Thursday, August 26, 2010

Assignment ideas for English 5361

Here are a few proposals:

1. An iterative progression, from Assignment No. 1 to No. 3, building a multimodal presentation that maybe starts with textual discourse and then expands into other media, such as video or audio (podcast).

2. A formal debate of classical perspectives. A scenario is introduced in the MOO, and students are given a specific theoretical lens through which to examine and analyze the situation. Maybe pit two contrasting schools of thought, having half the students argue one side and half the other.

3. A profile of a person in the field and a presentation of that person's primary contribution. Maybe pick a "Top 10" rhetoricians list, Aristotle, Foucault, Burke, etc., and have each of us pick one and give a summary or introductory presentation on that person and the primary contributions to the field.

4. Creating a case study of contemporary expression and looking at it through various classical perspectives. So we could create a new piece of rhetoric, in whatever form (in my case, say, a snippet of historical interpretation delivered through a mobile device) and then examine the skeleton of the piece from the inside, through the perspective of either a specific rhetorical paradigm or a cluster/school of thought.

5. Or how about something that extends rhetorical theory into visual rhetoric, like maybe a thorough examination of an image using the classical perspectives on rhetoric as a foundation of the analysis.

3 comments:

Deb said...

Brett,

I like the ideas you have posted, especially 1, 3, and 5. The debate sounds interesting though. If we could agree on a topic as a class, this exercise would definitely be a unique and valuable experience. You seem to have lots of good ideas which you can articulate quickly and well! I look forward to your posts!

Debbie Davy said...

Hi, Brett...

Like Deb, I feel you have lots of good ideas...I think proposal #1 would make a great series of projects for our class. I look forward to finding out which one of our suggestions wins! :-)

Ben said...

Seems like a good approach to use classical rhetoric as a lens. I wonder if we could all do that in more personalized projects? For example, if we use classical rhetoric as a lens for contemporary rhetoric. We could focus on technology or speeches or whatever...?