Assignments

The intention of these assignments is to invite you to participate in the practices of a literacy researcher. Many of these assignments invite you to collect and analyze your own data; other assignments will give us a chance to read and discuss current ideas in the field of literacy studies. I look forward to working together.

Full descriptions of our assignments in the links below; we’ll support the work in class and with feedback.

• Ongoing: Reading and Annotating in Perusall (see info below) 80 points
• Ongoing: Peer Feedback (see info below) 30 points
• Aug 22-Sept 7: Tracing Your Literacies (data collection & paper) 20 points
• Sept 12-19: Literacy Interview (interview & paper) 25 points
• Sept 21-Oct 5: Digital & Multimodal Literacies (data collection & paper/artifact) 25 points
• Oct 10-Nov 2: Schooled Literacies (data collection & paper) 30 points
• Nov 7-Dec 7: Literacy Project (30 points: 5 for google form; 15 for memo; 10 for gallery walk)
• Final’s week: Reflection (20 points)

Total: 260 points

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Reading Together

   weekly

We’ll read and annotate together in a platform called Perusall: Perusall allows us to see each other’s comments, respond to each other, share links, and create a shared conversation around the ideas in our reading.

To Join:

• Go to perusall.com, click Login, and then either log in using your Facebook, Twitter, or Google account, or create a Perusall account using your email address and setting up a password. Select I am a student and enter our course code: JAXON-PWRPY
  • *Note: only students enrolled in our English 332 course can join our Perusall community.

Semester reading schedule (all in our Perusall community):

• Aug 24: Sylvia Scribner’s “Literacy in Three Metaphors”
• Aug 31: David Kirkland’s “The Skin We Ink: Tattoos, Literacy, and a New English Education”
• Sept 12: Deborah Brandt’s “Sponsors of Literacy”
• Sept 26: Mike Wesch’s An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube
• Sept 28: “Four Things Social Media Can Teach You About College Writing–And One Thing It Can’t” & Kim Jaxon’s and Leslie Atkins “Making Science: When Does Spaghetti Become a Light Ray?”
• Oct 3: Stommel & Morris’ “A Guide for Resisting Edtech: the Case against Turnitin”
• Oct 10: April Baker-Bell’s “We Been Knowin: Toward an Antiracist Language & Literacy Education”
• Nov 7: “Introduction to Primary Research”
• Nov 7: student example ethnographies

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Peer Response (10 pts each; 30 points)

Due (in class work): Sept 7, Sept 19, Nov 30

We’ll give peer feedback to drafts. We’ll create guiding questions and guidelines together for our feedback. Must be in class for credit.