One of the most valuable practices that you will engage in as a writer/graduate student/composition teacher is conversation—with texts, peers, professors, scholars, and with yourself. Sustained engagement with course concepts—particularly during your first semester teaching FYC—is perhaps the most important component of the course. As such, responding and reflecting through consistent posting on the course website is a significant percentage of your semester grade. In general, these responses will ask you to work closely with the readings and examine your own experiences (as a writer, graduate student, and/or teacher) to extend, confirm, complicate, nuance, refute, or otherwise engage an argument presented in the readings and/or class discussions.

(Updated 11/1) Tentatively, you are expected to write at least 20 10 posts this semester (at least 200 words each). There are specific requirements for blog post content, requirements, and frequency that will be discussed in class and posted on the class website.

• 5 3 (or more) Classroom Praxis (enacting theory, or putting theory into action in the classroom)
• 5 3 (or more) Pre-class Reading Responses
• 5 3 (or more) Post-class Discussion Reflections
• 2 1 News Items
• 1 Teaching Tool
• 1 Weekly Recap

Classroom Praxis (≥3)

Reductively, “praxis” means putting theory into action. Theory + Practice = Praxis. Posts in the “Classroom Praxis” should draw connections between the theories we discuss in class (compositional, rhetorical, epistemological theories, etc.) and your own classroom teaching this semester. Consider the way/s in which theory informs your teaching and the way/s in which your teaching informs theory (and/or your understanding of its foundations, tenets, or goals). Reductively, “praxis” means putting theory into action. Theory + Practice = Praxis. Posts in the “Classroom Praxis” should draw connections between the theories we discuss in class (compositional, rhetorical, epistemological theories, etc.) and your own classroom teaching this semester. Consider the way/s in which theory informs your teaching and the way/s in which your teaching informs theory (and/or your understanding of its foundations, tenets, or goals).

Pre-class Reading Responses (≥3)

Posts in this category should respond to readings before the class day they are due. Be specific in identifying readings, passages, and or concepts — you may summarize, paraphrase, or quote. Though not required, free to use “questions to consider” as prompts for your response (questions may not be provided for all weeks). You may also draw connections between the assigned readings and past assigned readings.

Post-class Discussion Reflections (≥3)

Posts in this category should respond to readings after class discussion of those readings. Be specific in identifying readings, passages, and or concepts — you may summarize, paraphrase, or quote. Though not required, free to use “questions to consider” as prompts for your response (questions may not be provided for all weeks). You may also draw connections between the assigned readings and past assigned readings.

News Item (1)

Posts in this category should provide the title, author, publication, and date of a news item of interest to GTAs along with a link or URL. The post should summarize the news item and offer some commentary (analysis, connection, disagreement, response, etc.). “Items of interest” to GTAs could be about teaching, higher education, academia, humanities, graduate programs, etc. Feel free to think broadly as long as the topic is relevant to our interests (generally) or class discussions (even tangential). Also, feel free to include opinion pieces (articles/items don’t have to be unbiased).

Some examples of appropriate articles:

• Halloween Costume Correctness on Campus: Feel Free to Be You, but Not Me, New York Times (relevant to Wednesday night students because we discussed knowledge of cultural appropriation during the class meeting before Halloween, asking questions about how people know to be culturally respectful/sensitive)
• Killing a Tenure-Like System, Inside Higher Education (relevant in light of recent post-tenure review proposals at FAU and relevant because it happened at a Florida institution)
• Should We All Be Grading Blind? Part of Pedagogy Unbound series of opinion pieces at the Chronicle of Higher Education (relevant to our discussions of grading, responding, etc)
• Why It’s So Hard to Leave Academe, the Chronicle of Higher Education (relevant in light of our discussions about job prospects for MAs, MFAs, and PhDs)

(Excuse the representation of articles from publications focused on higher education — I simply pulled from my recent reading list. Feel free to use articles posted to Reddit, shared on social networks, from a variety of sources, disciplines, levels of seriousness, etc. Is it of interest? Yes? Then it’s fair game.)

Teaching Tool (1)

Weekly Recap (1)

Starting on/around the fourth class meeting, 1-2 students will be responsible for summarizing key points from the past week’s blog posts (focusing on the post categories Classroom Praxis, Pre-class Reading Responses, and Post-class Discussion Reflections) in a 1 page recap post and an informal presentation.