose-based assignment asks students to write about a place they consider “home.” They write about the phenomenological elements of their home first by describing what it looks, sounds, smells, and feels like to be in that space. They then explore their own historical attachments to the space that help make it an important and meaningful place for them. Finally, they explore possible misconceptions that others might hold about their home place and begin to push back against such narratives by discussing why those conceptions are incorrect and where they might come from.
Comparing Spatial Rhetoric of the Tex-Mex Fast Casual Restaurant Genre
Based on:
Dickinson, G., & Maugh, C. M. (2008). Placing visual rhetoric: Finding material comfort in Wild Oats Market. In C. A. Hill & M. Helmers (Eds.), Defining visual rhetorics (pp. 259–276). Lawrence Erlbaum.
Overview
This assignment asks students to consider the different rhetorical effects of various elements of the spatial construction of similar fast-casual restaurants they might know. Students practice understanding the connection between design choices and rhetorical effect on particular audiences by comparing menu items, colors, logos, slogans, interior design, furniture arrangement, and materials used in each restaurant. In this case, students compare Moe’s Southwest Grill, Salsarita’s Fresh Mexican Grill, and Chipotle Mexican Grill. For students who are not familiar with these restaurants, it can be helpful to provide images of interior spaces, logos, menus, and food items.