Student Choice Assignments- Template and Example
Template and Example
Reggie Townley
Student Choice Assignments
Background:
The idea for the student choice assignments was given to me by my friends at Whatcom College: Katherine Burns, Justin Erickson, and Brian Cope. These assignments were conceived as an opportunity to solve the problem of offering a variety of topics for students, without overwhelming students with required readings. I have used this basic template to create assignments ranging from Indigenous Rights Issues to Computer Sciences. With each one, I provide a base reading, followed by three prompts for crafting the “Student Choice Assignment”. Each unit, one SC is required, of any of the topics. In addition, there are multiple other readings available in the assignment, and instructions for expanding the SC assignment into a full essay. This allows students to customize their writing portfolio with subject matter that is relevant to them.
Template:
Purpose:
Here, you can provide context for the base reading, including a short introduction to the content of the reading and the intentions for the assignment.
Course Goals
Here, you can provide your departments outcomes for your course.
Module Goals
Here, you can describe how this assignment fits in with the given module, whether that be weekly modules or units.
For a “Student Choice Assignment
Here, provide your base reading, further content description, and prompts.
For Expanding to an Essay
Here, you can provide suggestions for how to expand the SC into a full essay. You can include supplementary readings for more lengthy, multi source assignments.
Example: “The Man to Send Rainclouds” by Leslie Marmon Silko
Purpose
Attached at the bottom of this page is the short story by Leslie Marmon Silko, “The Man who Sent Rainclouds”. If you wish to complete this as a “Student Choice Assignment” you will read this not only for the enjoyment of reading a good story, but to look for the moves the author used to craft a moving piece of literature with heart and purpose, that also contains a subtext of cultural tension that provides richness and historical significance. If you wish to go deeper, and use this to center one or more of your essays, there are further resources you can use to do more extensive work.
Course Goals
- Integrate critical thinking, reading, and writing to analyze college-level texts and to develop college-level analytic/argumentative essays.
- Adapt writing to audience, context, and purpose by using rhetorical principles at an intermediate level.
- Apply the basics of composition principles at an intermediate level in order to connect ideas coherently, explain them thoroughly, and arrange them logically.
Module Goals
For this module, we are taking our first steps in reading and responding to college level texts. Before tackling analytical, non fiction pieces, I thought it would be nice to read some creative work, and apply some basic analytical tools.
For a “Student Choice Assignment”
Address the questions below for your shorter, “SC Assignment”. Please do so in a paragraph format and omit the actual questions in the post. Please provide a 3 to 5 sentence paragraph per question. For each answer, provide direct reference to the text, including direct quotes when helpful, as well as your own observations and interpretations.
1) In one paragraph, summarize the events that occur in this story. Include the setting, as well as the major characters.
2) What is the incident that drives this story at the outset, and what is the event that ultimately provides resolution?
3) What are the cultural tensions underlying this story, that provide a subtle yet strong conflict between the characters? What actions, interactions and dialog demonstrate evidence of this tension? (You may consult the added sources for context, but for this shorter assignment, keep evidence to the story itself. In fact, the course hero link will probably be enough, but many of us will be curious about reading deeper to know what’s going on).
The story:
The Man to Send Rainclouds with Footnotes-Silko.pdf
(You do not need to address the questions in this file. However, some of the footnotes will be helpful for certain items in the story that may be unfamiliar).
A short resource for context.
The Man to Send Rain Clouds Context – Course Hero
Deeper readings and sources:
For those of you who choose this as the topic for one or more of your essays, below are some sources I’ve found. The English department is specific that this course is not a course that teaches research, so I will provide any sources. For this class, we want to focus on deep reading, and practicing the skillse of interacting with assigned texts, and processes for crafting our own work.
1- A peer reviewed examination of “The Man to Send Rainclouds”. This will be very helpful if you would like to do a deeper essay on this story, with a close examination of the meeting of religions found in the text.
Native American and Catholic Spaces.pdf
2-For those who would like to look at contexts outide the text, looking at historical/archeological studies of Native American responses to the Catholic church, here is a peer reviewed article on interactions in early missions in California.
Native Response to European Intrusion-peer reviewed.pdf
For those who wish to look at this text in context to atrocities in American Colonialism, here are two pieces, one is a short, more opinion based newspaper article:
Catholic Church-Native American Abuse-WaPOST.pdf
The other is a press release on the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative. This press release alone can offer ideas for examining the sub-text of this story, especially if you are interested in writing Essay 1 about this topic. If you want to really dive deep on this matter, it includes a link to Volume one of the initiative’s report. While this focuses on Federal Boarding schools, this issue was directly tied with colonization efforts, often with ties to various church organizations. Reading the report is not a requirement by any means, but is very important information for understanding a major issue in colonization of North America, and acts of tribal disruption and genocide. This is a monumental and important study.
I recommend taking a look at the beginning of each source to see which one strikes you, in the event my descriptions of them don’t give you enough to go on.
Depending on the Essay assignment, there are many ways you can go with this topic. If you have personal experience with any of this, you could integrate personal narrative, particularly with Essay 1. For Essays 2 and 3, you could go deeper into argumentation and textual examination. If you wish, you can choose this topic to do all 3 essays on, as it is rich enough to do extensive work.
