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Basic Writing and Service-Learning Teaching Reading in Basic Writing Trends Shown in the CBW Survey of Basic Writing Programs
Collaborative Practices
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What Are Some Basic Writing Collaborative Assignments?By: Joy Palmer
The following activities have been culled from our research over the course of the project. Many thanks go to Shannon Carter of Texas A&M, Commerce; Carol Kountz of Grand Valley State University; and Melody Gough and Lorie Jacobs of the University of Nevada, Reno, for their generous contributions through CBW-L. We issue another invitation here: Please continue to add assignments? that have worked well in your BW classes for others to draw from. Carol Kountz’s scrapbook assignment speaks directly to audience awareness: If you look at page 219 in Picturing Texts (Faigley et al., Norton, 04), you’ll find a group activity to build a scrapbook about “your” school for prospective students. This collaborative venture, performed over several weeks, taught my WRT 098 students a great deal about writing for an audience. I asked other professors to write evaluations of the finished books. In general, Picturing Texts has wonderful assignments. The following project comes from Shannon Carter and the BW program at Texas A&M-Commerce:
Bob the Rubber Chicken from Melody Gough and Lorie Jacobs: This assignment asks students to write a collaborative narrative essay starring Bob and illustrate the story with pictures taken with a disposable camera. I provide a new rubber chicken and new disposable camera for each section. Students self-select groups and work together, mostly outside of class, to tell the story. They are free to dress Bob, decorate him, whatever, to reflect his experience. The groups go in turn, working from where the last group left off. And as a finale we do whole-class revisions, making decisions about audience, purpose, tone, etc., to create a unified finished class book, complete with the pictures each group took of Bob in action. It’s a really fun assignment. I find it’s successful because of the fun, lighthearted aspect - students learn not to take themselves so seriously and that writing is indeed a fun and rewarding part of learning. They also learn to work effectively in a group, to divide up work, and be accountable to both their small group and the whole class. I really can’t say enough wonderful things about Bob. This assignment is also highly adaptable - I came up with a 60 minute version for a seminar presentation, where each group had only ten minutes to craft a paragraph of the Bob story. This was obviously much shorter, but still meets the goals of collaboration. Bob Assignment Sheet You have one week to get together at a spot of your choosing. I want your group to collaborate on a three to five-page draft. On Friday, Oct. 14 you will read the beginning of the story to the rest of us and then pass that draft onto the next group along with Bob and the camera. Make sure each group receives the camera and all the previous pages so they can continue to develop conflicts, ideas and characters in Bob’s story. Take pictures of Bob in whatever setting you choose. Bob can be in the picture by himself or you can have people posing with Bob. Just use some discretion when taking the pictures. Think PG Ideas of places you can go:
How did Bob get to this particular place? Is his name really Bob? Is he new to Reno? Remember it is the job of each group to think of how to transition the story into the next part. Use sensory detail, dialogue, active language and all of those other positive things good writers use to get the point across. Work together as a group to brainstorm, revise, and edit, but each individual must write a minimum of one page each, so that your group has a minimum of 3 or 4 pages depending on the number of people in your group. Come to a consensus before you start on the type of adventure Bob will go on and divide up the work so everyone can meet the minimum page requirement. Then you will have to come together to revise each other’s pages and edit before you pass Bob, the camera, and your pages on to the next group. Keep in mind that someone’s grandmother or mother might be reading this. Have fun with this and get creative! Group Due Dates:
Each group will present their pages in a mini-Author’s Chair on their due dates. Credit: Lorie Jacobs & Melody Gough, University of Nevada, Reno
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