Audience awareness - how do we model audience awareness in the classroom?

I spent a fair amount of this morning searching for multi-modal college writing projects and found several I really like (see, for example, the celebration of student writing) but one site in particular got me thinking about how we teach - or, more specifically, how we model audience awareness. I am talking about The Converging Literacies Center (CLiC)- an online project meant to provide a space for teachers, writers, and researchers to experiment with, and share, new ways of conceptualizing literacy - and composition/rhetoric - in an attempt to make academic writing more relevant to students who may not hail from traditional academic environments. The entire project seems very interesting to me, but one thing really caught my attention as I looking through their mission statement/white paper - that as teachers we need to keep our audience in mind as we compose, lecture, and generally interact with our students. This is not a new idea but I liked the way they presented it - considering audience is something we constantly remind our students to do, but do we usually stop and reflect on how we must continually do this as well? I mean, do we talk to our students about how they function as our audience? Do we ask them how we are doing? Do we point out to them that we are constantly engaging in the activities we ask them to do? In short, how transparent are we about the fact that we are not really in a position to oversee, but more in a position to participate? In theory this is all well and good, but what does this transparency look like in a classroom? I'm not exactly sure - discussion is part of it, but how else can we become more participators and less observers? After all, isn't that what we want from our students?

fun with Wordle

This word cloud was made using Wordle, an online interactive word art tool. Word clouds are a fun and easy way to visually represent main ideas and can be used as brainstorming tools and presentation visuals, among other things. Check out the article Top 20 Uses of Wordle by Rodd Lucier for some fun suggestions about how you can use Wordle in your class.

Zombie Grammar - Writer's Block

Welcome back!

Welcome back ITT instructors and those of you who may teach at other institutions. I'm currently developing some new workshops addressing common grammatical issues and peer review techniques. My intention is to create short workshops that will help students start thinking about how to revise their papers. As always, I will also make some handouts that can be used either with the workshop or independently. These will be posted under the workshop section in the sidebar. Have a great quarter/semester/school year!