Active Learning and Authentic Rhetorical Situations in Assignment Design
Gerri McNenny
California State University, FullertonAlthough active learning has become something of a buzz word lately, the pedagogical strategy of involving students actively in their mental construction of specific disciplinary structures and the writing situations that accompany them has long been a mainstay in the field of rhetoric and composition. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the basic writing classroom, where the need for kinesthetic involvement and multiple modes of learning that suit adult learners compels us as writing instructors to design our writing assignments with care.
One of the key strategies for engaging the basic writer is a fuller appreciation of the rhetorical situations we set up in our writing assignments. The term “rhetorical situation,” coined by Lloyd Bitzer in a 1968 article on rhetoric, has given us significant insights into the ways in which the writing tasks we assign to our students can be made more relevant to them. Every writing situation, Bitzer argues, is made up of a complex configuration of factors. These include a compelling reason or exigency for responding to a given situation, an audience to whom the writer directs his or her words, and the constraints of the rhetorical situation, or what is appropriate and expected in terms of genre and the public occasion.
All of these factors need to be considered in designing a writing assignment that will engage students in intellectual pursuits that matter to them. At times in our classes, the writing assignments we offer our students seem to have no real compelling purpose. Students may feel as if they are simply fulfilling the formal requirements of an assignment without really attempting to respond to a situation or find out and share new information. Or we may fail to conceptualize an audience or an opportunity for publication of students’ written work that will cause them to see the real world consequences of their writing. Likewise, we may fail to explore with them the formal constraints and traditions of the genres that they are working in. The advantage in recognizing genre, of course, lies in the marvelous potential to study rhetorical form organically, as a consequence of other writers’ efforts to respond to public occasions that compelled them to write. The combination of all these factors in a writing assignment renders what I call an authentic rhetorical situation.
An authentic rhetorical situation refers to that combination of situation, purpose, audience, and recognition of rhetorical constraints that characterize opportunities for writing that readily engage college students in the complexities of writing. When you as a writing instructor pose writing assignments that relate to your students’ life experiences and contingencies, the chances of their being motivated to respond to that assignment dramatically increase.
College students have a wide range of concerns that they bring with them to their college careers. Taylor, Marienau, and Fiddler, in their study of adult learners, identify these as being related to community connections, career preparation and transitions, the educational value of the coursework they take, and their acclimation to the demands and expectations of college. We can create assignments that tap into these needs and fulfill them at the same time that they provide opportunities for teaching writing. The difference here is that through the use of authentic rhetorical situations as the basis for classroom assignments, writing becomes a meaningful, public exercise of citizenship and active participation in the community. Authentic rhetorical situations involve exigencies identified by students and yourself, real needs that require some response, real audiences interested and affected by the results of students’ efforts, and opportunities for publishing student writing that encourage them to be aware of their writing for an audience other than an instructor.
Finding One’s Way in College
Writing assignments that ask students to investigate the resources available to them on their new college campuses enable them to acquire some expertise in a strange situation at the same time that they fulfill personal as well as academic objectives. Students can evaluate the effectiveness of the various resources on campus in identifying and responding to students’ needs by visiting the offices, collecting and evaluating informational data (brochures, handouts, and other outreach materials), interviewing staff and students, and assessing the openness and accessibility of the office’s setup for students. Students can then report their findings to the class. As an instructor, you can vary the amount of structure you give students in responding to this assignment by requiring different levels of accountability in the reporting process. The rhetorical purpose here can be that of an informational interview, an evaluation of the services offered there, or the composing of a class compendium of campus resources for class use.
Charting a Course in College
Entering students typically enrolled in basic writing courses are also somewhat anxious about gathering information and making decisions about college majors and the careers they ultimately lead to. They find themselves in the situation of not having enough time or opportunities to research the implications of various career choices. As writing instructors, we can use this to introduce assignments geared to those needs that require academic rigor at the same time. Profile essays in which students interview experts or practitioners in their prospective careers will give them some sense of the reality of the career (See St. Martin’s Guide to Writing, Ch. 4). Research into college majors and the commitments required at the undergraduate and graduate level can be incorporated into I-search papers that ask students to pose their own directed inquiry into choices for college majors. Students can also work in groups that share similar career goals or questions about majors. As instructors we can explore different venues for sharing the information students uncover, whether they be in school publications, classroom presentations, or poster sessions in which student research is featured.
Community Involvement and Student Writing
Many students coming to college have a thriving life outside of school, and they welcome the opportunity to create connections between their lives in the community and their work at school. Service-learning is an ideal means of tapping into the need to foster these connections in their lives. Service-learning is a complex endeavor, but we can approach the opportunity in a simple manner. Students can become researchers for their community’s needs, interviewing social agency directors and local ministers to find out if there is any writing or research that the agency needs that students, working either in groups or separately, can fulfill. Whether it be spreading information about English classes for new immigrants or informing citizens of a new local agency that fulfills a community need, students can identify, research, and respond to a need in the community that asks them to write for a real audience and a compelling purpose. Writing can take the form of a brochure, an editorial in the newspaper, research for a local agency, or an announcement in the student newspaper.
Service-learning typically involves an agreement between an agency supervisor and the student for the completion of a certain task. Site supervisors can act as co-educators, working with students to help them understand the clientele that they serve and the rhetorical exigency that they need to address. Researching and exploring the needs of the agency may involve participant-observer research, in which students both participate and observe and reflect on the needs of the agency. Students maintain an ethnographic journal in which they keep field notes of their experiences. Using these, they can study and reflect on their prospective audiences, the needs of the agency, and the task they wish to complete. Students can then consult their notes in completing their tasks and present their findings to the agency, the community, or their classmates through publication and presentation of the work that they’ve done.
For an excellent overview of service learning and its implementation, I recommend Thomas Deans’ book, Writing Partnerships: Service-Learning and Composition. Numerous resources are available on the Internet as well. The National Council of Teachers of English web site for service learning in composition studies is available at http://www.ncte.org/service/ . Their web page for resources for composition can be reached at http://www.ncte.org/service/teach_resources.html. Campus Compact, long a proponent of service-learning, has an incredibly useful website full of resources for incorporating service-learning into college curricula. Their web site address is http://www.compact.org/faculty/
An Invitation to Share
These are just a few ways to incorporate authentic rhetorical situations in your writing assignments. I hope that by sharing ideas through the Teaching Basic Writing listserv, we can expand on the repertoire of writing assignments that respond to students’ literacy needs while at the same time engaging them in intellectual work that they experience as their own. Please feel free to write and to respond to the questions below to further extend the conversation.
Questions for Discussion
1. What do you think truly motivates your students to write in a college context?
2. What situations do you perceive around you on your college campus that need decoding for the entering student?
3. What avenues of involvement exist on your campus and in your community that tap into students’ desire to make a link between their lives at college and their lives in their communities?
4. What services do the churches and social agencies in your community offer to community members that would benefit from your students’ study and involvement?
5. In what ways can you connect opportunities for writing with your students’ desire to explore career options and to gather information about their choice of college majors?
Works Cited
Bitzer, Lloyd. “The Rhetorical Situation.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 1 (1968): 1-14.
Deans, Thomas. Writing Partnerships: Service-Learning in Composition. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2000.
Taylor, Kathleen, Catherine Marienau, and Morris Fiddler. Developing Adult Learners. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000.
Copyright © 2002 The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. Any use is subject to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
McGraw-Hill Higher Education is one of the many fine businesses of The McGraw-Hill Companies.If you have a question or a problem about a specific book or product, please fill out our Product Feedback Form.
For further information about this site contact english@mcgraw-hill.com