Assignment #4 (Grad Students): Pedagogy Project

Length: 2-4 pages (depending upon genre)

Date Due: December 17, 2003

This last project is a short one, but one that asks you to turn to pedagogical issues–basically, how has what you have read or learned about language bias affected how you would (will) teach in a high school, grade school, college or corporate setting? You may choose from a variety of projects, but I would like to ask that you create practical documents with a real (or potentially real) audience.

Projects:

• a teaching philosophy that draws upon ideas you have developed as the result of reading and research in this class.
  
• a letter of application for a teaching position explaining your beliefs on teaching and gender/language. etc.
• a unit or workshop drawing attention to language bias (for a school or corporate setting).
• a rationale for teaching a unit on language bias.
• a proposal for adding a course on topics related to some aspect of language bias or for some other curricular change to your school’s English program. (This could be your own master’s program, the FEC for a first-year writing class focused on issues of language bias, or a high school where you might envision yourself teaching–even a high school you attended.)

Purpose: The purpose of this project is to:

• help you apply the ideas you have learned to a practical situation.
• help you understand that different audiences and purposes require written documents from different genres.
• encourage you to find models of unfamiliar genres and catalogue their conventions before you write using them.
• require you to develop a document that could actually be useful in your future as a teacher/scholar/trainer.

Audience For this assignment, you will need to define your audience in a one-page memo to me. Let me know the audience you are writing to and the purpose of the document you are producing.

Planning and Drafting

1. With other students, brainstorm to help you get ideas for this project. I am happy to meet with you individually, too.
2. Decide on a genre and search for examples of documents in that genre.
3. Study the documents you found as models for the type of document you hope to write. Develop a list of generic conventions of the document type, if that helps you.
4. Write up your project, confer with peers, and check your document against others of its kind.
5. Fill out grading rubric and turn it in with your assignment and memo.

Back to 454/654 index
Grading rubric for this assignment