Final Class Project in Process

Hello Y'all,

Link back to the WCC English 101 page

Below is an assignment that a group of Community College instructors from around the state, including myself, created last year at a conference. I've been wanting to use this in an English Composition class, although I've been unsure of how to go about it. I will paste the assignment as we wrote it up, and will also include, in the purple italic font, my ideas, questions, etc. about how to apply this assignment towards your final writing project of the quarter--which includes a visual component, an in-class essay, a third (and final) out-of-class essay, and some sort of presentation that connects with your final project. Feedback and questions invited!

Interdisciplinary Assignment Integrating Visuals and Writing

Main Outcome: Employ students’ visual intelligence as an entrypoint/springboard to writing, and employ all their intelligences to create visuals that represent course concepts.

Students will know/ be able to:

- Make a conceptual connection between a visual image (or metaphor) and a course concept.

"Course concept": Defining this has been my main difficulty in thinking about using this assignment. WCC has developed a list of "Core Learning Abilities" that reflect what you, as college students, should master through all of your courses. They are: Knowing; Communicating; Thinking; Relating; and Integrating. Using these as concepts to work with on this assignment is one idea I have. Another idea, the one I am leaning toward, is to use concepts that you could then explore in relation to yourselves, specifically to how each of you define, create, project/communicate your individual sense of self. Examples of such concepts: autonomy, individuality, receptivity, identity--we can brainstorm more of these in class.

- Visualize a concept as a step towards exploring the concept in writing.

- Make an authentic / self-reflective connection to the subjective matter.

Possible steps or stages to assignment series:

Activity #1 (in class):

Provide image(s) and model ways of analyzing or reacting to images.

• Ask them to think about and discuss choices made or perspectives taken by the creators of the image (by comparing different visual treatments of identical subjects – e.g., 3 different visual representations of a cell, of a swinging bridge).
• The examples given above related to specific courses--a cell to biology, for instance. In writing about personal identity, perhaps the images that I bring in could be self-portraits. The subjects wouldn't be identical, though.... Another idea I have is to bring in ad images that suggest one of the concepts I mentioned above; for instance, I could bring in three ads that seem to suggest autonomy through their presentation of individuals.

• Provide image(s) and ask students to write about it (via freewrite, followed by discussion).
• Different ways to write about images:
• description: reflecting the image in words by describing the subject, setting, placement, colors, text
  
• analysis: zeroing in on specific aspects of the image and suggesting the meaning behind things such as gaze, placement, color choices, text
• response: writing about how you react to the image, creating a story to go with it, making connections with other similar or dissimilar things from your experience
  

Content/Correctness: Emphasis on content, not on correctness. Generative, to unleash ideas and creativity, develop descriptive writing skills. This writing would be done in class, to get ideas going and to practice the different kinds of writing approaches used to talk about images.

Activity # 2:

A. Choose or make a visual (or visual metaphor) to illustrate a course concept. In this case, you would come up with your own visual image--either by finding one that you relate to yourself through one of the concepts mentioned above (we can brainstorm others in class), or by creating an image that reflects one of the concepts. You can use collage from magazine images, or you can draw or paint your own. What matters here is that your image has some meaning to you, not that it is artistically "good."

AND

B. Write a descriptive analysis of your visual/ visual metaphor. This could be the in-class essay portion of the project.

• What layers of meaning do you find in / did you try to put into your visual, and how do these layers intersect?
• Use a variety of sentence structures, not just simple declarative sentences. Encourage students to emphasize grammatically/rhetorically the same features that they consider significant in the image; or ”paint with words” so structure of text reflects the image (like using meandering sentence structures to describe a picture of a river, or organizing the text in a way that mirrors organization of cell).

C. Then, in class: workshop the descriptive analyses of visuals with other students (to gather input for revising your descriptive analysis piece. You may also choose to revise your visual based on this workshop, if you want to, but revising the visual is not required.) Workshopping these in-class drafts could be a step towards a final essay. Revising the visual image could be something you do in order to generate further ideas for your final essay.

Activity # 3: (final project in the series, out of class)

Write a reflection essay.

Include:

1) The visuals you’ve created or selected (you may include and reflect on drafts of the visual if you want).

2) Submit your revised visual analysis of the image you chose/created.

3) Describe the process you used to create the visual.

4) Please also reflect on any changes (during this course) to your perceptions of the ways that words and visuals connect.

Content/Correctness at this stage: Content-rich, but correctness emphasized more.