English 505

I'm currently grading Response Paper #2: Profiles with a Purpose, in which I had my students describe/justify three different Facebook/MySpace/etc. profiles with respect to three distinct audiences. Though there are still plenty of issues that plague their individual responses, overall, I'm witnessing a noticeable improvement in organization (i.e. the presentation is somewhat more logical, more thought-out, this time around).

This week, we begin preparation work for their first 3-5 page essay. (The assignment sheet will be posted under "106 Materials" on my child page.) I asked each of the students to be thinking about a "controversial" issue this weekend: one that is contemporarily relevant for which they do not already claim an impassioned position. (I did declare a few topics off-limits because they are far too broad for the intended assignment, among them: legal abortion, same-sex marriage, capital punishment, the legal drinking age, the "War on Terror", and the Iraq War.)

I am presenting the Ethos/Pathos/Logos PowerPoint and Excerpt Interpretation Exercise that I ran through during orientation week. (These media will be posted under "106 Materials" on my child page.) We will then talk about each student's chosen issue of "controversy" and how its various "sides" are presented (with ethos, pathos, logos, or a mixture thereof). This will hopefully segue into a discussion of arrangement and also leave significant time for peer editing.

The following week we will pick up with critique of sources, investigate citation practices deeper, and go over basic usage of EndNote and (if there's time) OpenMind.

Unrelated to this week's lesson plan:
When I presented the game "Darfur Is Dying" to my 106-ers a few weeks back, I was amazed that NOT A ONE of them knew where Darfur was or what was happening there. Even after playing the game and perusing the website, most of the students who chose to write about it in their response papers described the situation in Darfur as something involving "starving Africans" and failed to mention specifics or the word "genocide". I'm well aware that it's not my place, as an English 106 instructor, to force political awareness or humanitarian enlightenment, but I do not want to believe that I introduced a world event of such grave importance only to have it misconstrued or worse, dismissed by my students. I am thinking about perhaps showing the film "Hotel Rwanda" in class at some point this semester. It's a highly accessible, gripping action flick that nevertheless attempts to faithfully capture a real moment of survival during Rwanda's genocidal campaign. The students would likely enjoy the movie, it could potentially teach them about a historical event they know little (or nothing) about, and it could lead to a discussion about the parallels between Rwanda and the heinous unfoldings in Darfur. Of course, I would only employ this material if I could find a legitimate way to investigate it using relevant course materials about rhetorical presentation (which indeed any film, but particularly an avowedly political one, is rife with examples of). I'm thinking of tying in something about all of this (U.S. [white] media representations of Africa, etc.) into their visual rhetoric project. So, what do you think? Is this all too ambitious? Am I setting myself up for failure by treading on this dangerous ground? Feedback would be much appreciated.