When I develop an activity for a class, I think considering temporality is essential, especially if you are trying to contextualize the activity against the current socio-cultural moment. So, for this week in my business writing classes I planned a buffer week between the first unit and the second unit and designed in-class activities at the triangulation of genre studies, socio-cultural pedagogy, and current events.
The first activity was a response to Hurricane Dorian which devastated the Bahamas and other parts of the Caribbean just last week. Student-groups were tasked with crafting a social media policy for a fictional company called Humane Canine Health, a non-profit start-up which specializes in domesticated animal relief and rescue during catastrophic weather events. As an animal advocate myself, I really love this activity—but I think I love it even more because the activity prompts students to think about the implications of a social media policy for a non-profit company, a start-up company, one without the ethos of a large, multi-national corporation. Plus, students get to work with a genre they may not be familiar with, a social media policy, a genre which they might not get to work with otherwise. An activity like this is reusable since hurricanes, and other weather events, unfortunately occur quite often. So, that was Tuesday. On Thursday we performed a similar activity, but the genre student-groups were working with on this day was the press release. Instead of a non-profit start-up, students were prompted to think of themselves as technical communicators working for Nike and responding to the Colin Kaepernick advertisement which debuted last fall to correspond with the kickoff of the NFL season. Certainly, the advertisement is a year old now, so there is a certain distance temporally, but I think the advertisement works really well on my campus for a variety of reasons. The first reason I think this activity works well on my campus is that my institution has a football team, and a full athletics department, so sports are on the students minds during the beginning of the fall semester. Well, football, or at least tailgating, etc. We will leave it at that. The other reason I think that this activity works well on my campus is because I am not at a very culturally diverse campus. That is not to say that my campus is not diverse, and does not allocate resources to making our campus more diverse. The business writing students I teach though, are, for the most part, white and middle class. With the demographics of my campus, in mind, then, that this activity focused on a unique, culturally-relevant advertising campaign might challenge personal beliefs is healthy and helpful as they prepare to hit the job market, start their careers, or just go out into the world and do things. If you are interested in either of these assignments, please reach out to me! I am willing to share any and all resources! If you like what you are reading, feel free to leave a comment to get the conversation started!
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Charles WoodsPhD student focusing on Rhetoric, Composition, and Technical Communication at Illinois State University. Archives
October 2019
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